Death Cab for Cutie announce completion of their tenth album
New music will arrive next Wednesday (May 11)
By Joe Goggins
Death Cab for Cutie have announced that work on their tenth album is complete.
The seasoned indie rockers have been in the studio for most of 2022, per their social media activity, and tonight (May 4) took to their platforms to let fans know they should expect new music one week from now. “New album done. New music May 11. Pre-save link in bio,” read the simple message.
Assuming the full record arrives shortly afterwards, then the as-yet-untitled record is due roughly four years after ‘Thank You for Today’, which was released in August of 2018. That album was the Seattle outfit’s first without founding member and long-time producer Chris Walla, who had previously sat out production duties for the first time ever on eighth album ‘Kintsugi’, whilst still playing on the album, before leaving the group in 2014 to pursue his production career full-time.
Details on the tenth full-length are, for now, scant, but frontman Ben Gibbard was a frequent presence on fans’ computer screens during the first of the COVID-19 lockdowns, live-streaming nightly, then weekly, from his home studio, for performances that included a fan request show, a all-Beatles covers set, and a performance of the band’s second album, ‘We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes’, to mark its 20th anniversary. Death Cab have since returned to the road in earnest, playing shows in their native US last year.
They’ll play more gigs on their side of the Atlantic this year, including a huge gig at Forest Hills Stadium in New York on September 30. Speaking to NME last year, Gibbard suggested that his new signature Fender Mustang was having a material influence on the sound of album ten, as well as that the pandemic had shaped it thematically. “There is a theme of the loss of time and the finite amount of it that we all have,” he said. “This last year of our lives has put a fine point on the fact that we are all mortal and only here for a brief period of time. It goes by quicker than you think.”
“Love and death are always big things for me, he added, “but there’s a new component about how quickly time moves and how impermanent our existence here truly is.”