The Only Living Band in New York

In the mid-2000s all it took to be the next white-hot indie band was a few insidiously catchy tunes, a clandestine industry connection or two, a content-generating backstory and/or fashion sense, an era-appropriate bashful sort of cockiness, and a patently ridiculous name. Then you just waited for a few idle words to perk up the right ears and light up the right blogs. It was an inexact process. But when it worked, the results were both exhilarating and bewildering.

Nitsuh Abebe first heard the era’s biggest and most ridiculous band name of them all on the train, sometime in early 2007, somewhere on the Upper West Side. “I was living up around Columbia at the time,” he recalls, “and I was just riding the subway home and overheard this young guy talking to somebody about, like, ‘Should our band work with Nasty Little Man? I don’t know. We’re sort of talking to them.’”

Abebe is a rock critic and editor who wrote primarily for Pitchfork at the time; Nasty Little Man is a major PR firm. “I was so curious about what sort of Columbia-kid band would be working with Nasty Little Man that I was sitting next to, I think, his girlfriend at the time,” Abebe continues, “and I had to kind of lean over and ask, ‘What band is this?’ She said, ‘Oh, they’re called Vampire Weekend. You should go check them out.’”

The subway guy was Vampire Weekend front man Ezra Koenig, and Abebe noticed something else immediately: “He was making boat shoes and a polo shirt look really good, in a way that they hadn’t to me previously. I was like, ‘That actually looks really cool and interesting in a surprising way. Maybe there’s some pull to this.’”

There was. Soon, a blue CD-R full of spare indie-pop songs with provocatively fussy names like “Oxford Comma” and “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” was roiling MP3 blogs. Each new tune sounded like a demo but felt suspiciously complete: the prim Afro-pop filigrees, the Ivy League erudition, the wise-ass hyper-melodiousness. It sounded as flamboyantly preppy as the band—then singer-guitarist Koenig, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, bassist Chris Baio, and drummer Chris Tomson—looked.

Rock critics evoked Paul Simon’s Graceland instinctively, as is our wont, though not everyone took this as an enthusiastic recommendation. “I mean, for us, that was like the music that your dad got real into after your parents divorced,” recalls Chicago author and critic Jessica Hopper, summing up the initial, far more skeptical attitude outside the band’s East Coast stronghold. “Just nothing cool about it.”

But really, Vampire Weekend took everything from highlife guitars to collegiate lust to Lil Jon worship to a crisp polo shirt and made it theirs. This would raise quite a ruckus; this would make them famous. As 2007 rolled on, Rolling Stone interviewed them for the magazine’s Hot Issue, while The New York Times caught a modest show at a Williamsburg art gallery and enthusiastically pointed readers to the band’s Myspace page. Vampire Weekend were interviewed for a Spin cover story (written by Ringer podcaster Andy Greenwald) before they even had a full album out—a first for the magazine. And when their self-titled debut finally materialized in January 2008, it earned a rave Pitchfork review from Abebe himself. “Even you could beat up these guys,” Vulture quipped in a piece headlined “What to Expect From the Upcoming Vampire Weekend Backlash.” Koenig and the boys would be on Saturday Night Live by the spring.

Even by contemporary blog-hype standards, it was a meteoric rise with a deliriously rich culture-war subtext: one of the last major indie bands kicking up a major extended rock-critic argument. That larger debate can be boiled down to the song title “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” (which references a Congolese dance style) and the cheeky Myspace genre tag “Upper West Side Soweto” (which nods to both South Africa and Paul Simon’s vivid but not-uncontroversial reimagination of South Africa). Batmanglij is Iranian American; Koenig is of Hungarian-Jewish descent. But the band’s cavalier approach to genre and fundamental monied tweeness ruffled feathers by design. (The best line from the Spin cover story comes during a chat with Batmanglij: “He requests that a discussion about his love for Wes Anderson be kept off the record.”) A few critics, as Koenig himself later complained, dismissed Vampire Weekend as “the whitest band in the world.”

