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“It’s amazing how quickly generations come and go,” Ezra Koenig mentioned. “And how quickly you go from one place to a new place.”
Koenig was speaking to SPIN for a function titled “Vampire Weekend Are 2013’s Band Of The Year” — among the many final of the umpteen interviews the band gave whereas selling their third album. Journalists have at all times flocked to Koenig and his bandmates; they had been objects of fascination, adulation, and disdain from the start. But the press had particularly good cause to fixate on Vampire Weekend a decade in the past. After proving their mettle with two precocious, star-making LPs, the polarizing quartet had now capped off the primary part of their profession with one of many defining artistic statements of its period. The headline didn’t lie.
Modern Vampires Of The City got here out 10 years in the past this Sunday, and it’s onerous to think about an album that has meant extra to me within the interim. I used to be solely an informal Vampire Weekend fan earlier than 2013, an individual who loved studying about them not less than as a lot as listening to them. Yet Modern Vampires revealed itself as a masterpiece on my earliest listens, cruising a rental automobile down the Gulf shore to and from a music competition on the seashore. That idyllic setting was nearly excellent for immersing myself in one among historical past’s sunnier death-obsessed information, however I’d quickly discover that this music works in nearly any context.
In numerous playbacks since, my awe and admiration have solely deepened. The writing is savvy however stops in need of overbearingly intelligent. The ingenious preparations and manufacturing pull off an identical trick, standing out in ways in which elevate reasonably than undermine the songs. Beyond its musical excellence — in tandem with it, actually — MVOTC is resonant in ways in which elude most artists’ makes an attempt at a press release album. Released right into a second of transition for Vampire Weekend’s style, their business, and their technology, the report grappled with significant questions in thought-provoking methods, sending me deep into my emotions within the course of. Excuse me for thus bluntly enthusing about such a sublime murals, however: This shit is so fucking superior, and I adore it so rattling a lot.
A typical remark upon listening to Modern Vampires was that these former fresh-faced faculty children had been now all grown up, their previous assured whimsy changed by a jaded-yet-searching maturity. Gone additionally had been their controversial reliance on African rhythms and their lyrical concentrate on the nuance of sophistication and privilege. Not solely was this their coming-of-age report, it was their New York City report, evolving their aesthetic towards a unique sort of eclecticism, extra metropolitan than cosmopolitan. The erudite contact that marked Koenig as probably the greatest younger writers in music remained, as did Rostam Batmanglij’s style for harpsichord. But they had been totally different folks now, and Vampire Weekend had been a unique band. In reality, at this level they had been viewing it much less as a band than a “recording project,” as Rostam instructed NPR.
I can’t discover it now, however I’m virtually positive I learn an interview circa MVOTC during which Koenig dismissed the rock-band format as passé. The sentiment actually match with the spirit of the occasions. In 2013, indie rock was winding down from a second of peak cultural visibility, a part when even a distinct segment, nerdy band just like the Decemberists may rating a #1 album and tentpole indie acts like Arcade Fire and Bon Iver had been taking residence a few of the largest prizes on Grammy night time. (Vampire Weekend had been proper within the thick of that phenomenon; this disc made them the primary impartial artist to attain prime the Billboard 200 with two consecutive albums, and some months later Koenig and drummer Chris Tomson offered an award to One Direction on the VMAs.) As the style expanded to enviornment scale, some retro bloat inevitably got here together with it. At the identical time, many artists from the indie world had been beginning to dabble extra liberally in pop, rap, R&B, tender rock — something however guitar-based rock music. Some had been trying to journey the indie hype practice to precise pop stardom, whereas others had been simply attempting to maintain up with a zeitgeist during which hipsters had been extra smitten with Frank Ocean than Built To Spill.
Vampire Weekend navigated these currents extra skillfully than most. They had assist from Ariel Rechtshaid, the primary exterior producer they’d ever employed. After months writing collectively in Rostam’s New York condo and some weeks woodshedding at a good friend’s home at Martha’s Vinyard (chef’s kiss), Koenig and Rostam headed out to LA to work with Rechtshaid at his yard studio in Echo Park and Vox in Hollywood. At the time, Rechtshaid was greatest recognized for producing Plain White T’s’ fluke #1 hit “Hey There Delilah,” however — after engaged on hip 2012 tracks like Usher’s “Climax,” Charli XCX’s “Nuclear Seasons,” and Sky Ferreira’s “Everything Is Embarrassing” — he was out of the blue the most popular producer on the intersection of indie and pop. “We were just trying to make a sonic statement on this record,” he instructed the New York Times of his work with Vampire Weekend. “We didn’t know what we wanted it to sound like, but we knew we wanted it to sound like nothing we ever heard.”
