Most millennials of a certain age are coming up to nearly two decades of association with Vampire Weekend. For many, it will have been short-lived, focusing mainly on their 2008 eponymous breakout debut, featuring the popular, and very of its time, indie hit single A-Punk. A-Punk will be remembered with a deep link 2008, along with other now severely dated hits such as those from Razorlight and Noah and the Whale.
My own association with Vampire Weekend was, for over 10 years, based upon derisive dislike, the tinny riffs of A-Punk reminding me of an era of music that I would sooner forget. All that was to change in 2019, when on BBC Radio 6 Music I heard the irrepressibly off-kilter, distorted synth line of Diane Young. What followed was a sort of gradual encroachment onto my list of favourite artists. This was ultimately, in the era following 2019, a lonely exercise, barring one party I remember where the trendy hosts ended up kicking out an attendee after the fourth offence of hijacking the techno playlist to play Vampire Weekend. While I admired that man’s music taste and passion you have to respect that there is a time and place for Vampire Weekend, and a house party in Stoke Newington in 2022 simply was not it.
The pervading sense of irrelevance surrounding Vampire Weekend was (and is) striking, however. Many people will read the words Vampire Weekend and instantly think ‘A-Punk, 2008, Inbetweeners soundtrack landfill indie.’ One could argue that this label haunts them unjustly - in the near 20 years since their debut, they have aggressively courted positive reviews with the hard-to-please Pitchfork, won several Grammys, and seen numerous albums debut at number 1 on the Billboard 200. Their lead songwriter has written songs for Beyonce, while their synthesist was a producer on Frank Ocean’s career-defining Blonde.
It’s probably not too far of a statement to say their level of critical acclaim is almost unrivalled. Across five albums and 17 years they are yet to drop below an 8/10 rating on Pitchfork, and typically hit much higher. In 2024 this culminated in their latest album, the relatively dark and brooding Only God Was Above Us, or OGWAU (8.6/10). The tour for this album kicked off in April 2024, including a two night sold out residency at Madison Square Gardens, a four night sold out residency at their home town theatre in Wellmont, New Jersey and UK dates throughout November.
VW and their live sets are fronted by Ezra Koenig, born in the Upper West Side but who grew up over the Hudson in the New Jersey suburbs. Koenig completed his return to New York around 2002, majoring in Creative Writing and English at the prestigious Ivy League university Columbia. A number of short stories and attempted screenplays became the basis for various elements of the band’s universe, including their name, and he brings the band an undeniably literate style. Through this lens Vampire Weekend’s albums can in a sense be seen as efforts in creative writing. The first two albums represent breakout campus novels, bringing sudden success and fame and showcasing the typical intellectual pretensions one could expect from fresh Ivy League graduates. Modern Vampires of the City rises to tower above these two (already critically respected) albums with such a level of affectation, arrangement and imagination as to resemble a rich Pulitzer-winning novel by Michael Chambon. The near neurotic fixation on the tristate area and NYC rings of Philip Roth (a fellow Jewish New Jerseyan to Koenig). Father of the Bride is the indulgent, though still enjoyable, lapse aiming for commercial success after the translocation to California. OGWAU is regarded as a matured, jaded but wiser return to VW’s roots, the LA-based and ageing indie band reflecting on their history, their place within history, and the history of the East Coast city in which they were formed.
At times this talent swells to the barely believably; a whole queer romantic novel appears to be tied up within the lyrics of Diplomat’s Son (itself based on a Koenig short story), delivered over its unique digitised reggae beat and featuring a Mulholland Drive-esque abrupt turn in tone and time signature.
Koenig’s viewpoint certainly seems to come from a higher plane than his independent contemporaries. Mac DeMarco recently released his latest crooning love song album, interspersed with lyrics about sandwiches and cigarettes, while it is hard to imagine Matt Healey having enough curiosity to write a song about a New York art gallery owner from the 1980s. With OGWAU, VW completed their gradual transition from an undergraduate flippancy to professorial, and academically paced, reflection.
This surplus affectation and structuring, creating a sense of ornamentation, extends to the music and has been both a pull factor and, for many music fans who might prefer a more natural soundscape, a hard push. The juxtaposition is obvious on Classical, one of the singles from OGWAU. The opening riff is jarring and awkward, almost sounding like a slightly deranged theme song to a travelling theme park showground. It is hard to imagine many music fans making it past this juddering start. But the verse then moves into a magnetic chorus that flows through assonance and alliteration, showcasing Ezra’s fun though sometimes half-firing nods to other genres such as rap, underpinned by the classiness of double bass lines, breakbeat drum tracks and a virtuosic saxophone solo.
The characteristic playful pretentiousness is particularly apparent on OGWAU’s Mary Boone, the aforementioned song about a 1980s New York art gallery owner. The song features sophisticated piano lines, choral vocals, hip hop beats and Indian sitars, somehow still managing to exceed the sum of its parts.
The fabric of OGWAU is infused with the historic fabric of New York, focusing much more on the piano, double bass, the saxophone and hop-hop style drumbeats than their previous efforts. The lyrics flit between stories from the city, while the artwork (and apparently the overall aesthetic of the album) is based on the chaotic, graffiti-imbued photos of 1970s New York by the street photographer Steven Siegel (the title of OGWAU was taken from the front page of newspaper being read by a 1970s subway rider in one of these photos).
