Part of what I love about Vampire Weekend is the fact that my wife likes their music, too. Spend your life with someone, and it’s nice if there’s not just music you can enjoy together, but music you can enjoy together across multiple states on road trips, for the 19th time, playing on repeat, and maybe if the kids can bounce around in their seats, that’s a plus.
There’s new music from Vampire Weekend (yes, yes, asterisk minus Rostam, fine) for the first time in six years, and it’s lovely enough.
Last time around I spent lots of time with MVOTC early in Genius’s run, and ended up building a spreadsheet out of all of VW’s lyrics from all their albums, looking for narratives and themes and clues to some bigger story, sure I’d heard a snippet of a song referencing some past character. There wasn’t some overarching epic woven through that I could discern, but it was a fun corpus for data science projects that never took shape.
In one of the new songs out today, there’s a completely transparent interpolating (as the kids say) of a song from the prior album, so there’s something to pull apart there, maybe, or it’s just their way of letting us know they still don’t want to live like this, but they don’t want to die.
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