With Vampire Weekend, connecting the past and the present

Vampire Weekend made a triumphant return in 2024 with “Only God Was Above Us,” an album full of maturity, marked by the thoughtfulness of songs like “Connect.”

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Stream: “Connect” – Vampire Weekend

IThe Strokes was released in 2020 The new abnormal, an album that exudes a new maturity, through the lens of a band that has realised that times have changed, and they have, especially compared to the days of 2001. Is that it? To discover this newfound depth of songwriting and a bittersweet openness in the face of the inevitability of time ‘hit me like a chord,’ to steal a lyric from “At The Door.”

I was at university at the time and was more aware than ever of time’s ability to pass more quickly without ever looking back.

A few years later, for Vampire Weekend’s fifth studio album, Only God stood above usHer latest album (released in April 2024) addresses the feelings that The new abnormal: Ezra Koenig and Co. have grown older, the world around them has grown older, and they have the awareness to recognize the changes – externally and internally. Of course, they do this with the same “preparation” and dynamism that we expect as a trademark.

The fourth track of the album “Connect“” begins with a blizzard-like whirlwind of piano arpeggios before Koenig introduces us to a character who reminisces about days gone by that, despite all adversities, “don’t fade away” despite being “elegantly squandered.” Here a key image appears:

“Before you lost your spark
Took LSD in the park’

The memory from which the song emerges is a psychedelic trip. The song’s protagonist travels through New York City and eventually encounters “this insane cross-section of humanity,” as Koenig put it to John Kennedy in an edition of Radio X’s X-Posure. Is this the connection that the song’s title alludes to? A moment of drug-induced, macrocosmic spirituality in which the protagonist himself merges with the population and the architecture in one great moment? Koenig himself explains the fascination he draws from the fusion of “the very down-to-earth, straightforward side of New York with the spiritual, psychedelic side,” as revealed in the same interview.

The crisis appears in every pre-chorus, and its swelling choruses lend it weight as our protagonist “where we kept the box with the wires,” or to “where we first met, overwhelmed”, before a pulsating choir tells us: “I know that once it is lost, it will never be found again.“ A squealing, pleading king whimpers “I need it now‘ in response – desperately, in as high a voice as he can manage. The grinding chord progressions of each pre-chorus swell, the transitions happen more quickly as we approach a burst of tension.

I know that once it is lost, it will never be found again
I need it now
The grid is buried in the ground
Hopeless on the ground

The protagonist has long since left the psychedelic, listless evils of the past behind him, and in old age reflects on how far he has come – perhaps reflecting on a former haunt of sentimental significance – only to find that sense of spiritual connection has vanished. Perhaps he has sacrificed in the pursuit of maturity, freedom, and that great ability to connect “everything.”

I have read the parking rules
When Amsterdam was being liquidated and trucks carrying ephedrine were on the road
The things we saw
The sand pigs on the street, the chickens in their bedroom

Is it weird now that I can’t connect?
It’s not strange, but I could check
Walked around where
We met for the first time, overwhelmed

You can’t run away from the future. The haunting drum patterns of “Mansard Roof” try to manifest themselves timidly in the percussion instruments of this song, but are stopped short each time. Vampire Weekend’s very first single, itself a song about sightseeing and lost essences, is no longer intelligible. Instead, we are left with the same piano, whizzing away merrily.

Suddenly, as the nervous scales of the piano blur, we realize that everything is “happens too quicklya proverbial “Book of Revelation“Predictions about our future – from prophecy to reality. The days of acid in the park and great spiritual discoveries are long gone. Wheelchair holidays (however exotic) are the equivalent of those faded adventures.

A country house in June
It happens too soon, your book of revelations
We can not undo the bed
We used the chair instead and called it a vacation

Is it a coincidence that in the slow process of summoning Only God stood above usexplains King Rolling Stone that while his family was busy, he was simply “out there wandering the sidewalks of Tokyo, lost in thought”? Is this a parallel to the spiritual awakening of acid-fueled forays into New York? What about the leopard darting around in a cage in the visualizer video “Connect” – is his imprisonment the best adventure he can have, and the cage a blockage to wider connections? Or are these themselves connections that I can’t really find, but am forcing?

Whatever the case, it’s reassuring that while Vampire Weekend’s frontman is no longer able to connect, he can still produce an album that explores this idea and related themes so openly and fruitfully, even without the need for acid.

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