Stand clear of the closing doors, and get on the Vampire Weekend comeback train. The New York rockers have returned with two singles from their upcoming fifth album, Only God Was Above Us — coupled with two music-video odes to the MTA. Both “Gen-X Cops†and “Capricorn†come with visuals inspired by 1980s MTA cars, carrying over a theme from the album cover, a 1988 photo by Steven Siegel from a subway “graveyard.†The singles themselves aren’t exactly transit anthems, but the jarring, distorted guitars in both don’t sound unlike the screeching of an MTA car. And who’s to say “Gen-X Cops†isn’t about the gaggles of officers you see in stations? “Every generation makes it own apology,†Ezra Koenig sings in the chorus. Not much of the raga influence we were promised is in those vocals but holding out hope for the rest of the album.
The singles lead off Vampire Weekend’s first new album since 2019’s Father of the Bride. The ten-track Only God Was Above Us is out April 5, and also includes titles like “Ice Cream Piano,†“Prep-School Gangsters,†and “Mary Boone.†In other words, it’s also the band’s return to New York iconography after the jammy FOTB. A press release even teases that it’s “inspired and haunted by 20th-century New York.†Inspired and haunted, just how we like our boys.
The band will follow OGWAU with their first tour since the pandemic, kicking off with their solar-eclipse show in Austin on April 8. The tour includes three Saturday night/Sunday morning doubleheaders in Berkeley, California; Bonner, Montana; and New York, which hopefully gives the band a reason to dust off their cover of Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning.†It also features a slew of special show-specific openers, like Maya Rudolph’s Prince cover band, Princess; the Billy Joel cover band Turnstiles (in New York, of course); and even long-running New Wave band the English Beat. Plan on taking the train to the show to get into the OGWAU mind-set.