From the opening seconds of Vampire Weekend’s new album, ‘Only God Was Above Us’, it’s clear that something has changed. “Ice Cream Piano” opens with whistling, buzzing, feedback and a floating, distorted guitar note — the opposite of the clean pop tones that have been the band’s trademark. It’s the start of an album full of surprising changes and wild sonic twists, all packed into 10 songs.
The new album, like all of Vampire Weekend’s work, is meticulous, self-aware, and awash in musical and verbal allusions — sometimes direct, sometimes cryptic. But it’s also a wide pendulum swing from his 2019 release, “Father of the Bride,” a laid-back, jam-band-influenced romp that clocked in at nearly 58 minutes. “Only God Was Above Us,” the group’s fifth album, due April 5, is eight songs and 10 minutes shorter.
“With every album we have to push in two directions at once,” Ezra Koenig, lead singer and main songwriter of Vampire Weekend, said in a recent interview. “Sometimes that means we have to be more poppy and weirder. Maybe with this record, it’s as much about a push towards true maturity, in terms of worldview and attitude, but also a further push towards playing. There’s a youthful amateurishness along with some of our more ambitious swings.”
Koenig, 40, described the new album’s track record as “a journey from questioning to acceptance, maybe even surrender. From a kind of negative worldview to something a little deeper.” Ultimately, he said, LP is optimistic. “It’s not a devastating record. And even if there are songs where the narrator is trying to figure something out or feeling confused, that’s not all. That’s part of the story – it’s not the album’s position that the world is dark and horrible.”
The album also features musical zingers, non sequiturs and impressive off-the-grid outbursts. The songs often morph through multiple changes of tempo and texture, surging unpredictably through indie-rock austerity, orchestral opulence, pop vibrancy and hallucinatory electronic studio constructions, like the cascade of rippling, overlapping piano lines on “Connect.” Where “Father of the Bride” had a folksy openness, “God Only Was Above Us” is full of delightfully clashing ideas.
Always analytical, Koenig thought that Vampire Weekend’s albums each reflected patron saints. He named Paul Simon for the band’s self-titled 2007 debut, Joe Strummer and Sublime for 2010’s “Contra,” Leonard Cohen for “Modern Vampires of the City” and Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead, along with Phish. “Father of the bride.” The new album, he said, may reflect a short-lived tour he didn’t get to see: the 1997 pairing of Rage Against the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan, which reached the cover of Rolling Stone.
“Distortions, gravity, hardness,” Koenig said. “We’re drawn to those features on this record in a more immediate way than ever before.”
Koenig spoke via video from his home in Los Angeles. Behind him — from the collection of his wife, actress Rashida Jones — was a wall of artist Taryn Simon’s photos from the play “Smuggling”: bootleg DVD packages seized by United States customs, lined up in minimalist formations. Like Vampire Weekend’s songs, they frame subversive material beautifully.
Vampire Weekend has always had two distinct sides – its curated album work and its raucous live shows – and may soon have three. (More on that later.) Central is the music the band makes in the studio, tweaked and scrutinized. Vampire Weekend’s songs carry on a long tradition of concise pop songwriting. But even when delineating clear verses and choruses, the band pushes every other parameter.
“With certain types of art, you probably have to think a lot about how to create layers of meaning,” Koenig said. “Songs are, by their nature, relatively short. They have repetitive hooks. Then if you want to go maximalist and fill it with production details and settings, you can. And if you want the lyrics to come out in a weird place, you can.”
However, the basics of pop songwriting keep the band’s experimentation grounded. “You can zig and zag from verse one to verse two to verse three, but you keep coming back to the same chorus,” he added. “But now it’s redefined by the second verse. I think all those things are built into the format. It’s this great populist art form where you can really get out there, but the structure holds it together.”
Beginning with the 2013 album Modern Vampires of the City, Vampire Weekend’s studio production has increasingly been a collaboration between Koenig and producer and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Rechtshaid, who has worked on hits with Madonna, Usher, Heim and others.
“I’ve been involved in making things that sound expensive and beautiful,” Rechtshaid said in a video interview from his studio in Los Angeles. “But on this record, when the songs were at a certain stage, we were just, ‘This sounds exciting to us.’ It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t like, “Here’s the decision to make something that feels noisy or dirty or distorted.” It’s that the songs had the right emotion.”
The band and Rechtshaid have been working on—and editing—most of the songs on the new album since 2020. Two tracks, “Gen-X Cops” and “The Surfer”, created much earlier. The untamed slide-guitar line of “Gen-X Cops” came from the 2012 Brooklyn sessions, while “The Surfer” features heavily altered elements of a song Koenig had begun writing with Rostam Batmanglij, who left Vampire Weekend in 2016.
