Hot Press Meets Vampire Weekend

Don’t call it the year of the comeback. Don’t be distracted by French robots rediscovering disco, the first eruptions from an Irish perfectionist’s sonic volcano in two decades, the return of a reclusive icon who once claimed to be a carrot-haired alien.

When the dust settles, the finest album ushered into the world in 2013 may well be remembered as a vibrant young band’s third. The next installment in a five year period of creativity seems set to continue indefinitely. A logical evolution, creatively and commercially. Modern Vampires Of The City is the album for your consideration. ‘Upper West Side Soweto’ quartet Vampire Weekend, its creators, are the prodigal sons that never really went away.
Ezra Koenig, 29, is in his New York apartment, enjoying some precious time on home territory. As Vampire Weekend’s atypically charismatic frontman, Koenig confesses to having been a “nomad” for much of his band’s life – he had a brief affair with LA a couple of years back – but now he finally has a fixed abode on the East Coast that so informs his songs.
As the conversation unfolds, you get the feeling that he’s none too eager to leave. He’s bracing himself for a world tour that is about to travel along the ley lines that lead to Glastonbury. Quietly confident in his band’s new creation and the show they’re rolling out, he also shrugs about the specifics of his itinerary.
“I’ve always enjoyed playing Glastonbury but we’re on such a long tour that I’m trying not to think too much about what’s coming up,” he confides in tempered, gentle tones. “I mean, we’re going to be gone all summer.”
A week later, he’ll join his bandmates Chris Baio, Rostam Batmanglij and Chris Tomson in turning in one of the Pyramid Stage’s most masterful sets. Certainly more vital and arresting than watching a leathery Jagger creaking about to ‘Midnight Rambler’ (a zombie-like Keith Richards is arresting, but for the wrong reasons).
The performance is another announcement that, following their adored-in-indieland 2008 debut and 2010’s Billboard-straddling Contra, Vampire Weekend deserve to grace the biggest stages. They’re a group with mass appeal that truly matters. Their third LP, Modern Vampires Of The City, pens an early ‘reserved’ note for their prospective seat in the pantheon of great American bands.
It was heralded with a small announcement. A title and release date appeared in the ‘Lost And Found’ section of The New York Times’ Classifieds.
Understated and unorthodox, it got everyone talking with little fuss. Such is Vampire Weekend’s nonchalance in the face of external pressures.
“I can honestly say that with this album I’ve felt the most free from that compulsion that everybody has to know what people are saying,” Koenig confirms. “It’s absolutely a lie when people say ‘I truly don’t care whatsoever’, but compared to when we first started? We were so nervous: ‘what does everybody think?’”
When recording commenced in 2011 after a lengthy-by-their-standards break, the four were relieved to have cleared that ‘difficult second album’ speed bump. Koenig emphasises how they continued to be hard on themselves, but the third time was a relative charm.
“It was a different kind of stress. The second album was kind of like... existential stress. We thought, ‘if we don’t nail this album and get it out relatively quickly we might cease to be a band’. You feel like the world is ready for you to disappear on your second album. When people like your first two albums and you get to your third, the fear of disappearing isn’t really there anymore.”
Those fears allayed, they could subvert the hype machine and ignore expectations. Look inwards. Focus on what Koenig calls the “pure” things: “Quality, songwriting, creativity; the things that got you there in the first place.”
At times, the Columbia graduate possesses all the mannerisms of a magnetic, if serious, young professor. Analysing aspects of himself or the business, he’ll often sigh, “it’s classic” as if he were a psychology scholar noting trends in test cases. He’s too genial to be described as pensive, but every thought out of his mouth is a considered, insightful one. The band as a whole have had an academic air about them since they first stepped off their Ivy League campus into the music blogs.
On one recent YouTube clip, Koenig says that they themselves employed the “preppy” adjective when dreaming up their early sound and aesthetic, but insists, “now it’s meaningless, that’s what time does.” In any event, he told HP’s Peter Murphy in 2010 that, “A lot of people still want to pretend that the musicians they listen to are not intellectual, but that’s just a sham.”
