Vampire Weekend will be coming out with the follow-up to 2019’s Father Of The Bride. The long-running rock band has officially announced that its fifth LP, Only God Was Above Us, will be released in April.
The album is described as being inspired by “20th century New York City” and was recorded across studios in Manhattan, Los Angeles, London and Tokyo. Frontman Ezra Koenig produced most of the project alongside Ariel Rechtshaid. Dave Fridmann handled mixing while Emily Lazar mastered it.
Only God Was Above Us has been in the works for quite some time now. Koenig wrote the lyrics for nearly all of the album’s 10 songs in 2019 and 2020. Over the years, the band continuously revisited and refined those tracks. The first two tracks of the LP, “Capricorn” and “Gen-X Cops,” will be released next week on February 16.
As for the title and artwork, the album cover is a photo of an abandoned subway car, captured by Steven Siegel in 1988. A man in the image reads a newspaper, whose front page reads, “ONLY GOD WAS ABOVE US.” The headline is taken from the words of a survivor of the Aloha Airlines flight 243 explosion that occurred on May 1, 1988, in which the roof of the airplane blew off.
Vampire Weekend hasn’t announced a tour for the album but will be playing a special show at Austin’s Moody Amphitheater on April 8 to commemorate the solar eclipse.
