Vampire Weekend announce new album, album trailer and release two songs next week

Vampire Weekend announce new album, album trailer and release two songs next week

Only God was above us Out April 5 via Columbia

February 08, 2024

By Mark Redfern

Photo by Michael Schmelling

Vampire Weekend have announced a new album, Only God was above us, and shared a trailer for the album. Two new songs, 'Gen-X Cops' and 'Capricorn', are promised for next week (February 16). Only God was above us will be released on April 5 via Columbia. Check out the album trailer below, followed by the tracklist and album art.

Only God was above us is the band's fifth album, their first new album in five years, and its follow-up Father of the Bride. Father of the Bride was our album of the Week, debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 album chart with the biggest first-week sales of any rock album in 2019, and you can stream it here. It was also nominated for album of the year at the Grammys.

Vampire Weekend is Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio and Chris Thomson. Koenig wrote most of the album's lyrics in 2019 and 2020, and the band has been refining the album since then, recording in various cities around the world, including New York, Los Angeles, London and Tokyo. Koenig produced the album with longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid and it was mixed by Dave Fridmann and mastered by Emily Lazar.

A press release promises that the album is “immediate yet complex, showing the band at their most intense as well as their most beautiful and melodic.”

The album cover also inspired its title. It's a photo taken in 1988 by Steven Siegel in a metro cemetery in New Jersey. Pictured is a man sitting on an overturned subway car, reading the May 1, 1988 edition The New York Daily News. The newspaper's cover story describes a plane crash on Aloha Airlines Flight 243, when an explosion tore the roof off. The headline of the paper quotes a survivor saying, “Only God was above us,” which is now the title of the new album.

We were the first nationally distributed print magazine to interview Vampire Weekend, way back in 2007, and you can revisit that article here.

Only God was above us Track List:

1. Ice cream piano
2. Classic
3. Capricorn
4. Connect
5. Prep-School Gangsters
6. The Surfer
7. Gen-X Cops
8. Mary Boone
9. Pravda
10. Hope

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