But then the band did something even more unexpected: survived. Young breakout mid-2000s bands—see Black Kids, Cold War Kids, Tapes ‘n Tapes, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah—tended to wither in the critical limelight, their debut albums praised to the heavens and their sophomore albums often ignored if not nuked from space. They were never bigger or better, at least in the public eye, than the first time you heard their snappy, irreverent names. But the next Vampire Weekend record, 2010’s Contra, debuted at no. 1, and soon the band was landing so many songs in so many TV ads that in 2011 they joined the Black Keys on The Colbert Report to sheepishly clown themselves for it. Two years later, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City likewise debuted at no. 1, topped myriad year-end lists, and won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. The “alternative” label was superfluous by then; they’d become one of the biggest rock bands in America, period.

In 2019, Vampire Weekend, now a trio—Batmanglij left the band after Modern Vampires of the City—are perhaps the best band still standing from the mega-indie era, with a bigger and broader sound worthy of a longtime festival headliner. Their fourth album, Father of the Bride, is out Friday; its best song, lead single “Harmony Hall,” evokes the piano-bashing Rolling Stones at their jolliest, Fatboy Slim at his mellowest, a big-tent jam band at its warmest and least alienating.

Vampire Weekend are veterans now, uncontroversial, still beloved by their day-one fans and largely ignored by their day-one detractors. But in 2007 they were instant, improbable heroes and supervillains all at once. “People I know who don’t follow new bands, they would hear one Vampire Weekend song and just be like, ‘What’s that? That’s catchy as shit! Who are those guys?’” recalls Charles Aaron, Spin’s music editor at the time. “And then they’d hear who they were, and they’d be annoyed.”

Whether you loved to hate them or hated to love them, few modern rock bands inspired stronger feelings faster. It all felt so simple, so immediate, so preordained. “Things really broke right for them,” Aaron says. “But they’re the kind of kids that things break right for.”

No breakout-band success story, no matter how instantaneous and organic it appears, is entirely instantaneous and organic; at this level, nobody does it overnight, and more importantly, nobody does it themselves. Putting yourself on the internet is step one. Somebody important finding you there is step two.

Kris Chen, who signed Vampire Weekend to XL Recordings—home to Radiohead, M.I.A., and, soon, Adele—first heard them in early 2007 after looking the band up on Myspace: “I saw them listed for a Mercury Lounge show,” he says via email, “and thought it was such a peculiar name.” He reached out immediately and made the band a mix CD—“maybe to capture everything I heard in their music, or maybe to express songs I loved”—with a tracklist running from exquisite Brazilian troubadour Milton Nascimento to reggae songbird Horace Andy to Scottish post-punk scamps Orange Juice. Soon he was helping Vampire Weekend set up shows and pass demos around.

It was a grassroots operation on an industrial scale, each cog in the music-biz machine so efficient as to be inaudible. “That spring, after a conversation where I said I could visualize their next 18 months, they rightly challenged me on that assertion,” says Chen, now an executive at Nonesuch Records. “So I sent them a week-by-week breakdown from May 2007 to December 2008—outlining when I saw their fall touring, finishing the album, releasing it, playing SNL, Central Park SummerStage, going to Australian and Japanese festivals and U.S. holiday radio shows.” It was ridiculously ambitious to the point of arrogance, and once anyone heard any one Vampire Weekend song, the band’s flight plan had a thrilling and/or maddening sense of destiny.

Kelefa Sanneh, then a New York Times pop critic and now a writer for The New Yorker, wrote that early admiring NYT live review and still recalls how infectious that admiration was from the start. “I brought a friend of mine who was into music,” he says. “So we get there in the middle of the opening band’s set. I can’t remember who it was, but he kind of looks at me, like, ‘You dragged me to this club for this?’” On any given night, in any given club or art gallery or scruffy DIY hideout, you might find a band with a few pieces of the puzzle: a hooky chorus, a flashy look, a dopey name. Hype was cheap; staying power, even past a few seconds, was invaluable. And even then, an eventual letdown was inevitable.

“And then Vampire Weekend starts playing,” Sanneh continues, still marveling at his suspicious friend’s conversion in real time. “And I think probably halfway through the first song, he looks at me, like, ‘Oh.’ Certainly to me and to him, and to a lot of people who heard it, it sounded just very ... obviously … rad.”

Rewards repeated listens is the old rock-critic cliché; Vampire Weekend’s magic trick was to reward you from the very first. “Oxford Comma” packs an enormous amount of sardonic charisma into three minutes and change, its pace unhurried, its winsome melodies unforced, Koenig’s opening line (“Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”) somehow elegant and absurd and profane and profound all at once. You got it. And they got you. “I feel like they were never the band that you had to listen to the album a bunch of times and kind of warm up to it and figure it out,” Sanneh says. “There was something very accessible and charming and obvious only in retrospect about it.”

Returning now to 2008’s Vampire Weekend, that affable brashness and casually nuclear charm is everywhere. “A-Punk” indeed sounds like a straight-A student’s idea of punk; “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” sounds like a louche campus loverboy’s come-on that doubles as a humblebrag about how many passport stamps he’s got. The winks pile up: the flirtatious ones and the strategic-cultural-reference ones. “Walk to class, in front of ya,” Koenig croons. “Spill kefir on your keffiyeh.”

The music industry at that time was post–Napster crash but pre-streaming boom, with Pitchfork ascendant, MP3 blogs like Stereogum and Fluxblog thriving—yes, a decade ago, young tastemakers devoured new tunes one download at a time—and the critical conversation, in those halcyon days before Twitter saturation, transpiring mostly on message boards and, soon, Tumblr. “Indie rock” still carried considerable weight as a lifestyle brand; the notion of a hot new young rock band was not yet a ridiculous anachronism.

The trick, of course, was to leap that yawning chasm between the online world and the real one. The gulf between goading someone into downloading a free MP3 and hounding them into plunking down actual cash for a full-length album. The leap from a computer screen to Late Show With David Letterman or, better yet, Saturday Night Live. The leap from a tepid one-paragraph blog writeup plagiarized from all the other blogs to a full-length interview full of your witty quotes and compelling backstory. The gulf between desperately selling yourself and confidently helping Apple sell more hardware. The gulf between BrooklynVegan and Gossip Girl. Vampire Weekend had “the charisma of the internet,” as Aaron puts it, but the throwback swagger of actual people predestined for actual success. But a hot, new, young rock band that seemed to have a chance of mattering IRL was just enough of an anomaly to warrant taking the leap.

Karl Walter/Getty Images

That internet ecosystem, by the late 2000s, had its monumental successes and its cautionary tales, too. For every Pitchfork favorite that later hit some semblance of the big time—whether that’s Arcade Fire winning the 2011 Album of the Year Grammy or LCD Soundsystem throwing itself a luxe (and premature) goodbye party at Madison Square Garden that same year—there was a band like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Black Kids, lavishly praised at first contact but ferociously dismissed with the very next breath, such that one’s dopey band name might become shorthand for “instant success followed by just-as-instant failure.” The music-internet economy needed a new challenger every few months, but the turnover rate was vicious, and so many of those once-hyped bands never quite got around to feeling … real. For a restless and forever-mutating music press, the whole cycle felt as irresistible as it was inevitable.

“I just feel like Vampire Weekend was, ‘OK, they’re an internet band,’” Aaron says, recalling Spin’s thought process. “‘Maybe internet bands are the thing that are really going to blow up.’ And we’ve got to jump on that, you know? But that was a huge risk, because Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Tapes ‘n Tapes, and all those other boring bands never went anywhere. And it just so happened that Vampire Weekend wrote better songs and were cuter.”

Indeed, “cute with great songs” could get you anywhere, though it couldn’t necessarily keep you there. MGMT, a gently surrealist synth-pop duo from Connecticut’s tony Wesleyan University, made the internet-to-IRL leap in 2008 with their debut album, Oracular Spectacular, with swaggering hits just as catchy as Vampire Weekend’s and twice as bombastic. But the band either couldn’t keep it together or didn’t want to, returning in 2010 with the claustrophobic, fame-addled, and defiantly pop-averse Congratulations. Success all but ruined them; vaporizing their mainstream appeal, which for them meant writing knottier tunes nobody would think to put on Gossip Girl or even HBO’s Girls, was the only way to save themselves.

But Vampire Weekend, with their 2010 sophomore album, Contra, proved themselves an anomaly once again. Their detractors were still around and still out for blood. But the band’s stature, and its audience, appeared to double overnight. The ska-for-ska-haters jam “Holiday” was hooky and genial enough to power ad campaigns for both Honda and Tommy Hilfiger, but also durable enough that fans could still listen to it without feeling gross. They’d crossed over to the real world so successfully that it didn’t matter anymore what the internet thought. That sort of dramatic leveling-up doesn’t really happen overnight either, of course. Though it’s still intoxicating when it feels like it does.

