Vampire Weekend
– Only God Was Above Us
For a band that once made boat shoes and preppy angst seem revolutionary, Only God Was Above Us feels like Ezra Koenig finally staring at the ivy-covered wreckage and asking, “What now?” Gone is the twitchy brightness of their debut. Gone too is the baroque pop maximalism of Modern Vampires or the sun-drenched chill of Father of the Bride. What’s left? A record that’s dense, moody, full of looping thoughts and urban anxiety—but never flat. It breathes different air. Grittier. Smoggier. Maybe older.
There’s something deliberately stubborn in these arrangements. Songs stretch. Horns honk like traffic. Pianos don’t twinkle—they pound. It’s the sound of a band digging deeper instead of louder. Ezra’s voice still floats above it all, but the melodies feel soaked in newsprint and neon. There’s less cuteness, more clutter. A kind of beautiful disarray. You can hear the band wrestling with nostalgia, faith, death, and the way New York used to look from a cab window at 3am. You don’t get answers. You get mood.
And that mood matters. Because while the hooks don’t jump out like they used to, they linger longer. Vampire Weekend haven’t lost their touch—they’ve just stopped showing off. This record invites you to sit with it, not scroll past it. No grand gestures. No obvious singles. Just a slow-burning glow from a band no longer concerned with proving anything, which might be the most compelling thing they’ve done yet.
Choice Tracks
Capricorn
Somewhere between a prayer and a voicemail to the void. The lyrics drift, the synths hum like old fluorescent lights, and Ezra sounds like he’s remembering a memory that might not even be his. It’s woozy, but sharp. Weirdly comforting in its confusion.
Classical
The closest this album gets to a banger. Layers of guitars swirl under a swaggering vocal, but there’s a nervous twitch to it, like the whole thing could unravel. The structure’s a little warped, and that’s what makes it stick.
Mary Boone
A six-minute meditation on art, ego, and maybe Ezra himself. There’s beauty here, but it’s tangled in noise and distortion. The piano insists, the drums stagger, and it all builds to something fragile. Almost cinematic, in a downtown, 16mm film kind of way.
Connect
A late-album stunner. Sparse at first—just voice and haze—but then the rhythm section kicks in like a pulse returning after a long sleep. Lyrically direct but emotionally messy. It’s a quiet triumph.
Hope
The closer is a slow fade into resignation—or maybe acceptance. No grand finale, just a wandering sense that nothing’s fixed, but maybe that’s okay. It leaves you with more questions than answers, which is kind of the point.
Only God Was Above Us doesn’t chase the moment. It haunts it. It’s Vampire Weekend with the color drained and the city noise turned up, daring you to listen closer, and rewarding you if you do.