It’s been almost five years since indie-rock legends Vampire Weekend last released an album. While this marks the longest period between the band’s records, the group have been hard at work on a new album, one that Vampire Weekend’s frontman says almost ended up a rather sprawling mess of guest stars.
Over the last year, we’ve seen updates on the band’s long-awaited fourth record, with Ezra Koenig stating that the record that may or may not still be called Mitsubishi Macchiato is about 80% done” in September. However, according to a new interview, Koenig has stated that the new record almost started off life as a pop record rather than a good ol’ fashioned indie record.
“When I first started thinking about this album, I had big ambitions,” Koenig told Entertainment Weekly. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna do this Kanye stuff, and if that means I work with 200 people, I’m down.'”
“Every once in a while I’ll sit down and write a song by myself, but I really love writing songs with other people. Increasingly that seems like that’s the way that people work. It’s not just pop; that pop way of working starts to encompass the whole music industry. I was always interested in that. I was like, ‘I want to try that. I’m cool with it.’”
Despite this, Koenig says that his introversion and desire for familiarity ended up winning out. “At the end of the day, the people I’ve ended up enjoying working with are the people I already knew.”
At this stage, we’re still no closer to finding out when the new record is out, or whether it will be called Mitsubishi Macchiato (seriously, what does that even mean?), but we can be sure that it isn’t going to be filled with guest appearances by artists who only show up to scream their name on the track. We’re looking at you, DJ Khaled.
Check out Vampire Weekend’s most recent single, 2013’s ‘Step’:
