Vampire Weekend, Only God Was Above Us

If Wes Anderson and Donna Tartt had ever collaborated and come up with a fictional band, it would have looked and sounded an awful lot like Vampire Weekend.

They were the weird fish in the pool that spawned the New York rock revival of the noughties, arriving in the mid-2000s looking preppy and nerdy, with polo shirts and floppy hair. While bands from The Strokes to LCD Soundsystem built their sound by rejigging and reconfiguring a post-punk world that spanned the dingy downtown rock club and the dingy downtown dance floor, Vampire Weekend were more Upper West Side and bounced sprightly ska-pop off springy Afro-pop.

The guitars were clean, sparkling and trebly. The rhythms were rickety and complex. The keyboards whistled and whirred. Ezra Koenig sang like a cross between a choirboy and David Byrne – in fact, the smart-nerd aesthetic and herky-jerky music of early Talking Heads is probably the closest comparison for what they were doing.

Their songs referred to Mansard roofs and characters from US college campus life. On early single Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, they built a bridge between the moneyed US north-east and the Congo. And on Oxford Comma (key line: “who gives a f--- about an Oxford comma?” ), they became the only band to ever direct their twenty-something angst towards the use of a punctuation mark.

The band’s last record, 2019’s Father of the Bride, was something of a concept album about marriage, with many songs based around more traditional song structures. With that said, the band – even minus founding member and producer Rostam Batmanglij, who departed after 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City – always pull things apart and add oblique angles, so a simple four-chord strum could quickly be swamped with distorted keyboards, a clattering beat or a choir, while on a couple of songs Danielle Haim (of sister trio Haim) played Nancy Sinatra to Koenig’s Lee Hazelwood.

Now, on their fifth album, what’s changed? Well, for Koenig, quite a bit. He has moved to Los Angeles – his partner is actor Rashida Jones, and they have a young son – contributed to soundtracks, including Peter Rabbit, Booksmart and Champions, and co-written songs for Liam Gallagher and Beyoncé.

On Only God Was Above Us – the title comes from a newspaper headline about a plane crash, featured in the 1988 photo by Steven Siegel on the album cover – it sounds like Koenig is in a New York state of mind. The videos for Capricorn and Gen-X Cops teem with footage of the city, while the lyrics are dotted with references to the metropolis: “I know what’s buried beneath Manhattan”; “came in from Jersey, not from Brooklyn”; “I had a job once in Penn Station”.