Six years. Six long, joyless years Vampire Weekend’s fans have waited for the US outfit’s chirpy, Ivy League pop to return to the flaming dumpster fire of a world it left behind.
Now, double album behemoth ‘Father Of The Bride’ is coming in hot. Refusing the confines of genre and the characteristically tongue-in-cheek pop of its predecessors, the album seamlessly blends wit, the wisdom of age, and Vampire Weekend’s special brand of ironic detachment.
It’s a vivid tapestry of synth sounds and Nashville, hip hop and Hans Zimmer, throughout which none of the 18 tracks seem to belong on the cutting room floor. Its release will come hand-in-hand with a gargantuan seven-month tour that will take the trio on the road from now until November.
And with the help of outside collaborators for the first time (The Internet’s Steve Lacey, Haim’s Danielle Haim, and Jonah Hill all cop credits), frontman Ezra Koenig says it was worth the wait. “I know that in 2019 the concept of a double album is not gonna have meaning to everybody,” he laughs.
“But I definitely felt like 18 tracks would give me a lot more room to explore the ideas I wanted to explore. I think when I was younger I’d just start with a phrase – you know, ‘oxford comma’, ‘mansard roof’ – something weird that had come across my radar.
“After doing that for a while it became really exciting to try to write about something simple, like love or pain, and not have to try and dress it up with expensive words.
“We’d also always talked about having an album that would have more guests, which seems to be the way a lot of albums are made these days. But I actually ended up finding most comfort in the middle ground, where it’s not exactly a revolving door but more a slightly cracked open door.
“Whoever we let in, they had to be part of the family – I like the idea that you don’t just dip in to do your thing for two hours then leave, you know, you’re part of the atmosphere.
“I found that in the end the people that really became an important part of this record, like Steve and Danielle – she sings backup on more than half of the songs – their voices are part of the texture and the sound of the whole album.
“Even with the longer gap in between records, there was something very familiar about making this album. I kind of realised that it’s not some big, crazy secret about how to continue to make records when you move past your early 20s. You kind of just keep living.”
According to Koenig, the six-year gap between 2013’s Grammy-snatching ‘Modern Vampires Of The City’ and upcoming ‘FOTB’ was less of a break and more of a “successful facade of productivity”.
I’ll take his word for it, though I struggle to believe such sentiments from a man with a reputation for the hustle as legendary as his own.
Outside of his band duties, Koenig kept busy with a range of casual co-curricular activities, including creating an animated Netflix series about a demon hunter; hosting a fortnightly radio show discussing the current political climate and snacks; the occasional Beyonce or Peter Rabbit collab; and welcoming his first child, Isaiah, into the world with actress Rashida Jones.
“It’s all an illusion. I’m an incredibly lazy person,” he explains.
“I mean, of course I go to the studio, go to work, work on the cartoon. But I realised that I actually need to save a lot of space just to be a normal person.
"Would it have maybe been a little smarter on my part if the albums were three, four years apart? Perhaps. But now we’re back. We’re giving our fans new music. We’re about to go on tour. And in a funny way, it kind of feels like we’re back on track.
“My current feeling is to just take your time, get things right, and you’ll actually create the illusion that you’re very productive. Ultimately, when people look back in ten or twenty years they’re going to see what you did, not the spaces in between.”
The overwhelming reaction (see: pandemic fanfare) from their famished fan base after the drop of six preliminary tracks this year, as well as clips for singles ‘Sunflower’ and ‘Harmony Hall’, does seem to support this theory.
Despite having to deal with a fatalistic shift in the charts, the impending time death of the universe, and the likelihood of a potentially pissed off fan base, Koenig maintains that the Vampires are on a positive trajectory - including promises of a new video for track ‘This Life’, a lack of further six-year hiatuses, and even an Australia-only ‘FOTB’ yo-yo.
So, the band’s previously uncompromising faithfulness to a single genre has been compromised. The doors to their studio have been left permanently ajar. The well-loved cord blazers and boat shoes are long gone. The world can wipe their collective brow and rest assured of one constant: that the eternal optimism of the crooner that brought us 'A-Punk' remains alive and well.
“Whenever we finish a record, I look at that album and think ‘does this album feel like a dead end, or does it feel like a lot of doors opening to future music?’.
“I look at this one and I think it feels like a lot of doors opening. It’s a good feeling.”
