The members of Vampire Weekend are very good at this.
Gathered on a recent afternoon to talk about the band’s fifth album, “Only God Was Above Us,” frontman Ezra Koenig, bassist Chris Baio and drummer Chris Tomson have agreed to play a little game in which they’ll try to name from memory LP No. 5 by half a dozen high-profile acts.
Five out of six they get right: U2 (“The Joshua Tree”), Kanye West (“My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”), Bruce Springsteen (“The River”), Bob Dylan (“Bringing It All Back Home”) and Coldplay (“Mylo Xyloto”). But even with the one they flub — Koenig initially misidentifies Madonna’s fifth album as “Like a Prayer” before correcting himself to “Erotica” — they make a pretty solid case for their mistake.
“So she becomes Madonna over the course of the first three, then ‘Like a Prayer’ consolidates it,” Koenig says. “Maybe a bit early. Doesn’t ‘Like a Prayer’ have fifth-album energy?”
It’s no surprise that these unabashed music nerds would crush this challenge, given that Vampire Weekend has been peppering its indie rock, for the better part of two decades, with references and allusions drawn from an attentive and enthusiastic study of pop history.
On tour this year, the band has been performing a country-themed medley it calls “Cocaine Cowboys” that links Vampire Weekend’s “Married in a Gold Rush” with the Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Sin City” and “All the Gold in California” by the Gatlin Brothers; for an encore, the musicians take requests from the audience and attempt to cover songs they don’t necessarily know how to play, including Steely Dan’s “Peg” and “Rock Lobster” by the B-52’s, both of which they (mostly) managed to get through at the Hollywood Bowl in June.
But they’re also acutely aware of the creative arc built into a discography and the story it tells about an artist or a band. The way Koenig sees it, Albums 1, 2 and 3 are about establishing an identity; Album 4 represents a chance to stretch out and “spend a little of that capital.” The fifth LP, he says, should be “a confident distillation of what you do. It shows that you know who you are and that you’ve still got gas in the tank.”
Koenig, 40, remembers seeing the video for the Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic,” the lead single from the rap trio’s 1998 “Hello Nasty” — “a classic fifth album,” he reckons. “They’d never done anything quite like that, but you knew them well enough at that point to think it was perfect. It’s like: different, but of course.”
That’s an apt description of “Only God Was Above Us,” which jams together styles and textures with the band’s usual intricacy — check out the way “Ice Cream Piano” moves between genteel balladry and galloping rock — while relishing a newly noisy edge.
“On every album, they make complexity irresistible,” says Thomas Mars of the French band Phoenix, which drafted Koenig to appear on the song “Tonight,” from 2022’s “Alpha Zulu” LP. “Their music is so layered and it grabs from so many directions. Yet it always sounds like them, which is what a true artist does.”
Phoenix has invited Koenig to play “Tonight” onstage several times over the last couple of years, including during the closing ceremony of this past summer’s Olympic Games in Paris and at May’s Just Like Heaven festival in Pasadena, where Koenig stuck around after “Tonight” to join Phoenix for its hit “1901.” “He was just riffing on his guitar, surrounded by six other musicians, and he made the song sound like Vampire Weekend,” Mars recalls with a laugh.
Titled after a headline in the New York Daily News shown on the album’s cover, “Only God Was Above Us” — which may bring Vampire Weekend its fourth nomination for alternative music album at the Grammy Awards — threads together thoughts on some of the cultural figures and political maneuverings that shaped the band’s former hometown. Vampire Weekend formed in 2006 while the members were students at New York’s Columbia University, though Koenig, Baio and Tomson all now live in Los Angeles. (Koenig’s partner, with whom he shares a 6-year-old son, is actor Rashida Jones, who — fun fact — was directed by Mars’ wife, Sofia Coppola, in 2020’s “On the Rocks.”)
As a New Yorker transplanted to L.A., Koenig draws a line between his lyrical preoccupations and the fact that the New York-obsessed “Seinfeld” was shot here and that the Beastie Boys “were living in L.A. when they made ‘Paul’s Boutique,’ which has so much New York flavor.” Koenig has driven past the real-life façade of Jerry Seinfeld’s fictional apartment building in Koreatown. “It’s a period building, not like some West Hollywood condo,” he says, sprawled with his bandmates on a sofa at their manager’s office. “But the more you look at it, the more you’re like, ‘Yeah, I can tell.’”
The members attribute the new album’s relatively raw sound to the many hours they spent playing together in a rehearsal space that Baio and Tomson keep in Eagle Rock. Yet Ariel Rechtshaid, who co-produced the last three Vampire Weekend albums — and who’s also worked with Haim, Usher and Charli XCX — notes that in some ways the recording process was more elaborate than on the band’s tidier earlier records.
“It gives the illusion of being less produced,” Rechtshaid says. “But this was a s— ton of human performance”: people plucking guitars, people blowing saxophones, people sawing away at cellos and violins. Indeed, Koenig’s singing has never been more expressive — wistful in “Mary Boone,” tender yet suspicious in “Prep-School Gangsters” — which according to Rechtshaid is always the goal in the studio. “Nothing is more important than the voice that’s talking to you through the speakers,” he says. “Everything else is just there to serve that.”
When Vampire Weekend started out, one aspect of the band’s project was recontextualizing certain styles that perhaps had fallen out of vogue — the ska elements, for instance, that feature prominently on the group’s self-titled 2008 debut, which came out in the wake of the New York garage-rock revival. “There was a deliberate provocation regarding taste,” Koenig says now. “I’d picture someone where if they thought something was cool, I had to think it was uncool. And if they thought something was uncool, I had to think it was cool.
“But you can only play the generational-taste game for so long,” he adds. (It’s probably worth noting that Vampire Weekend remade several of its oldies in a ska mode at the Hollywood Bowl.) “Getting older, I think it comes down to the slightly more eternal things: Do your songs connect? And songs that connect with people for years or decades are rare.”
Vampire Weekend will spend the rest of 2024 on the road in its semi-jammy seven-piece live incarnation, which features a second drummer in addition to Baio, who today wears a Herbie Hancock T-shirt commemorating the jazz legend’s recent reunion with his Head Hunters band at the Bowl. “We’re still gong-less, though,” Baio points out. “Two drummers and zero gongs is a nice, strong boundary, I think.”
The musicians also are pondering the arc that Vampire Weekend’s next five albums might trace. “I do love to see an aging songwriter reach that moment where they just don’t give a f—,” Koenig says. Told that a DGAF era seems hard to imagine for a band that pays as much attention to detail as this one, Koenig replies, “You’re totally right, but that’s the challenge of it. I’ve seen a shirt that says, ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff,’ and then underneath it says, ‘It’s all small stuff.’” He smiles at the thought of the corny aphorism.
“I have to do some research to find out if that’s true.”
