\n<\/p>\n
From the first seconds of Vampire Weekend\u2019s new album, \u201cOnly God Was Above Us,\u201d it\u2019s clear that something has changed. \u201cIce Cream Piano\u201d starts with hiss, buzz, feedback and a hovering, distorted guitar note \u2014 the opposite of the clean pop tones that have been the band\u2019s hallmark. It\u2019s the beginning of an album full of startling changes and wild sonic upheavals, all packed into 10 songs.<\/p>\n
The new album, like all of Vampire Weekend\u2019s work, is meticulous, self-conscious and awash in musical and verbal allusions \u2014 sometimes direct, sometimes cryptic. But it\u2019s also a broad pendulum swing from its 2019 release, \u201cFather of the Bride,\u201d<\/a> a leisurely, jam-band-influenced sprawl that ran nearly 58 minutes. \u201cOnly God Was Above Us,\u201d the group\u2019s fifth album, due April 5, is eight songs and 10 minutes shorter.<\/p>\n \u201cWith every album we have to push in two directions at once,\u201d Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend\u2019s singer and primary songwriter, said in a recent interview. \u201cSometimes that means we have to be poppier and weirder. Maybe with this record, it\u2019s about both pushing into true maturity, in terms of worldview and attitude, but also pushing back further into playfulness. There\u2019s a youthful amateurishness along with some of our most ambitious swings ever.\u201d<\/p>\n Koenig, 40, described the new album\u2019s sequence of songs as \u201ca journey from questioning to acceptance, maybe to surrender. From a kind of negative worldview to something a little deeper.\u201d Ultimately, he said, the LP is optimistic. \u201cIt\u2019s not a doom and gloom record. And even if there\u2019s songs where the narrator is trying to figure something out or feels confused, that\u2019s not all. That\u2019s part of the story \u2014 it\u2019s not the thesis of the album that the world is dark and horrible.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The album also exults in musical zingers, non sequiturs and startling off-grid eruptions. The songs often morph through multiple changes of tempo and texture, riffling unpredictably through indie-rock austerity, orchestral lushness, pop perkiness and hallucinatory electronic studio concoctions, like the cascade of wavery, overlapping piano lines in \u201cConnect.\u201d Where \u201cFather of the Bride\u201d had a folky openness, \u201cOnly God Was Above Us\u201d is crammed with ideas that gleefully collide.<\/p>\n Ever analytical, Koenig mused that Vampire Weekend\u2019s albums each reflected patron saints. He named Paul Simon for the band\u2019s self-titled 2007 debut<\/a>, Joe Strummer and Sublime for \u201cContra\u201d<\/a> from 2010, Leonard Cohen for \u201cModern Vampires of the City,\u201d<\/a> and the Grateful Dead\u2019s Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, along with Phish, for \u201cFather of the Bride.\u201d The new album, he said, may reflect a short-lived tour he didn\u2019t get to see: the 1997 pairing of Rage Against the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan, which reached the cover of Rolling Stone<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cDistortion, heaviness, hardness,\u201d Koenig said. \u201cWe were drawn toward those qualities on this record in a more direct way than ever before.\u201d<\/p>\n Koenig spoke via video from his home in Los Angeles. Behind him \u2014 from the collection of his wife, the actress Rashida Jones \u2014 was a wall of photographs by the artist Taryn Simon from the project \u201cContraband\u201d<\/a>: bootleg DVD boxed sets that were confiscated by United States Customs, arrayed in Minimalistic formations. Like Vampire Weekend\u2019s songs, they neatly frame disruptive material.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Vampire Weekend has always had two distinct aspects \u2014 its fastidious album work and its frisky live shows \u2014 and may soon have three. (More on that later.) The central one is the music the band constructs in the studio, which is minutely tweaked and painstakingly considered. Vampire Weekend\u2019s songs uphold a long-established tradition of concise pop songwriting. But even as it delineates clear verses and choruses, the band pushes every other parameter.<\/p>\n \u201cWith some types of art, you probably have to put a lot of thought into how to create layers of meaning,\u201d Koenig said. \u201cSongs are, by their nature, relatively short. They have repetitive hooks. Then if you want to go maximalist and fill it with production details and arrangements, you can. And if you want the lyrics to push out into some weird place, you can.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet the basics of pop songwriting keep the band\u2019s experimentation grounded. \u201cYou can zig and zag from verse one to verse two to verse three, but you keep coming back to the same chorus,\u201d he added. \u201cBut now it\u2019s recontextualized by the second verse. I think all that stuff is built into the format. It\u2019s this great populist art form where you can get really out there but the structure holds it together.\u201d<\/p>\n Beginning with the 2013 album \u201cModern Vampires of the City,\u201d Vampire Weekend\u2019s studio output has increasingly been a collaboration between Koenig and the producer and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Rechtshaid, who has worked on hits with Madonna<\/a>, Usher<\/a>, Haim<\/a> and others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been part of making things that sound expensive and beautiful,\u201d Rechtshaid said in a video interview from his Los Angeles studio. \u201cBut on this record, when the songs were at a certain stage, we were just, like, \u2018This sounds exciting to us.\u2019 It wasn\u2019t a gimmick. It wasn\u2019t like, \u2018Here\u2019s the decision to make something that feels noisy or dirty or distorted.\u2019 It\u2019s that the songs were emoting properly.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The band and Rechtshaid have been working on \u2014 and reworking \u2014 most of the new album\u2019s songs since 2020. Two tracks, \u201cGen-X Cops\u201d<\/a> and \u201cThe Surfer,\u201d originated much earlier. The untamed slide-guitar line of \u201cGen-X Cops\u201d came from Brooklyn sessions in 2012, while \u201cThe Surfer\u201d includes much-altered elements of a song Koenig had begun writing with Rostam Batmanglij<\/a>, who left Vampire Weekend in 2016.