The image that Vampire Weekend cultivated early doors was best encapsulated on their first video, for ‘Mansard Roof’: a smart ditty about elite architecture, sang in Ray-Bans and buttoned-down shirts, on yacht trips off Cape Cod. That too, was myth-making (it was shot in New Jersey for a start), but it stuck, even angering some dim bulbs who queried how valid it was to couple all of this loftiness with African pop rhythms and highlife guitars.
Koenig has been sure to point out that they come from backgrounds far removed from WASPish nests; he himself is Jewish and got by on a scholarship, whilst, in May, multi-instrumentalist and producer Rostam Batmanglij opined in the Guardian: “I don’t know if me being gay and Iranian is completely edited out [of the band’s press story].”
Contra broke them Stateside and showed signs of maturation, but it didn’t do much to alter a narrative in danger of becoming stale. A commercial smash that found the band stretching their legs, there were also a few yawns to be found in the critical response.
Modern Vampires Of The City – the title coming from Junior Reid’s ‘One Blood’ and alluding to the band, their hometown and much more besides – is a different beast. An ending, a chance to break free. Choirs descend on their tales of a city engulfed in fog on its cover, as the players assimilate influences to create a strong and spacious whole that encompasses melancholic chamber-pop, hip hop nods and joyful new wave.
It is darker, with more weighty concerns. It is the album that makes those jokes about Oxford boat shoes redundant, but Koenig seems unperturbed by the views of outsiders.
“Beyond anything specific to our band,” he ventures, shrewdly deflecting past criticisms, “I always thought that your third record is such an important one because it’s your chance to show your fans at least why your band is worth continuing to follow. My personal goal with this album was not that we needed to change anybody’s mind about Vampire Weekend but just to show people who already liked Vampire Weekend that we still have new stuff to say and we still have new ideas to explore. 
“Your first album you might introduce a sound or a vibe, the second you expand on it, and that’s a formula that only works for two albums. With a third album, I think you fundamentally have to show your dedication to songwriting. Show your dedication to growing. And you have to prove it to yourself. I think that matters a lot to the people who listen to you.”
If they duck the spotlight and the jabs, it still strikes them in unexpected ways. The preview for lead single ‘Diane Young’ took its cue from Koenig’s pyro-baiting first line and featured a fixed-cam shot of a Saab 900 being torched “like a pile of leaves”. In the aftermath, internet uproar from lovers of the defunct Swedish car manufacturer. It reached critical mass when one motor blog, Jalopnik, published an article entitled ‘Vampire Weekend Are A Bunch Of Dicks’.
A bewildered band apologised, said they loved cars, really, and then stuck an official video out featuring them in a Last Supper-style scene alongside LA gloom-pop starlet Sky Ferreira.
As for the song itself, its themes chime with MVOTC’s other 10 – the passing of youthful abandon, and how you come to terms with your own mortality. A seductive fatalism lies in lyrics like “Irish and proud baby, naturally, but you’ve got the luck of a Kennedy” (begging to be roared out in a field this side of the Atlantic).
The four friends are taking stock as they prepare to leave their twenties behind. The vocal distortions on MVOTC have been praised for their playfulness and sonic daring, but it goes farther than that: the band are trying to mimic the changes to your vocal chords over the course of your life, sign-posting different ages in sound. Still a long way off midlife, is this their ‘two-sevenths of a life – touch wood – crisis’?
“Ha! Well... To me, there’s drama and fear and issues pertaining to ageing at every year of your life. It has a different flavour if you’re a teenager or in your twenties. Or if you are actually reaching the end of your life; in your eighties or nineties, if you should be that lucky.”
Koenig sees it as the closing chapter of a decade making music. Vampire Weekend, Contra and MVOTC form an arc. Characters introduce themselves, grow, or become more disillusioned.
“I always had that feeling that this was kind of a trilogy,” Koenig muses. “One thing is that these three albums basically take up the entirety of our twenties. They didn’t really take ten years but we probably started working on the first when we were 22, wrapping up college, and then this one is the last album we’ll make in our twenties.
