Vampire Weekend are reportedly gearing up to release their long-awaited fourth album, and their label boss has just turned the excitement up another notch.
For a few years now, fans have been eagerly awaiting the release of the follow-up to Vampire Weekend’s 2013 effort, Modern Vampires Of The City. While the band played their first live shows in four years a few months back, frontman Ezra Koenig has sporadically offered updates as time goes by.
Back in August, Sony records outlined a list of the “noteworthy projects” that were on track to be released in Q3 of 2018. Among them was a new Vampire Weekend album, but considering that Q3 ended on September 30th, fans have been left wanting yet again.
Only days after this announcement from Sony, the band made an appearance at Lollapalooza, confirming that the new record is indeed complete.
“I wanted to tell you that the album is done now,” Koenig told the crowd. “I mean, we’re mastering it but it’s done. More on that to come – in the meantime, just enjoy the rest of your summer.”
So, the record’s done, and everyone else is ready for it to be unleashed, so what are we waiting for? Something special, it seems.
Speaking to Music Week recently, Columbia Records’ Ferdy Unger-Hamilton spoke about the label’s previous year, and what’s in store for 2019.
In addition to speaking about new records from the likes of Rag’N’Bone Man and King Princess, Unger-Hamilton also noted that Vampire Weekend’s new record is set to arrive early in 2019.
“The record’s brilliant, it’s going to go really well,” he explained. “It will be your favourite record next year, and they’ll come in and do some shows. ”
Check out Vampire Weekend’s ‘A-Punk’:
Previously, Ezra Koenig had discussed what went into the new album, and how he had rather grand plans when the recording process started.
“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.”
Vampire Weekend’s as-yet-untitled fourth album is set to be released early in 2019.
Check out Vampire Weekend’s ‘Diane Young’:
