Indie rock titans and eight-time GRAMMY nominees Death Cab for Cutie – Benjamin Gibbard, Nicholas Harmer, Jason McGerr, Dave Depper and Zac Rae – announce their 11th studio album. I Built You A Tower, will be released on June 5 via ANTI- Records. The move marks the band’s return to their independent roots after 20 years on Atlantic Records. Produced and engineered by John Congleton and assembled from a mere three weeks of sessions, I Built You A Tower was recorded at Animal Rites in Los Angeles, as well as the band members’ homes in Seattle, Bellingham, Los Angeles and Portland.
Alongside today’s album announcement, Death Cab for Cutie share the album’s propulsive first single, ‘Riptides.’ “’Riptides’ is about the challenge of dealing with overwhelming grief as the world around us experiences tragedy and loss on an unfathomable scale,” says Gibbard. “And how when these two elements intertwine themselves in our psyches, it feels utterly paralyzing.”
Listen to the song and watch its Jason Lester-directed video
Death Cab for Cutie – ‘Riptides’ (Official Music Video)
In recent years, Death Cab celebrated several historic milestones, including massive sold-out tours celebrating the 20th anniversaries of seminal releases Transatlanticism and Plans. Those tours were pivotal to the creation of I Built You A Tower, as behind the scenes, Gibbard weathered the greatest pressure of his professional life — fronting both Death Cab and the Postal Service on arena stages for hours a night — while struggling with the collapse of his personal life in the background. The strain felt too much for one person to bear, and the “tower” originated as a way to protect himself. “There’s this need to find a place in ourselves to put loss and grief,” he explains. “A place that can hold it so we can move on with our lives. But there are these moments where the trauma breaks out of that shell we created for it.”
I Built You A Tower is an album of reconciling with past selves in order to locate a new future. “The anniversary tours exorcised any nostalgia in our systems,” Depper observes. “We felt part of this powerful force greater than all of us and went into the studio with a sense of, how can we capture that feeling and put it into something new?” Harmer continues, “The whole experience of this record got us back to the earliest versions of this band: If the musicians in the room like what we’re working on, that’s enough. We reconnected with the confidence that comes with that.” As such, this is not the dreaded “return to form” narrative, but a reclamation of a core ethos that has run through Death Cab’s 30-year history.
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
I Built You A Tower
OUT JUNE 5TH ON ANTI- RECORDS
Tracklist:
1. Full of Stars
2. Punching The Flowers
3. Pep Talk
4. I Built You A Tower (a)
5. Envy The Birds
6. Stone Over Water
7. How Heavenly a State
8. Trap Door
9. Riptides
10. The Flavor of Metal
11. I Built You A Tower (b)
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