Ezra Koenig: “It’s uncharted territory for us”

The mood here is different to Father Of Bride, which was pretty sunny.

The I’m so in the weeds on the albums, I don’t see a huge shift from one to the next. But definitely the moodboard of this album has more distortion and heaviness. That plays a larger role than on any of our albums. So that’s uncharted territory for Vampire Weekend.

There are a lot of late-20th-century New York City references on the album. 20th-century New York will always function as a kind of a psychological home base for me. It’s the place and the culture that my family is from. I’m sure something has to do with getting older, and watching the new generations come and the old generations go, that probably put me in a reflective mood. Also, the last five years, me and my family spent a lot of time living in different places. When you shake things up, you can think more clearly about the past and the places that are meaningful to you.

You’ve talked about how oldschool sample-based music was a touchstone. There’s really only one sample on the album. But even when there are no samples, there’s selfsampling and layering different types of recording technology on each other. A lot of us learned that from people like the RZA, you know? Growing up in the ’90s, the sound of Wu-tang, Cypress Hill and Beastie Boys records is what got us excited about making music in the first place. When I saw [our] album cover photo, I described it as looking like Pink Floyd meets the Beastie Boys. And that was something I repeated in the studio. “Let’s make sure the music lives up to it.”