On its floor, Solely God Was Above Us, the fifth album from Vampire Weekend, has a darkly fatalist viewpoint. Over a number of the band’s loudest, grittiest manufacturing thus far, frontman and songwriter Ezra Koenig sings of curses, missed connections and imagined wars, airing plangent anxieties about how this tumultuous period of historical past will likely be remembered. It performs a bit like a knottier sequel to the band’s anxious 2013 file Fashionable Vampires of the Metropolis – however Koenig himself hopes the album leaves listeners with some stage of hope.
“I feel fatalism taken to its excessive is optimism – a number of the happiest folks on the earth have some aspect of give up and acceptance,” he says. “There’s fatalism – the world is a chaotic place and isn’t that horrible? After which there’s optimism – the world is a chaotic place, and also you gotta surf that wave.”
The road of considering is typical Koenig: fastidiously equivocal and wryly flippant on the similar time, delivered earnestly and thoughtfully. It’s a tightrope stroll that’s spilled into Solely God Was Above Us, which dips again into the genteel trappings of early Vampire Weekend data – richly orchestrated with lush, ambling upright bass, dizzying sax solos and cascading piano traces – however manages to sound vastly completely different to something the band have executed earlier than.
There’s a tense, virtually violent streak to this album. Koenig agrees that it’s “aesthetically darker – tonally, it’s essentially the most aggressive file we’ve made”, however he doesn’t essentially see it as a heavier file than its predecessor, 2019’s shaggy, maximalist Father of the Bride. “I feel if you happen to swapped the album covers, folks would hear them in a different way,” he says. “However possibly you need to permit folks to classify the albums by some type of binary.”
Koenig and I are assembly in February, a couple of days earlier than the long-awaited new album is introduced. Sitting in a central London picture studio, he appears barely any completely different from when he was selling Father of the Bride. His type, although, has modified along with his data’ shifts in tone, ditching brightly colored fleeces with socks and sandals in favour of a khaki sweater and sand-toned slacks – maybe a byproduct of his imminent fortieth birthday.
Ageing actually influenced the stressed, if hopeful, spirit of Solely God Was Above Us. “Once I was youthful, I used to be possibly a bit smug, ready for all times to indicate me what was so good about it – after which I used to be like: ‘Oh proper, each particular person has a capability to like life,’” he says. “It’s precisely the kind of concept that will make my eyes roll out of my head after I was a sullen teenager or in my late 20s, wrestling with the purpose of all this.”
It’s a marked change from his band’s early years, after they have been praised for distilling large concepts about existence and mortality into catchy, richly produced pop songs. Rising within the mid-00s as a part of a wave of indie bands that included MGMT and Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend rapidly ascended to pageant headliner standing, thanks in no small half to their prodigious songwriting skill and Koenig’s personal sense of ambition.
“When the band was beginning, I used to be obsessive about getting [second album] Contra out in 2010 – I believed it was vital that we launched albums again to again – it was so rushed. There was an actual feeling of: ‘It is a uncommon alternative,’” he recollects. “To proceed at that tempo and with that stage of agitation would ship anyone to burnout. And then you definately get into these existential issues: if all you’re doing is making music, what’s the music about?”
Within the 5 years since Father of the Bride, Koenig let life take centre stage. In 2018, he and his spouse, the actor Rashida Jones, had a child; after touring the album, he hung out residing in Tokyo and London, along with their residence base of Los Angeles, whereas she labored on movie initiatives, grateful to let his life contract a bit after the circus of selling a file. He wrote and recorded elements of Solely God Was Above Us in these cities, but it surely was hardly a case of selecting flashy recording locations.
“Residing in these completely different locations superficially provides the file a glamorous contact, however once you’re transferring overseas with your loved ones, and your spouse is working 14 hours a day, and your child is at school, there’s additionally a number of solitude,” he says. The relative mundanity of this time, he says, “allowed concepts to only creep in” with little exterior strain. “I like doing regular stuff – I like taking lengthy walks and being alone and studying. I like taking my son to highschool within the morning and speaking about what we see throughout the drive. I like that being my main mode.”
Solely God Was Above Us is the primary file Koenig has written since having a toddler. Has fatherhood modified his outlook on songwriting, or his profession? “The brief reply is not any,” he says, smiling sheepishly. The album’s sense of optimism, nevertheless, does derive partially from some sense of accountability he feels in direction of a youthful technology. “The longer term is completely out of their management,” he says. “Generally you hear folks discuss no matter facet of the world is their present fixation – like: ‘I can’t imagine this exists when my youngster is gonna be rising up’ – and then you definately realise, properly, what are you able to give a toddler aside from a approach of embracing life?”
