Vampire Weekend “almost have an album’s worth of songs”, says Ezra Koenig

Ezra Koenig has offered an update on Vampire Weekend‘s next LP, revealing that the band “almost have an album’s worth of songs” completed so far.

• READ MORE: The Big Read – Vampire Weekend: on the road with the summer’s must-see band

Sitting down with Blink-182‘s Mark Hoppus on his Apple Music Hits show, After School Radio, the frontman shared a few details about the follow-up to 2019’s ‘Father Of The Bride’, saying that the band are “feeling really good about [their] new material”.

“It is crazy that it’s been three years,” Koenig said of the time that’s passed since the release of Vampire Weekend’s last album. “I mean, about a year and a half of it doesn’t count because of COVID.

“But, yeah. We’ve been working on music and we were just recording in England for a while, now back in LA, working with everybody and, yeah, I think we’re… I’m always hesitant to… Sometimes I oversell how close we are with the record because who really knows? But we almost have an album’s worth of songs.”

He continued: “As you well know, you could tinker with a song forever; change the arrangement, change the lyrics, whatever. But in that sense we’re close. I have no idea how long it’ll take to finish, but we’re feeling really good about the new material. So yeah, a lot of studio time to come after the holidays.”

You can listen to Ezra’s chat with Hoppus here.

Earlier this year, Koenig recorded a new track for the second season of Netflix‘s I Think You Should Leave. He told Hoppus how he came to work on the record.

“Basically through the producer, Akiva, from Lonely Island, and I’d met Tim Robinson before over the years,” he explained. “He’d come to a show. I was a huge fan. He’d always been cool. And then, Akiva hit me up just saying, ‘Hey, the guys need a song for the next season of the show. Could you do it?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ Anything for that show.

“And then, we got on the phone with them and they basically wanted not a bad pop song, but kind of a… They played me references and stuff for what they were looking for, and they already had some lyrics. So, it’s not like they were wanting a song that sounds like me or Vampire Weekend, they just wanted to know if we’d have fun with it.

“The best way I could describe the kind of music that they were looking for is pop music that came two or three levels after Frank Ocean and Bon Iver. The kind of not so great pop music that was very influenced by that music. I don’t even know how to describe it. I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but I was like, ‘Okay.’ So we got the assignment and then I did it with my boy, Ariel [Rechtshaid].”

As for Vampire Weekend, they shared a new EP called ‘40:42’ back in February, which features two fresh re-workings of their song ‘2021’.

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