Five years had to pass before some repairs Vampire Weekend have given us “Only God Was Above Us” (Columbia/Sony, 24), but the wait has been worth it. We have them back more adventurous than ever.
The fifth album of Vampire Weekend, “Only God Was Above Us”, shows the American band more adventurous and experimental than ever, going from guitars to lush string arrangements or leafy psychedelia, with imagination to the power and cultural codes of New York in the second half of the 20th century as an alibi plot. They are the same as always, but with a renewed suit. It was worth waiting five years for “Only God Was Above Us”. I talk about all this, through the PC screen, with Ezra Koenig, the vocalist, guitarist and main songwriter of the trio completed by bassist Chris Baio and drummer Chris Tomson.
It seems like you had a great time in the studio. With a recreational desire, trying new things, exploiting textures. It was like this?
Our ambition was to make the record sound as hard as possible. Well, actually “hard” can mean anything. It’s a bit hard rock, on the one hand, because it’s our loudest work, with a lot of distortion. But it also sounds harsh in the quieter songs, which show a special resistance. Yes, it was fun. As much as Vampire Weekend has always been branded as an indie or alternative band, we’ve never really bothered to explore distortion and feedback. And at the end of the day it is a type of music that we have grown up with. It was a new world that we wanted our sound to approach.
You started working on it in 2019, five years ago. It’s a long time. Weren’t you afraid that perhaps there are ideas from then that are difficult to reconnect with mentally, after so much time, and that this would result in a lack of cohesion?
It’s true that we started five years ago, but if we compare ourselves to other people, I can tell you that we don’t really work that much. [risas]. As I get older, the idea of not working all the time becomes more and more important to me. In recent years my family has been away for work for a few seasons: my wife found a position in England for six months, the following year she spent another six months in Japan, and that made me move with them. Ariel [Rechtshaid], our producer, with whom we have worked closely, came to see us, and we also had the opportunity to meet in London and Tokyo, but he was also going to be without traveling for six months, so we have been away from each other for a long time. I made the decision not to work during those periods. Sometimes I listened to the demos, and little else. Those long breaks were very good for us to return later with fresh ideas.
“I listen to music all the time and it’s obvious that new talents are always going to emerge, but I no longer have that feeling that there is a physical epicenter”
Almost all the songs deal with issues and events of the 20th century. I was thinking that you were sixteen years old in 2000, you have lived longer in this century than in the previous one. What is it that you find so attractive about that time? Do you find the present uninspiring?
Well, I think what I said to promote the album was focused specifically on 20th century New York. It’s important to draw that distinction, because when you talk about a place you have the option of focusing on what’s happening now or its history, and I’ve always felt a family connection to 20th-century New York, not just because I was born there. during that time, but because there are a lot of places that no longer exist, and that my family frequented when they arrived here as an immigrant. I am very interested in the culture of the New York that my parents and grandparents knew. Everyone is interested in the culture of their country, and New York is as big as an entire country. The distinction you have drawn between the 20th and 21st centuries is interesting, and although I think this is extremely different in terms of our use of technology, what actually fuels that technology are ideas from the 20th century. It is an interesting mix. “Capricorn” is a song that is about that generation that is between both centuries, and the chorus ends with a phrase that says “passing through the centuries from our own moments,” and after writing it I thought it portrayed that transit very well. There are ideas from the 20th century that replicate themselves, over and over again. The 20th century remains the center of gravity for many things.
In fact, it remains an inexhaustible source of ideas. I was surprised that in “Mary Boon” there are a couple of fragments that replicate the classic rhythm of British dance music from the late eighties and early nineties, things like Soul II Soul.
It’s a Soul II Soul sampler! And so much so that it is a source of inspiration. When we chose that sampler, we were thinking about something a little darker, I thought the Soul II Soul thing was too obvious, but then I realized how well it anchors the song to something familiar, and I like that. Ariel liked it. I wasn’t so convinced at first, I thought “could we try to recreate that sound in our own way?”, but the more I listened to it, the more I was convinced that it should sound like that, in its original form. Especially in a song like that, which has very crazy orchestral moments with a great chorus. The sampler then takes you back to a familiar sound. It is important, probably in most music and certainly in any kind of art, to incorporate new ideas but at the same time have one foot in the familiar: that is our challenge.
In that sense, I get the impression that the pressure of what people expect of you does not weigh on you, even though from the beginning you have had the great media spotlight very close to you.
I’d be lying to you if I told you that didn’t worry me when I was in my twenties. I wanted to be successful, of course, and I was nervous about not having a future as a musician, so of course we were worried about people’s response, but I think we’re too old to hold on to that. The same anxiety that helps and motivates you when you are young can destroy you when you get older. It’s something I’ve seen in other people. It happens to many artists. It can happen to everyone. If I focused on how people are going to receive this album, it wouldn’t help me. We are immersed in our own journey, and I have faith that if there is quality in the songwriting and production, and both meet our usual standards, some of our audience will continue to enjoy it. If pop culture is a language, of course I’m going to be able to speak it like I did when I was in my early twenties. So for us it is time to look in other directions.
There are a few songs that appeal to the role of the media in the 20th century: “Prep-school gangsters” is a headline from the early eighties around that New York scene in which hip hop germinated, “Pravda” was the newspaper of the Russian Communist Party and the title of the album itself comes from a headline written after an event in which the upper part of the fuselage of a commercial plane came loose in mid-flight. Is there any vindication of its role in the face of fake news and the distortions of social networks today?
It’s interesting, because I didn’t mentally put those ideas together. There’s even another song, which ultimately didn’t make it onto the album and we’ll probably release later, that has more references to newspapers. [risas], because he mentions the Village Voice and the New York Times. As you say, there are many references to newspapers of the time and the media in general. I haven’t had time to think about why all those images have been put together on the disk. I couldn’t tell you if the media are now more or less reliable than before, it is difficult to discern. I don’t think I’m going to contribute anything new in this regard. But are people now more disappointed and confused with the information landscape? Yes, definitely. There may be people who look back and say that 20th century newspapers were lying all the time, too, and that might be true. Don’t know. But in terms of emotions and feelings, and how they affect people’s well-being, it’s definitely worse now. Never in my life have I heard so many people complain about misinformation. Thinking about it this way, it is one of the themes of the album: people feeling lost, confused and disappointed, trying to find something to hold on to. Today’s information flows are ephemeral, and music is something that connects you with something much bigger.
How do you see the musical landscape now in New York? It was always one of the capitals, along with London, of world rock, an avant-garde driving force.
It doesn’t have the relevance of yesteryear, that’s clear, because today there are artists coming from anywhere. In that sense, I think that the classic musical cities do not play the same role as before. The truth is that I also feel a little disconnected. I listen to music all the time and it’s obvious that new talent is always going to emerge, but I no longer have that feeling that there is a physical epicenter. On this album almost all the influences we have considered are old. Although, curiously, the first band I thought of was LA LOM, who are from now, they are part of the Los Angeles League Of Musicians, and we asked them to support us: it is instrumental and they draw on surfing and Mexican music, of things from the past, I love the sound of their guitars.