In retrospect, in broader sonic terms, Vampire Weekend inadvertently helped bring the This Band’s Gonna Be Huge era to a close. 2009 brought one last burst of indie trailblazers crashing the mainstream, many tied to Brooklyn, physically or spiritually: Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective. With a more intellectual and experimental approach, none of those bands could match, say, the Strokes for pure instant-gratification appeal, and all of them were proud to say so. (“The music I’m making is not terribly easy to apprehend,” Dirty Projectors frontman David Longstreth told The New York Times in 2009, just as lots of people were starting to apprehend it.) The goalposts had moved, not so much farther away as just elsewhere: The trick now was to get the public to adapt to your vision of pop music, not adopt everyone else’s. They didn’t make ’em like Vampire Weekend anymore, so elemental, so accessible. And nobody was complaining much about it.

“I think people slowly stopped giving a shit about indie hype bands,” says longtime New York City critic and current Jezebel editor in chief Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, who panned Vampire Weekend’s debut album in The Village Voice alongside a much more positive review written by Mike Powell. (I was the Voice’s music editor at the time; the love-hate dichotomy the band inspired was so intense back then that it felt only fair to let both sides be heard.) “But I also think that 2008 was the great explosion on the internet, and so people were starting to listen to different types of music, and so I think that was the first year of the decline of guitar rock.”

In 2010, Kanye West released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: yet another in his string of reputed masterworks, but the one most effective in pushing the entire critical conversation more toward rap and R&B. Soon the likes of Kendrick Lamar, the Weeknd, and Frank Ocean—along with Solange Knowles and her sister—would seize the year-end lists and commandeer all that internet-borne intrigue. The dawn of the streaming era further awarded curiosity and genre diversification, and further disincentivized the industry to cough up a new putative savior of rock every six months.

As for Vampire Weekend specifically, “They also were a signifier of this old world, right?” Shepherd says. “Or this old rubric where mostly white, male, straight, cis, Ivy League, buttoned-up cool guys could come in and make a guitar album that was, like, jaunty, and everyone would lose their shit. It was like the end of that.”

The central question is whether the band’s globe-trotting, record-collecting sound helped usher in this omnivorous new era or tried to stifle it. It is not ideal, perhaps, for a jocular Ivy League rock band to serve as one’s introduction to the myriad joys of African music, but that’s still preferable to never discovering those joys at all. Vampire Weekend ideally served as a gateway drug, not a cheap American replacement. “The idea that if some kids in a band are gonna be inspired by Congolese music or Kid Creole & the Coconuts or something like that—I don’t think that takes away opportunity for that other music,” Sanneh says. “If anything, it leads more people to discover that music. I think people saw that with Paul Simon. I think people argue, certainly, about what’s appropriate credit and all that kind of thing, but I tend to enjoy those kinds of culture clashes.”

In 2010, that culture clash still drove much of the conversation around Vampire Weekend’s Contra, which further rankled those critics who found the band exasperating from the start. Contra is, for what it’s worth, the band’s best record, expansive and detailed and bracingly melancholy, though Hopper disagreed in a memorably hostile Chicago Reader review that described it as a “fuckless episode of Gossip Girl written by Jimmy Buffett.” Hopper’s piece also tackled the whiteness issue head-on, along with Koenig’s many interviews addressing it, setting the comment section ablaze and inspiring a relatively cordial Tumblr back-and-forth with Abebe about how critics should address matters of race and class. “I think if I wrote this now, I don’t think I’d be interested in unpacking Ezra’s relationship with Rostam’s ethnicity or identity,” Hopper says. “But yeah, I think the question of ‘Would Vampire Weekend get a free pass if they weren’t Ivy Leaguers singing of the woes of the American leisure class?’ fuckin’ still holds.”

For Abebe, now a story editor at The New York Times Magazine, the best defense of Vampire Weekend often came in Vampire Weekend’s own songs. “The band was often writing about that class stuff more incisively and more interestingly than the people who would take the sort of cheap shot of, like, ‘Oh, WASP-y boat shoes’ or whatever,” he says. He cites a line from the Contra track “Cousins” that sharply sums up class mobility in the internet age: “Dad was a risk-taker / His was a shoemaker / You, greatest hits 2006 little list-maker.”