“I don’t think you’re ever really done growing up. I don’t think when you’re 29, you’re suddenly an adult, but from 22 to 29 is definitely some kind of transition. And it’s a weird one. It’s one you have to stop and think about a lot but there’s no obvious milestone the way that graduating high school is, or having a kid. I don’t know too many people who have had kids in their twenties in my group of friends, but a lot of people do. Generally if someone has kids you probably wouldn’t see them quite as often. It must feel like the beginning of a new era in life.”
Hints at a burgeoning domesticity reveal themselves throughout the new record. ‘Hannah Hunt’ is a piece of writing that rubs shoulders with Paul Simon’s best. And there’s Ezra Koenig, going into town to, “buy some kindling for the fire”. On the stately ‘Step’, with its boombox and Walkman references and realisations that “the wisdom teeth are out”, he takes a deep breath and offers: “I’m stronger now, I’m ready for the house.”
When he was younger, he recalls, his family didn’t travel much. He dreamt of seeing the world, of living in far-flung places. His band have now circled the planet countless times, and all of them bar Batmanglij are in long-term relationships. The prospect of settling down in a comfortable enclave in New York and starting a family feels natural at this point.
“Yeah, absolutely,” he nods. “So much of childhood is dreaming about the future because everything is wide open. It’s the same reason why people mourn childhood so much: the endless possibilities seem to end when you’re an adult. You can’t just daydream all the time about what might happen because you start to feel like you know what’s going to happen.
“And I felt like it was just a random quirk of family history why I ended up where I ended up. I didn’t feel like it defined me. Now? Yeah, I do enjoy being at home more. There are still places I want to see in the world but there’s something nice about appreciating simplicity. It’s classic: sometimes you’ve got to go away to really appreciate what you have at home.”
Not that there is any real certainty. Not that the niggles go away. Not in the real relationships in Koenig’s songs. You still have death, religion, politics and all the other white noise buzzing in the background. On the anthemic ‘Ya Hey’, Koenig’s examines matters of faith, hope, desperation and conflict, and seems to surmise that if there is a non-interventionist god out there, we should all feel mighty sorry for him. As for the singer, it’s |not all summer retreats drinking Horchata in his pastels.
“I do worry about the future. I worry about it more than others. You know, sometimes I go through periods of insomnia where I’m up all night reading conspiracy theories about the environment, or the government. I’ll really convince myself that we’re the last generation that’s going to enjoy this industrial society. That everything is going to go downhill and that something crazy is going to happen. Y’know, in those moments you really believe it.
“Then you realise that people have been fearing the end of the world – feeling like they were going to be the last generation on earth – for hundreds of years. Personally, I think in some ways it’s a very exciting time to be alive. The other day I had a friend ask me, if I could be alive in any other era what would it be? And I thought it would be cool to go check out a couple of times for a week or something, but really I don’t think I’d want to live at any time other than now. I have hope about the future. There’s certainly frustrations, there’s some scary things, but at least people are talking about them.”
In January 2012, US President Barack Obama was hitting the campaign trail hard to secure the second term that ultimately came to pass. Mindful of the young electorate, the Obama administration drew up a list of musical artists they hoped would support his efforts, perform at rallies and spread the word. Alongside the likes of Jay-Z, Alicia Keys and Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend’s name appeared.
“Apparently,” Koenig sniffs. “I don’t remember where exactly, but I remember hearing about that list.”
You would think a call for help from the leader of the free world would stay with you.
“Well, we might have been asked,” he concedes with a smile. “We probably did get asked to do a couple of things... but we just weren’t playing shows at the time. That’s when we were working on the record really hard. So we were just saying ‘no’ to every offer that came up.”
Five years in, Guantanamo Bay is still open, Syrian rebels are being armed and it has been revealed that the National Security Agency have been spying on the American people under Obama’s watch. Did Koenig expect more from the Obama years?
