Vampire Weekend

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Essential Albums

  • Modern Vampires of the City
    Modern Vampires of the City
    Modern Vampires of the City

    If Vampire Weekend’s 2010 album Contra was the sound of four bright overachievers fussing over the zany contradictions of their young millennial lives, Modern Vampires of the City finds the band members retreating to their studies and pondering the gravity of what they’ve seen. Released in 2013, Modern Vampires of the City features hooks as clear and all-American as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty (“Unbelievers,” “Diane Young”). And the production—handled by Rostam Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid—is as weird and sumptuous and hyper-real as experimental electronic music or great hip-hop; the album is a forest of sound, full of clicks and warps you can easily get lost in (if getting lost is your thing). And like the great Paul Simon albums to which Vampire Weekend’s work is often lazily compared, Modern Vampires of the City manages to sound melancholy and world-weary, while still imparting a sense of inspiration that runs through the gray like a bright-orange current (“Ya Hey”). All these little details—not just the album’s sounds, but also Ezra Koenig’s lyrics, which take stock of people and places and gestures with forensic specificity (“Step”)—build to a point where the big picture of Modern Vampires of the City becomes suddenly, movingly clear. This is their attempt to craft an album on the scale of U2, or Foo Fighters, or Tears for Fears: pop-rock as both entertainment and spiritual salve. The references to gospel (“Don’t Lie”) and Baroque oratorio (“Hudson”) and rousing Celtic fight songs (“Worship You”) only further the point—they’re thinking about God stuff now. And while a lyric about having a religious epiphany while listening to a festival DJ transition from Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” into The Rolling Stones’ “19th Nervous Breakdown” during the bridge of “Ya Hey”—all in the context of James Joyce’s “The Dead”—might seem annoying or overly bookish, it’s also a reminder that music saves lives. Or, at the very least, gives us the feeling, however temporary, that it could.

  • Contra (Bonus Track Version)
    Contra (Bonus Track Version)
    Contra (Bonus Track Version)

    When the bright young men of Vampire Weekend started putting out music in the late 2000s, it was amazing how swift the backlash was, especially in the more gatekeep-y corners of indie music. The band members were slammed for being smart and not hiding it. For borrowing liberally from African and Caribbean music, despite scanning as preppy white kids (never mind that their de facto musical director, the multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, was Iranian American, and that white indie-rock bands would’ve done well to cultivate a musical curiosity beyond white indie-rock). And for being the kind of charming, winning, angst-free, and morally upright good sports that punks and underground culture-dwellers tend to hate, or at least sneer at from under the bleachers. Some guys have all the luck—the rest of us just hate ’em for it. As casually brilliant as 2008’s Vampire Weekend was, Contra was better and more evolved in every way: the lyrics were denser, and the sound more cleverly culturally referential—check out the baroque, Wes Anderson dancehall of “Diplomat’s Son,” or the Mexican surf-punk of “Cousins.” And while the ethical and spiritual quandaries felt deeper—as evidenced by the class guilt of “Taxi Cab” and the conscientious capitalism of “California English”—the vibes on Contra were brighter and more immediate. Obsessive listeners could hunker down with references to fonts (“She’d never seen the word ‘bombs’ blown up to 96-point Futura”) and eco-friendly hygiene products (“’Cause if that Tom’s don’t work/If it just makes you worse/Would you lose all of your faith in the good earth?”) while everyone else could just, like, have fun with it. Vampire Weekend could sound as melancholic and poetically ambiguous as Paul Simon (“I Think Ur a Contra”) and as anthemic—and slyly class-conscious—as Bruce Springsteen (“Giving Up the Gun”). Contra took the brains and pickiness and sheer idiosyncrasies we associate with alternative and nerd culture, and fed it back to us as pop.

  • Vampire Weekend
    Vampire Weekend
    Vampire Weekend

    Few debut albums arrive as fully realized as Vampire Weekend’s. The band formed on the campus of Columbia University and burst onto the late-2000s indie-rock scene looking provocatively preppy, singing songs that skewered privilege and colonialism using exactly the sort of worldly references and upper-crusty anecdotes that come with an Ivy League degree. That delicious contradiction also ran through Vampire Weekend’s sound—a fizzy mix of baroque flourish and African pop they winkingly dubbed Upper West Side Soweto. To some, the album felt like a bracingly exuberant sequel to Paul Simon’s Graceland, but others heard the aural embodiment of a Wes Anderson film: both twee and bold, incredibly specific and broadly charming, with everything in its right place. But as much as it reads like a collegiate concept LP, Vampire Weekend remains funny, affecting, bright, and—above all—catchy. Take the opening pair of songs, one named after a fancy architectural feature and the other after a piece of punctuation. And yet, “Mansard Roof,” with its swirling strings, clashing cymbals, and tumbling guitars, is the perfect vehicle for Ezra Koenig’s honeyed melodies. And “Oxford Comma” is just fun—a rich-kid roast that bops along to one of Rostam Batmanglij’s many antique keyboards and includes an earnest shout-out to Lil Jon’s “Get Low.” The Atlanta MC sent the band a case of his crunk juice as thanks, but similar favors were presumably not returned by the Dalai Lama or other name-checked folks, like Koenig’s professorial “Campus” crush or the blue-blooded girl who loves blue-collar rhythms on “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.” No matter: The album’s colorful pop smarts lifted the group from the blogosphere to the mainstream and helped make indie simultaneously more sophisticated and honest-to-god fun.

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About Vampire Weekend

At a time when indie pop was opening up to a wide world of influences, Vampire Weekend nudged things to the next level, bringing brainy lyrics and African flavors to the table as a sort of late-2000s alternative-scene answer to Paul Simon. The band began at New York’s Columbia University, where singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig, guitarist/keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij, bassist Chris Baio, and drummer Christopher Tomson were students when they united in 2006. They released their first single, “Mansard Roof,” the next year, and though their self-titled debut album wouldn’t arrive till 2008, a massive internet buzz had already earned them legions of followers by the time it appeared—along with suggestions of cultural appropriation that made the seemingly innocuous group a lightning rod for controversy. But the band transcended such claims with a fresh-faced, frothy blend of pop hooks, quirky lyrics, and soukous-influenced vibes. The album hit the Top 20, and the single “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” with its name-checking of Peter Gabriel, was wryly covered by Gabriel himself. With hits like the polyrhythmic “Horchata” and the feverishly paced “Cousins,” Vampire Weekend’s second LP, Contra, went to No. 1, a position that would become familiar. After 2013's Modern Vampires of the City, which bore a more naturalistic, acoustic-flecked feel, Batmanglij left the band; he became a hotshot producer for Charli XCX, Solange, Haim, and others while continuing in a collaborating role. Following a period of readjustment that found Baio and Tomson putting out their own projects, Father of the Bride appeared in 2019. More of an elaborate Koenig-led studio project than a proper band effort, it featured a raft of guest contributors, including Danielle Haim and Steve Lacy (and Jude Law!), who tilted the sound toward country, prog, and other directions.

ORIGIN
New York, NY, United States
FORMED
February 6, 2006
GENRE
Alternative

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