From Chen’s perspective at XL Recordings, having guided the band from Myspace to relative stardom and far exceeding his own original 18-month plan, the identity issue was a nonissue. “I always thought it was an unfair attack,” he writes. “Because if you haven’t realized the intertwined, recombinant nature of music by now, you shouldn’t even listen to anything new. If people are supposed to stay in their own culture lanes, then I suppose I, who grew up in Texas as the son of Taiwanese immigrants, should be working with Shan’ge, Mandopop, or country artists. Actually, I’d work with Kacey Musgraves. She’s from Texas, too.”

In 2019, a public critical argument that messy and convoluted would likely unfold in bursts of 280 characters or fewer. “I am down on the cultural hold that Twitter has taken, just because I think it’s made everyone worse writers, and probably worse critics, and I include myself in that,” Shepherd says. “I do miss a sort of lengthy banter, where there was a value in thinking things through and articulating your ideas.” Back then you had to prove whatever ludicrous assertion you’d just made, or at least pretend to show your work. “Now,” Shepherd says, “Twitter is just like, you can substitute that for, ‘I stan!,’ you know?”

Vampire Weekend, meanwhile, are far less of a critical flash point these days, in part because five-alarm critical flash points are rarer overall, and certainly among men holding guitars. Rock bands, even of the ironic or postmodern or deconstructed variety, are just another niche now, still a potent lifestyle for some but an increasingly inconsequential subgenre for most. And with the occasional polarizing exception of peak-Tumblr-era Lana Del Rey or the Twitter-archvillain heyday of Father John Misty, they just don’t make single-artist controversies that big anymore.

But the larger and more troubling point is that in 2019, only rappers or avant-garde pop stars can much inspire anyone to do or say much of anything.

Vampire Weekend’s last album, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, was a further maximalist leap and another critical and commercial success: the no. 1 Billboard debut, the no. 2 showing in the Voice’s year-end critics’ poll. (It lost to Kanye West’s Yeezus.) But in the six years since, it’s less that no younger band has overtaken the band’s lane than the lane itself has closed up entirely. Vampire Weekend now represents the end of an era. But they can at least ensure that the era goes out on a high note.

Father of the Bride is much anticipated within the band’s sizable universe but betrays no great urge to set the world aflame, critically or commercially: It unfolds, over the course of an expertly languid hour, into a broad, mega-festival pop-rock mélange designed to please most people and offend way fewer than usual. “‘Oh, I understand what they are now,’” Hopper remembers thinking many years after her review after inadvertently catching part of a Vampire Weekend set in Chicago at Lollapalooza. “‘They’re a party band. They’re a jam band with short songs.’” Also of note is the fact that there’s a song on this new album called “Unbearably White,” a guitar-noodling lope that finds Koenig still crooning, and winking, and pondering:

Sooner or later
The story gets told
To tell it myself would be unbearably bold
Presented with darkness
We turn to the light
Could’ve been smart, we’re just unbearably bright

“Unbearably White” will of course not generate as much hype as “Oxford Comma” did back in 2007, nor take as much heat. Thoughtful men gently strumming and/or politely shredding guitars are just another niche now, leaving Mac DeMarco and the War on Drugs and the National and the like to rule their amiable kingdoms while laboring under no great motivation to expand them. Vampire Weekend can now offer a pleasant, nostalgic respite from the rap and increasingly avant-garde pop that tends to dominate both the charts and The Conversation. This is for the best, for everyone. Far fewer young indie-rock bands are ascending to the level where they antagonize those listeners predisposed to distrust young indie-rock bands. You’ll have an easier time finding music like this than it will have finding you against your will.

“I do think that ultimately the reason their path was unique is because they’re unique,” says SiriusXM radio host and Rolling Stone contributing editor Jenny Eliscu, who first profiled Vampire Weekend for the magazine, back when the band was fresh enough to make a Hot Issue. “But the kind of thing that they do well is what I’m always looking for in a new artist, which is to combine things I already like into something I haven’t heard them combined into before … that’s part of what you love about the new thing, is what it reminds you of.” Vampire Weekend first kicked up quite a fuss for the singular way they evoked the past, playing college rock in a disturbingly literal sense and blurring the lines between rockism and poptimism until the whole conversation seemed pointless. Which maybe it was. But either way, they played the Hot New Band role so perfectly they rendered it obsolete. And now, happily, part of their modern appeal lies in the way they’ve become a part of the past, too.