“There have certainly been some strange surprises in the Obama administration. I don’t remember exactly how I felt in 2008, but now? I don’t really expect anything from the President of the US. There are just so many power structures already in place that sometimes it almost feels like a con. It almost feels like it’s pointless for me to blame a president because the whole system is set up so that people will blame a president. Miss out on the fact that the individual decisions of the president are so small in comparison to these much bigger trends and structures. There are a million exceptions to that rule but that’s how I feel. I am very interested in what’s going on in the world – things like congressional voting is very important. But those are the types of things that don’t really capture my imagination.
“I’m just like everybody else. I’m seeing what happens and trying to think little by little what I can do on an individual level. Your vote doesn’t count for that much and when people feel that way I don’t think it’s overly pessimistic. If you feel like your vote doesn’t count very much, that’s fine, as long as you start to think long and hard as an individual about doing something positive for what you believe in.”
So Vampire Weekend have been tending their own garden, focusing on their work. Recording of MVOTC took place in New York, Martha’s Vineyard and Hollywood. It was on the West Coast that they shared production duties for the first time, collaborating with Ariel Rechtshaid, the hip hop producer who was behind Usher’s Grammy-winning ‘Climax’.
The dark, avenues-by-night echoes and reverbed pianos pay homage to methods perfected by Phil Spector and the Plastic Ono Band, but elsewhere hip hop methodology rules the roost. The drums were recorded live to tape, and then fed into a drum machine, allowing them to contort the rhythm, rough up the beats.
Prior to Vampire Weekend, Koenig was in an irony-free rap group with bassist Chris Tomson, and he has previously revealed in these pages: “Even as a kid I remember listening to hip hop, which in itself is a mixture of different genres and ideas.”
It posits them as very modern Vampires indeed. ‘Step’ is perhaps their most glorious mongrel, borrowing from ‘90s Oakland rappers Souls Of Mischief’s ‘Step To My Girl’, a Grover Washington saxophone melody, and Pachelbel’s ‘Canon In D’. A tribute to musical loves as much as it ponders the passing of time, its lyric are stuffed with in-jokes, pop culture references, puns and double-meanings, making it as thrillingly labyrinthine as the best rap.
Along with other Vampire Weekend numbers, ‘Step’ is dissected brilliantly on rapgenius.com, a site that – as its url suggests – generally doesn’t get too worked up about indie boys with guitars.
“I know the site, yeah, and that’s how I feel,” says Koenig. “For me, every word and every phrase is full of meaning. There are a lot of references, some of which people catch immediately, some of which people still haven’t caught. I like detail in lyrics and I like references. I’m glad when people dig really deep and find a connection. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything that’s on the internet but definitely I pour over lyrics in that fashion.”
Above all else, Vampire Weekend have pledged their allegiance to pop. As a medium, they like how it can bring together high art and low culture, its constantly churning, changing nature. The only thing that stays the same is that it should ultimately sound irresistible. And yet, they’d clearly like their back catalogue to have some permanence. Batmanglij has stated that this trilogy could sit side-by-side on a bookshelf together, and that allusion to literature is telling.
“Sometimes you can make the literary comparison and I hope it doesn’t sound too highfalutin’,” Koenig offers, somewhat apologetically. “Of course, it shouldn’t, because we are just talking about words. There’s only so many art forms that specifically focus on words. There’s lyrics and there’s literature. I do see a similarity in that when somebody is crafting a novel – or even more so in a short story collection – you are kind of building a world. Everything that you do goes together to give a sense of place, a mood, and a tone. Every album, I think you should be able to choose a song and every song in some way reminds you of the greater world.
“That’s how I feel about something like Dubliners. It’s one of my favorite books and it’s a collection of stories which is more or less about one place, one time period, yet the tone of every story is so different. They all come together to give this bigger vibe and for me that really feels like an album.”
Ezra Koenig and his fellow Weekenders will occupy a space, if not time, that’s close to the heart of James Joyce when they bring their Modern Vampires... to Dublin. It’s not New
York, but it is a chance to be part of their unfolding story. Intriguing to date, the rest remains unwritten.

Vampire Weekend headline Longitude on Saturday, July 20.