Sometimes when musicians discuss like that, you find yourself with off-putting, heavy-handed futurism. MVOTC as an alternative supplied the sort of natural progress that really occurs in the true world, the place essentially the most intuitive new expertise slides in alongside age-old components prefer it was at all times there. It’s “Obvious Bicycle” laying a sparse, clattering sampled beat over Plastic Ono Band piano chords so glassy you possibly can virtually see your reflection in them. It’s “Hannah Hunt” bringing the hollowed-out deconstruction of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to bear on the Technicolor glory of Summerteeth. It’s all of the vocal manipulation threaded all through the tracklist, be it Koenig’s morphing rockabilly “baby, baby, baby” enterprise on “Diane Young” or the chipmunk backing vocals on the ostensibly fairly severe “Ya Hey.”
There is a lot occurring in each one among these songs, but all of them really feel so spacious, so stylishly minimal. It’s like Spoon’s Kill The Moonlight if Britt Daniel beloved the Beatles greater than the Stones. “We wanted it to be simple and bare,” Rostam instructed SPIN in an earlier function previewing the report. “We wanted you to hear us coming through the speakers.” Tracks as totally different because the frantic, nervy “Unbelievers” and the haunted slow-creep “Hudson” share a sonic language, although solely one among them erupts into… what would you name that outpouring on the finish of “Unbelievers,” an Irish reel? Again and once more, Tomson’s drums come by means of with resounding drive and readability, typically entwined with Rostam’s programmed beats. The band’s signature chamber-pop thrives transfer aerodynamically by means of the combo — typically floating, typically careening, however by no means glomming on to the rhythm part and mucking up the momentum. Years later it nonetheless registers as a end result, the breakthrough they’d been constructing towards all alongside.
All that musical splendor wouldn’t have almost the identical impression if Koenig’s pen wasn’t so on-point. “I feel like every song on this album has a specific purpose,” he instructed the Times. “Which is not like a general philosophy — I don’t feel like every song in the world has to be about one thing and every word and every part of the song has to move toward supporting that idea. But that felt right for this record.” Like anybody approaching 30 who should reckon with the truth that their 20s are by no means coming again, Koenig started to dwell on loss of life. Like anybody who achieves success but finds success fleeting, he was drawn to the metaphysical unknown. It added as much as a treatise of kinds, albeit one unfold out throughout a bunch of wildly approachable pop songs. “If you would have asked me when I was a teenager what my wildest dream would have been, I would have said, ‘To be in a band, to get to go play in front of a lot of people, to get to release albums,’” he instructed SPIN. “That was it. We’ve gotten to do that, and it was cool, but, you know, it doesn’t answer any of the big life questions, actually. You could do it for a few years, and then what? Beg, borrow, and steal so you could do it for another 40 years? And then die? It’s natural: You get a taste of it, and then you start thinking, ‘What is there beyond this?’”
Although knowledgeable by the vacancy of rock-star goals come true, Koenig’s new songs moved away from the unique world of privilege he’d beforehand chronicled, towards extra common considerations. The album begins at dawn, with a notice of resignation: “You ought to spare your face the razor, because no one’s going to spare the time for you.” It ends on what appears like a lullaby for a grownup returning to mattress after being wrung out by the world. In between, mortality and spirituality are at all times looming. On “Diane Young” and “Don’t Lie,” Koenig wonders how anybody can undergo life with out considering loss of life. The chipper “Unbelievers” balks at the specter of hell (“Is this the fate that half of the world has planned for me?”), whereas chunk of the album’s again half is addressed on to God, main as much as a staring contest with the divine on the climactic anthem “Ya Hey.” (Koenig being Koenig, the bridge transposes his existential disaster onto an impressed segue from “Israelites” into “19th Nervous Breakdown” in some DJ set heard faintly from throughout the competition grounds.)