In a similar way, their debut albums are infused with the fabric of an Ivy League campus, namely chamber arrangements, choral, boyish vocals and naïve, clean guitar tones.
As a band, and despite being in their 40s, they still resemble the preppy students that drew anti-privilege ire on their debut in 2008. That year, when Obama won the presidency with electoral college and senatorial landslides (now seen as impossible for contemporary Democrats), the New England Ivy League brand of liberalism was in ascendancy in the US. It felt oddly comforting when I saw the Columbia alumni in late 2024 at the Eventim Apollo, one month after the presidential election, in an era where the poor taste manosphere has achieved a cultural virulence in the Anglo world and is helping to propel a far right political surge. It was as though I had entered a sort of cultural oasis or time machine.
Koenig, whose band performed in support of socialist Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016, pre-empted this political shift in the closing track of OGWAU (released 6 months before Trump took back the White House). The well-paced and allegorical 8 minute denouement to OGWAU raises a litany of liberal disappointments, before Koenig turns to the song’s refrain: “Our enemy’s invincible; I hope you let it go”. This song is clearly not just directed to the political; as he says in an interview with Zane Lowe, by the time you reach your 40s you will have been on a number of paths that have run out of road. In this sense, the refrain can be seen as a call for himself to let go of his professional and commercial (in addition to what must be profound political) disappointments.
The commercial disappointments may also be significant. Since Contra, Koenig has been keenly aware that he operates in an increasingly outdated genre, with rock music sales effectively collapsing after the 2000s in favour of pop. It is striking that OGWAU, a universally acclaimed but commercially insignificant output, was released just a few months before Charli XCX’s Brat took the world by storm. Charli XCX now enjoys 30 million Spotify visitors a month, whereas VW achieve just over 3 million. Vampire Weekend’s eclectic discography has also never benefitted from that great propellant of indie streaming wealth and renown in the 2020s - a viral Tik Tok feature. Where Beach House, Mac De Marco, Djo and even left field Alex G now have billions or near billions of streams on Spotify, Vampire Weekend have to settle for hundreds of millions (and the corresponding loss of income).
OGWAU’s Hope also served as the lengthy conclusion of their two and a half hour live show at the Eventim Apollo, with the band slowly dwindling backstage, the various layers of the song slowly stripping away till just Chris Baio was left on stage, picking the rhythmic bass line at a steadily declining pace until finally it was his turn to turn his back on the crowd and end the show. It felt like a classic show business play but still seemed to provide a genuine dose of the cinematic. The other bookend of the show was Hold You Now but with the choral vocals replaced by a heavy and driving guitar line, and it was interspersed with a mix of quirky musical efforts, including ‘Ska-ttoman’ (a ska alternative version to Ottoman) and their now well-known sections of crowd request covers. The latter makes for entertaining set list reading. I will never forget Koenig tentatively trying to find the chords and alpine vocal notes for Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush, as an exercise in sheer good-natured fun.
The sum effect for the live show was ultimately dynamism. It is hard to know if I caught the band on one of the best performances of the OGWAU tour; the night was certainly well received by online communities and exceeded their constrained set at 2025’s Paris En Seine. But I was reminded of their set at Glastonbury Festival in 2019, where they grappled with the cloudy conditions and mid-festival fatigue to surprise me and a group of non-VW fans I had dragged along by their effectiveness on stage and a sound quality that cut through an otherwise hazy day. Despite being, at that stage, a burgeoning fan, I had feared that they would perhaps perform as fading irrelevancies from that bygone indie era. Instead, that set will go down as a moment that forever shaped my musical tastes and confirmed what I had begun to suspect, that this strange band operated at artistic levels they are (generally speaking) not given credit for.
In November 2025, VW wrapped up their multi-year and expansive OGWAU tour with a performance at Mexico City’s Corona Capital Festival. As I consider the end of this album and touring cycle I am filled with a certain sense of nostalgia and loss. With the band releasing albums only at 5 year intervals, they will be in their mid-40s when, or if, the next album is released. It seems unlikely they can maintain this string of exclusively acclaimed albums. Could they perhaps decide to call it a day on the back of the OGWAU high, regarded by many as their masterpiece?
In today’s era it would appear oddly anachronistic to attend an Ivy League college, form an indie band and achieve real commercial success alongside cultural relevance off the back of Paul Simon influenced pop songs. This has been replaced by the DIY internet virality of Mac DeMarco and the less commercial cultic nature of Geese’s (who supported some dates of the OGWAU tour) recent success, who presumably make most of their income from touring. So in a sense Vampire Weekend are now a relic to a vanished era of indie music. The difference compared to many of their contemporaries is that listening to this relic can provide an evocative, intellectually and aesthetically stimulating (though sometimes perplexing) experience. I have listened to Vampire Weekend while road tripping through coastal Maine, New England and the tristate area, and as I travelled down the industrial trainlines of Connecticut into the yawning gape of New York. Their music illuminated the landscape, made it more mysterious and enamoured me to its cultural history. Their live performances, to me, quickly demolish any sense of inferiority. In lay terms, they are better than they have any right to be.
There is no band that has so fixed me with curiosity as there is no band with such things to say. In my biased view, only god is above them.