Such an concept is a necessity within the US proper now, when partisan politics are at their most fractious. Koenig was a staunch Bernie Sanders supporter throughout each his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and performed at a handful of the senator’s rallies. By the point 2020 rolled round, “it felt a bit bit like, ‘Effectively, I don’t understand how probably it’s that that is gonna occur, but it surely seems like the appropriate factor to do at this second,’” he recollects. Does he suppose any of Sanders’s trademark insurance policies, corresponding to common healthcare, is likely to be revived throughout this yr’s election cycle? “There’s at all times hope, as a result of I feel a number of that stuff can be nice. Rationally, are any of these issues across the nook? I simply don’t know.”
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The calmness with which he speaks about politics is mirrored on Hope, the album’s remaining observe, on which he runs by a laundry record of political conspiracies and defeats, earlier than touchdown on a observe of bittersweet acceptance: “Our enemy’s invincible / I hope you let it go.” He sees this, too, as a second of optimism. “Politics is obsessive about final result, and we’re all surrounded by the anger and frustration of people that deeply imagine that issues have to go a technique or one other,” he says. Hope, the music, is an attraction to see hope as “a private feeling, somewhat than a requirement on the skin world”, an concept he’s come to as he’s grown older. “There’s going to be hundreds of thousands of individuals dissatisfied at any given second, possibly billions globally. If you happen to hope for one thing particular, you’ll typically be dissatisfied, however hope as a sense, or an idea, [is] in some way larger than final result.”
In the identical approach that Solely God Was Above Us returns to the baroque, distorted sound they explored on Fashionable Vampires, it additionally sees Koenig reuniting along with his bandmates Chris Baio and Chris Tomson, who toured with the band circa Father of the Bride however didn’t play on the file, and weren’t pictured in press pictures. Multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, who left the band after Fashionable Vampires, additionally labored on the brand new album’s manufacturing, as he did on Father of the Bride, though he’s nonetheless not “in” the band. Koenig says there wasn’t a aware determination to deliver Tomson and Baio again into the fold; Vampire Weekend has lengthy been a recording venture, and Father of the Bride was made with “them having some confidence in me to take us someplace attention-grabbing, and me having confidence that they’d be all the way down to type of wait and nonetheless be part of it.”
A number of years down the road, Koenig says he doesn’t know if presenting Father of the Bride as a solo venture was a good suggestion or not, though in the end “the file was successful, we have been very proud of the reception, it was our greatest and largest tour”. He nonetheless feels his motivations for the choice have been sound. “I simply had a sense that going into the fourth album, seeing an image of three guys of their mid-30s was type of like: ‘That is gonna seem like broken items.’”
A part of it might have been that he was nonetheless “traumatised by the haters of our early days”, he admits, referring to the coterie of music critics who ripped into the band for his or her perceived white, upper-class perspective – even if Koenig and Batmanglij, the band’s songwriters, have been working-class Jewish and Iranian, respectively. Presenting Father of the Bride as a solo venture got here out of a protecting intuition. “I had a sense that it was going to be essentially the most tough transition, as a result of some kind of indie period was over, we misplaced a member, and our final album was our most critical, critically acclaimed album ever. That’s a recipe for catastrophe.”
Koenig is true in considering that the scene Vampire Weekend got here out of now not exists in the identical approach; main mechanisms for breaking a band, corresponding to indie blogs, now not exist, and few rock artists are making it to the highest of the Billboard charts. On a private stage, he now not feels tapped into trendy indie music, and says that anyway the press now not appears intent on asking older bands to offer a seal of approval for rising prospects – as when Self-importance Honest requested Paul Simon for his opinion on them again in 2011. “I don’t know who the [young] Vampire Weekend is now, and I don’t know if anyone is aware of,” Koenig says. “When Contra got here out, I knew the context it was made in; when this album comes out, I solely realize it when it comes to Vampire Weekend’s profession.”
That appears to be as liberating for Koenig as it’s unnerving; in Solely God Was Above Us it ends in a sound that’s richer and extra expansive than something the band have made earlier than, even because it returns to a mode they mined deeply on Fashionable Vampires. “That context is one other factor to cope with,” he says. “However in the end, I give up to Father Time.”
Solely God Was Above Us is launched 5 April.