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes you get lucky and the music, the production, the lyrics and the performance all come together and it fits on the record you\u2019re working on,\u201d Koenig said. \u201cAnd sometimes, you know there\u2019s something special about it, but you have to put it aside and just let time do its thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Although Vampire Weekend\u2019s members have settled in Los Angeles, its new album is suffused with thoughts of 20th-century New York City. Those were the decades before Vampire Weekend got started at Columbia University in 2006. \u201cWeird, half-baked memories and pictures and thoughts and family history,\u201d Koenig said. \u201cThat\u2019s the version of New York that\u2019s floating through this record.\u201d<\/p>\n The opening tracks ponder conflict and disillusionment. \u201cClassical\u201d<\/a> finds bitter power struggles hidden in history, noting \u201chow the cruel becomes classical in time.\u201d In \u201cConnect,\u201d the singer wonders, \u201cIs it strange I can\u2019t connect?,\u201d mingling the personal and the online. The album eventually concludes with \u201cHope,\u201d the longest song in Vampire Weekend\u2019s catalog, a stately, eight-minute litany of disasters and injustices \u2014 \u201cThe sentencing was overturned\/The killer freed, the court adjourned\u201d \u2014 with a guardedly reassuring refrain: \u201cI hope you let it go.\u201d<\/p>\n The album title comes from a New York Daily News headline shown in the album\u2019s cover photograph<\/a>, which was shot by Steven Siegel in 1988 at a subway graveyard, inside a subway car turned sideways \u2014 an image that looks surreal but needed no special effects. One song, \u201cMary Boone,\u201d borrows the name of the SoHo gallery owner<\/a> who was hugely influential in the 1980s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Another, \u201cPrep-School Gangsters,\u201d is named after a 1996 story in New York magazine<\/a> about privileged students dabbling in the drug trade. \u201cThe prep-school gangster \u2014 these are the people who run the vast majority of institutions,\u201d Koenig said. \u201cIt\u2019s very possible, especially in America, especially in New York, that every now and then the prep-school gangster\u2019s grandfather was once the disadvantaged youth, and that the disadvantaged youth\u2019s grandson will be the prep-school gangster. And here they are in this brief moment of time, meeting together.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe Surfer\u201d begins with a reference to \u201cWater Tunnel 3,\u201d<\/a> a project to bring water to New York City from a reservoir in Yonkers. It has been under construction since 1970 and is far from complete.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s that eerie but beautiful feeling that underneath this, the most populous city in America, there is an almost century-long project happening, where people are burrowing through the Earth,\u201d Koenig said. \u201cAnd then, classic New York stuff that everybody wants to talk about, the bagels and the pizza \u2014 it\u2019s 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 somebody\u2019s tap on the Lower East Side?<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s always been a slight obsession of mine,\u201d he continued. \u201cI like that idea about the underground. I don\u2019t mean culturally. I mean just literally what\u2019s underground.\u201d<\/p>\n Vampire Weekend will soon be resurfacing to tour \u2014 a job far removed from the band\u2019s finely detailed studio work. Real-time performing used to be a fraught prospect for such a perfectionist group. \u201cI would hear other musicians talk about, \u2018Oh man, you know, touring is tough, but then once you get onstage, all your worries go away and you\u2019re just connecting with the audience,\u2019\u201d Koenig recalled. \u201cAnd I\u2019d think, \u2018What are these people talking about? That\u2019s when the worries start.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n For its 2019 tour, Vampire Weekend expanded its stage lineup to seven musicians and vocalists, opening up more possibilities in the songs and relieving some of the virtuosic pressures. \u201cNow, when we get together to rehearse, there\u2019s a youthful, playful vibe,\u201d Koenig said. \u201cWe\u2019re always coming up with ideas that make us laugh.\u201d The full band has been practicing since November for a summer tour it will preview on April 8 \u2014 performing a midday concert in Austin in the path of the full solar eclipse and sharing a free livestream<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Along with recording and touring, Vampire Weekend may soon unveil a third facet. Chris Baio, the band\u2019s bassist, and Chris Tomson, its drummer, did separate video interviews from the studio space they share in Los Angeles \u2014 a converted medical office where Vampire Weekend started meeting in summer 2020 for weekly, Covid-distanced jam sessions, playing in separate rooms and recording hundreds of hours of music.<\/p>\n \u201cThe world had stopped working and a lot of what we normally do was just not being done,\u201d Tomson recalled. \u201cThere was something about just playing with no expectation \u2014 to just play with my two very close friends without an agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n Baio said, \u201cIt\u2019s very rare for people in a band of our size to be alone together. No engineer, no tour manager, nothing like that. It felt like being at the outset of the band again. And we did that for three years and change, whenever we were all in town.\u201d<\/p>\n Those sessions may lead to the emergence of a new trio that happens to have the same members as Vampire Weekend, performing unreleased material.<\/p>\n \u201cWe kind of have an imaginary back story for that band,\u201d Koenig added. \u201cIt was a band that came out around 1989, 1990, and they were a little bit too punky for the jam scene and a little bit too jammy for the punk scene. And there\u2019s a little bit of the Minutemen<\/a> in there. The truth is, this is very premature because that band is still hashing out its sound. I don\u2019t want to say too much.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Could the unnamed trio open shows on Vampire Weekend\u2019s tour? \u201cThat has been discussed,\u201d Koenig said dryly.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re just trying to create a sound that we\u2019ve never quite heard before,\u201d he had noted earlier. \u201cThat\u2019s what keeps us going.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n