Vampire Weekend‘s long-awaited new album, their fourth, is coming out in 2019, according to GQ. Frontman Ezra Koenig will be appearing at the GQ Live event in Los Angeles to discuss the new album, among other things. Perhaps that’s when we’ll find out the small details, like the album’s title and release date.
Koenig has been teasing the followup to 2013’s Modern Vampires in the City for a while now. In August, Koenig mentioned that the band finished the new record amid stage banter at their Lollapalooza set in Chicago in August. He then reportedly played four new songs off his phone for the audience at a Lollapalooza afterparty before playing one new song as part of the band’s encore. Apparently no recordings of the performance exist, but one Reddit poster who claimed to be in attendance described the new songs as “a more spacey and empty sounding record” featuring “a slick almost sexy taste of 70s funk licks.” Huh.
In September, Koenig confirmed that the new album was finished when he apologized to the audience at the End of The Road Festival in southwest England for not having the record finished in time to play the new songs live. Unbeknownst to the crowd, Koenig was about to have a baby with partner Rashida Jones, so that might explain the delay.