“Ya Hey” is the form of energy ballad you count on from a plucky younger band’s mature third album, an earnest big-room sing-along that wouldn’t have slot in alongside the frenetic “A-Punk” and the wry “Oxford Comma.” But the youthful power hadn’t absolutely dissipated but; “Diane Young” is as upbeat and explosive as one thing like “Cousins,” whereas deep cuts “Finger Back” and “Worship You” are translucent updates on that tightly wound Vampire Weekend sound. And although Koenig’s former reliance on character research is scaled again in favor of big-picture reflection, those that stay are remarkably seasoned. “Hannah Hunt,” a cross-country travelog monitoring two lovers falling aside, truly dates again to the band’s Columbia days, nevertheless it’s onerous to think about earlier iterations of Vampire Weekend pulling it off so spectacularly.
Although fictional, the tune is called after an actual classmate of Koenig’s who later dated Christopher Owens of Girls and fronted the band Dominant Legs; as Koenig instructed The Scotsman, “We sat next to each other in the Indo-Tibetan Buddhism class run by this brilliant professor, Robert Thurman – Uma’s dad,” which is nearly essentially the most Vampire Weekend backstory conceivable. He’s framed it because the aftermath of “Run” from Contra, a thought that lends some credence to the band’s assertion that MVOTC is the top of a trilogy and people first three albums are an interconnected world. This chapter of the story options a few of Koenig’s deftest writing to this point, sketching out a complete novel’s value of plot in a number of crackling vignettes. Even there, God makes an look: “A man of faith said hidden eyes could see what I was thinking/ I just smiled and told him that was only true of Hannah/ And we glided on through Waverly and Lincoln.”
“Hannah Hunt,” a tune about actually driving from the East Coast to the West, could possibly be seen because the gateway from Vampire Weekend’s buttoned-up early years to the looser, shaggier dad-rock jam-band vibe Koenig would later discover on Father Of The Bride following Rostam’s departure. It’s not loopy to think about it as the top of Modern Vampires, the affected person centerpiece that reveals how far this band had come. But there’s multiple excellent gem on this report, and if “Hannah Hunt” offered a means ahead, no monitor encapsulated the place Vampire Weekend had been at in 2013 higher than “Step.” That was Koenig’s personal perspective in a Stereogum cowl story six years later: “I had a feeling that when I wrote ‘Step,’ it was what I had been trying to do the whole time. It’s not gonna get better than that. That, to me, is the peak of that type of songwriting.”
It’s true: “Step” is a staggering achievement — an elongated sigh that encapsulates the album’s themes, a grand summation of Vampire Weekend’s New York years, and perhaps even a wistful farewell to this part of indie rock historical past. Like so lots of the band’s greatest songs, it’s filled with allusions on the intersection of genres — Modest Mouse, Jandek, Run D.M.C., and naturally the Souls Of Mischief line he become a hook — but greater than most, it brims with an emotional vulnerability that transcends all of the footnotes.
Since we’d met them, this band had been quoting rap lyrics, accessorizing tight little pop songs with classical elaborations, and dissecting society with a cultured eye. “Step” streamlined all that and extra into 4 minutes of seamless gliding melancholy, topped off with a few of the most insightful lyrics of Koenig’s life. “The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out,” he sang on the refrain, as if ceremonially ushering millennials out of innocence and into maturity as soon as and for all. Amidst all of the passport stamps and historic references, the child who’d so neatly examined wealth was now taking a clear-eyed take a look at the world’s truest forex. He saved the realest reality bomb for the bridge: “Wisdom’s a gift, but you’d trade it for youth/ Age is an honor — it’s still not the truth.”
As the mud settled on a life-changing stretch, Koenig discovered himself someplace “a little bit weirder, at times lonelier.” The scene he got here up in was fading away, and so had been the mechanisms that introduced his band to fame. He and his friends had been transferring over a scary horizon into the remainder of their lives — no turning again, no beginning over. As somebody about Koenig’s age — who acquired married the yr earlier than the album dropped, who turned 30 inside a number of months of its launch, who’d watched with a mixture of pleasure and horror as my favourite bands morphed into traditional rockers earlier than my eyes — it might be an understatement to say it struck a chord. But I’d prefer to imagine I’d have beloved this album even when it didn’t meet me the place I used to be at. Modern Vampires Of The City funneled all that nervousness, uncertainty, and longing into an immensely assured assortment of songs that performs like a monument to a bygone second. For an album so freaked out on the prospect of rising previous, it’s onerous to think about growing older way more gracefully than this.
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