Vampire Weekend tease ‘Only God Was Above Us’ album with noisy montage
The trio will play a concert during the solar eclipse to coincide with April record release.
Vampire Weekend are teasing their new album, Only God Was Above Us, with a 30-second clip of a noisy yet upbeat guitar cacophony skating over some funky bass and drums. The clip for the album, due out April 5, shows a man jumping through an old New York City subway car sideways, a French horn, a recording studio, the World Trade Center, and sheet music with the word “Hope,” among other images. ‘Hope’ is the title of the final track on the album, and its lyrics contain the words, “I hope you let it go/Our enemy’s invincible.”
The first two songs from the album, ‘Capricorn’ and ‘Gen-X Cops’, will come out on February 16.
The trio will commemorate the release — their first album since 2019 — with a performance at Austin’s Moody Amphitheater on April 8. The performance will take place at noon to coincide with a total solar eclipse. Tickets for the gig will go on sale February 13 at 10am. CT.
The group got the album title from a 1988 New York Daily News headline that its members spotted in a photo by Steven Siegel of a New Jersey subway graveyard. It referred to an Aloha Airlines flight on which an explosion ripped the roof off the plane. VAMPIRE WEEKEND ARE using the Siegel photo, which shows a man standing sideways, similar to the guy in the teaser video, as sleeve art for the record.
The band took inspiration for the album from 20th Century New York City and recorded it in Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. The group’s Ezra Koenig, who wrote the lyrics in 2019 and 2020, produced the album with longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid.
Only God Was Above Us track list:
1. ‘Ice Cream Piano’
2. ‘Classical’
3. ‘Capricorn’
4. ‘Connect’
5. ‘Prep-School Gangsters’
6. ‘The Surfer’
7. ‘Gen-X Cops’
8. ‘Mary Boone’
9. ‘Pravda’
10. ‘Hope’