“Sometimes you get lucky and the music, the production, the lyrics and the performance all come together and it fits the record you’re working on,” Koenig said. “And sometimes, you know there’s something special about it, but you have to put it aside and just let time do its thing.”
Although the members of Vampire Weekend have settled in Los Angeles, their new album is filled with thoughts about 20th century New York. Those were the decades before Vampire Weekend started at Columbia University in 2006. “Weird, half-baked memories and images and thoughts and family history,” Koenig said. “This is the version of New York that floats on this record.”
The opening tracks contemplate conflict and frustration. “Classical” finds harsh power struggles hidden in history, noting “how harsh becomes classic over time.” On “Connect,” the singer wonders, “Is it weird that I can’t connect?”, mixing the personal and the online. The album finally closes with “Hope,” the biggest song in Vampire Weekend’s catalog, a towering, eight-minute litany of doom and injustice — “The sentence was overturned/The killer was set free, the trial adjourned” — with a guardedly reassuring refrain: ” I hope you’ll let it go.”
The album’s title comes from a New York Daily News headline that appears album cover photo, shot by Steven Seagal in 1988 in a subway graveyard, inside a subway car turned on its side — an image that looks surreal but required no special effects. A song, “Mary Boone”, borrows his name SoHo gallery owner which was hugely influential in the 1980s.
Another, “Prep-School Gangsters,” was named after him a 1996 story in New York magazine for privileged students involved in the drug trade. “The preschool gangster — these are the people who run the vast majority of institutions,” Koenig said. “It’s quite possible, especially in America, especially in New York, that every now and then the grandfather of the pre-school gangster was once the underprivileged youth and the grandson of the under-privileged youth is the pre-school gangster. And here they are in this brief moment, meeting together.”
‘The Surfer’ opens with a reference to “Water Tunnel 3” a project to bring water to New York from a reservoir at Yonkers. It has been under construction since 1970 and is far from complete.
“There’s this eerie but beautiful feeling that beneath this, America’s most populous city, there’s an almost century-long project going on where people are drilling into the Earth,” Koenig said. “And then the classic New York things that everyone wants to talk about, bagels and pizza — they’re so good because of the water. Where does the water come from? It comes from upstate New York, far away. How does it get into someone’s tap on the Lower East Side?
“It’s always been a bit of an obsession of mine,” he continued. “I like this idea of the underground. I don’t mean culturally. I mean literally everything underground.”
Vampire Weekend will soon be back on tour — a job far removed from the band’s detailed work in the studio. Real-time performances were a difficult prospect for such a perfectionist team. “I would hear other musicians talk about, ‘Oh man, you know, touring is hard, but when you get on stage, all your worries go away and you just connect with the audience,'” Koenig recalls. “And I’d think, ‘What are these people talking about?’ That’s when the worries start.”
For the 2019 tour, Vampire Weekend expanded the stage lineup to seven musicians and singers, opening up more possibilities for the songs and relieving some of the virtuoso pressures. “Now, when we get together to rehearse, there’s a young, playful vibe,” Koenig said. “We always have ideas that make us laugh.” The full band has been rehearsing since November for a summer tour that will preview April 8 — playing a noon concert in Austin in the path of the total solar eclipse and share a free live stream.
Along with recording and touring, Vampire Weekend may soon reveal a third facet. Chris Baio, the band’s bassist, and Chris Tomson, their drummer, conducted separate video interviews from the studio space they share in Los Angeles—a doctor’s office-turned-dispensary where Vampire Weekend began meeting in the summer of 2020 for weekly jam sessions away from Covid, playing in separate rooms and recording hundreds of hours of music.
“The world had stopped working and a lot of the things we normally do weren’t happening,” Tomson recalls. “There was something about just playing with no expectations – just playing with my two very close friends without an agenda.”
Baio said, “It’s very rare for people in a band of our size to be alone together. Not an engineer, not a tour manager, nothing like that. I felt like I was back at the beginning of the band. And we did that for three years and changed whenever we were all in town.”
These sessions may lead to the emergence of a new trio that happens to have the same members as Vampire Weekend, performing unreleased material.
“We have a fantastic history for this band,” added Koenig. “They were a band that came out around 1989, 1990, and they were a little too punky for the jam scene and a little too jammy for the punk scene. And there is a bit of it Detailed in there. Truth is, that’s way too early because this band is still hashing out their sound. I don’t want to say much.”
Could the eponymous trio open shows on the Vampire Weekend tour? “That has been discussed,” Koenig said dryly.
“We’re just trying to create a sound that we’ve never heard before,” he previously noted. “That’s what keeps us going.”