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Feb 08, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Michael Schmelling

Vampire Weekend have announced a new album, Only God Was Above Us, and shared a trailer for the album. Two new songs, “Gen-X Cops” and “Capricorn,” are promised for next week (February 16). Only God Was Above Us is due out April 5 via Columbia. Check out the album trailer below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork.

Only God Was Above Us is the band’s fifth album, their first new album in five years, and the follow-up to Father of the Bride. Father of the Bride was our Album of the Week, it debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 album chart with the largest first week sales for any rock album in 2019, and you can stream it here. It was also nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys.

Vampire Weekend is Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio, and Chris Tomson. Koenig wrote most of the album’s lyrics in 2019 and 2020 and the band have been refining the album since then, recording in various cities around the world, including New York, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. Koenig produced the album with longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid and it was mixed by Dave Fridmann and mastered by Emily Lazar.

A press release promises that the album is “direct yet complex, showing the band at once at its grittiest, and also at its most beautiful and melodic.”

The album’s cover artwork also inspired its title. It is a photo taken in 1988 by Steven Siegel at a subway graveyard in New Jersey. In the photo is a man sitting in a turned over subway car, reading the May 1, 1988 edition of The New York Daily News. The cover of the newspaper details an airplane accident on Aloha Airlines flight 243, when an explosion tore the roof off. The headline of the newspaper quotes a survivor saying, “Only God was above us,” which is now the title of the new album.

We were the first nationally distributed print magazine to interview Vampire Weekend, way back in 2007, and you can revisit that article here.

Only God Was Above Us Tracklist:

1. Ice Cream Piano
2. Classical
3. Capricorn
4. Connect
5. Prep-School Gangsters
6. The Surfer
7. Gen-X Cops
8. Mary Boone
9. Pravda
10. Hope

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