2 directions lead toward 1 album
Vampire Weekend pushes into maturity and back to youthful playfulness
From the first seconds of Vampire Weekend’s new album, “Only God Was Above Us,” it’s clear that something has changed. “Ice Cream Piano” starts with hiss, buzz, feedback and a hovering, distorted guitar note — the opposite of the clean pop tones that have been the band’s hallmark. It’s the beginning of an album full of startling changes and wild sonic upheavals, all packed into 10 songs.
The album, like all of Vampire Weekend’s work, is meticulous, self-conscious and awash in musical and verbal allusions — sometimes direct, sometimes cryptic. But it’s also a broad pendulum swing from its 2019 release, “Father of the Bride,” a leisurely, jam-band-influenced sprawl that ran nearly 58 minutes. “Only God Was Above Us,” the group’s recently released fifth album, has eight songs and is 10 minutes shorter.
“With every album we have to push in two directions at once,” Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend’s singer and primary songwriter, said in a recent interview. “Sometimes that means we have to be poppier and weirder. Maybe with this record, it’s about both pushing into true maturity, in terms of worldview and attitude, but also pushing back further into playfulness. There’s a youthful amateurishness along with some of our most ambitious swings ever.”
Koenig, 39, described the new album’s sequence of songs as “a journey from questioning to acceptance, maybe to surrender.
From a kind of negative worldview to something a little deeper.”
Ultimately, he said, the LP is optimistic. “It’s not a doom-andgloom record. And even if there’s songs where the narrator is trying to figure something out or feels confused, that’s not all. That’s part of the story — it’s not the thesis of the album that the world is dark and horrible.”
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 “Connect.” Where “Father of the Bride” had a folky openness, “Only God Was Above Us” is crammed with ideas that gleefully collide.
“Distortion, heaviness, hardness,” Koenig said. “We were drawn toward those qualities on this record in a more direct way
than ever before.”
Vampire Weekend has always had two distinct aspects — its fastidious album work and its frisky live shows. The central one is the music the band constructs in the studio, which is minutely tweaked and painstakingly considered. Vampire Weekend’s songs uphold a long-established tradition of concise pop songwriting. But even as it delineates clear verses and choruses, the band pushes other parameters.
“With some types of art, you probably have to put a lot of thought into 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 arrangements, you can. And if you want the lyrics to push out into some weird place, you can.”
Yet 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 said. “But now it’s recontextualized by the second verse. I think all that stuff is built into the format. It’s this great populist art form where you can get really out there, but the structure holds it together.”
Beginning with the 2013 album “Modern Vampires of the City,” Vampire Weekend’s studio output has increasingly been a collaboration between Koenig and producer and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Rechtshaid, who has worked on hits with Madonna, Usher, Haim and others.
“I’ve been part of making things that sound expensive and beautiful,” Rechtshaid said. “But on this record, when the songs were at a certain stage, we were just, like, ‘This sounds exciting to us.’ It wasn’t a gimmick. It wasn’t like ‘Here’s the decision to make something that feels noisy or dirty or distorted.’ It’s that the songs were emoting properly.”
Vampire Weekend will tour this summer — a job far removed from the band’s finely detailed studio work. Real-time performing used to be a fraught prospect for such a perfectionist group.
“I would hear other musicians talk about ‘Oh man, you know, touring is tough, but then once you get onstage, all your worries go away and you’re just connecting with the audience,’ ” Koenig recalled. “And I’d think, ‘What are these people talking about? That’s when the worries start.’ ”
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. “Now, when we get together to rehearse, there’s a youthful, playful vibe,” Koenig said. “We’re always coming up with ideas that make us laugh.”
Along with recording and touring, Vampire Weekend may soon unveil a third facet. Vampire Weekend started meeting in a converted medical office in summer 2020 for weekly, pandemic-distanced jam sessions, playing in separate rooms and recording hundreds of hours of music.
“The world had stopped working and a lot of what we normally do was just not being done,” drummer Chris Tomson recalled. “There was something about just playing with no expectation — to just play with my two very close friends without an agenda.”
Bassist Chris Baio said: “It’s 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.”
Those sessions may lead to the emergence of a new trio that happens to have the same members as Vampire Weekend, performing unreleased material.
“We kind of have an imaginary back story for that band,” Koenig said. “It 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’s a little bit of the Minutemen in there.
“The truth is, this is very premature because that band is still hashing out its sound. I don’t want to say too much.”
Could the unnamed trio open shows on Vampire Weekend’s tour? “That has been discussed,” Koenig said dryly.
“We’re just trying to create a sound that we’ve never quite heard before,” he had noted earlier. “That’s what keeps us going.”