Vampire Weekend season is nearly upon is. The band's new album Only God Was Above Us, their first since 2019's Father of the Bride, will be out in the world in a few short weeks, and they've just shared another song from it to help usher in the regular old non-vampire weekend.
Written by frontman Ezra Koenig and produced by Koenig and frequent collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid, "Classical" is a hooky and immediate piece of work that pulls off the neat trick of somehow sounding mannered and raw at the same time. It features an orchestral arrangement from Koenig, Rechtshaid, and Will Canzoneri and a squalling saxophone solo from Henry Solomon.
"Untrue, unkind, and unnatural / How the cruel, with time, becomes classical," Koenig sings on the track. "I know that walls fall, shakes shake/ Bridges burn and bodies break / It's clear something's gonna change / And when it does, which classical remains?"
The song comes along with a playful, green-screen-heavy music video helmed by longtime Vampire Weekend creative director Nick Harwood. Rechtshaid, touring band member Ray Suen, and the band's drum tech Josh Goldsmith all make appearances.
"Classical" is the third track that Vampire Weekend has shared from the upcoming record following "Gen-X Cops" and "Capricorn," which arrived as a simultaneous one-two punch shortly after the initial album announcement back in February.
Vampire Weekend have shared another new track from their forthcoming album.
Last week, Vampire Weekend also launched their discursive new Vampire Campfire podcast, in which Koenig was joined around a firepit by bandmates Chris Baio and Chris Tomson.
"We're in this weird zone right now," Koenig said in the first episode. "Where we announced the album, I think the art tells a story, the video tells a story and of course, the songs tell a story. But this is the modern world. You gotta create content. You gotta do press. And I found that in the past, people start asking about your influences or what the album's about –"
"You could say something impressionistic," Tomson interjected. "And that ends up setting a narrative or tone that is more serious than one might have intended."
"Exactly," Koening responded, later enumerating a stream-of-consciousness list of "influences" that included "whirling dervishes," "mistaken memories of medieval Manhattan," "New Wave hot dogs," and each member of the Wu-Tang Clan.
In a newsletter from last July (via NME), Tomson remarked that the new album was inspired when Koenig "took a raga singing lesson with Terry Riley in rural Japan and wrote what he considers to be 7 of his all-time top 10 best songs."
The album title Only God Was Above Us is a reference to a New York Daily News front page headline from 1988 about an ill-fated Aloha Airlines flight between Hilo and Honolulu in Hawaii where the top of the airplane blew off in mid-air, killing a flight attendant and injuring 65 other passengers and crew members.
Only God Was Above Us is out on April 5 via Columbia Records. You can pre-order it here. Koenig, Baio, and Tomson are heading out on the road alongside touring members Will Canzoneri, Garrett Ray, Colin Killalea, and Ray Suen beginning April 8 in Austin (which happens to be the day of the upcoming solar eclipse).
Vampire Weekend are heading out on tour in April.
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