Only God Was Above Us by Vampire Weekend

I did not expect good things from Vampire Weekend in 2024, and that is 100% on me. I have always been a big fan of the band, and the three albums that they’ve released while I’ve been tracking my Top 31s have all been near the top of the list in their respective release years (Contra at #6 in 2010, Modern Vampires of the City at #3 in 2013 and Father of the Bride at #3 in 2019). But five years had passed since the release of Bride, and apparently that’s just enough time to plant a seed of doubt in my mind that a band can’t possibly continue to succeed at the level they had previously.

I’m happy to report I’ve now learned my lesson: never doubt Ezra Koenig. The man is a genius songwriter, there’s really no bones about it. Only God Was Above Us, the band’s fifth album in sixteen years, is not unlike other Vampire Weekend releases. The jangly guitar, the bouncy rhythms, Koenig’s high-registered clear-as-day lyrics – it’s all here. In fact, the one thing that’s really changed in the past 16 years is everything else. Vampire Weekend stays brilliantly consistent while the world changes drastically around them. I mean, when the band’s self-titled debut album was released in 2008, we were still a year away from President Obama. That is more than a lifetime away from our current situation.

Production of Only God is similar to the last two Vampire Weekend albums. Koenig takes the lion’s share of the songwriting duties, with Ariel Rechtshaid partnering with Koenig on most of the production of the album. A pleasant surprise is former Vampire Weekender Rostam Batmanglij’s production on “The Surfer,” giving a small but no-less important indication that Rostam is still engaged with Koenig and the band, no matter how tenuous a connection that may be.

I had the immense pleasure of catching Koenig with bandmates Chris Thomson and Chris Baio on their late-Spring / Summer 2024 tour. Thanks to the pre-planning by friends of mine, I was overjoyed to get to watch the performance from the floor, just a couple people shy of the foot of the stage in the cavernous Climate Pledge Arena. The trio were joined by a handful of other musicians (violin, keyboards, a second drummer/percussionist), necessary to capture the full Vampire Weekend sound.

They put on a hell of a show. Theatrics, massive mid-show changes in set scenery, intimate shifts in lighting — this was’t just an indie-rock show, it was a a broadway musical, with Koenig commanding the stage at every turn. The band played nearly every song from Only God, and a huge variety of past songs as well, spanning about 90 minutes. After a short break, the band came out and told a short story. “We used to come out and take requests for Vampire Weekend songs that we haven’t already played in the evening and tried to muddle our way through them. On this tour, we’re taking a different approach. We’ll try to muddle our way through other bands’ songs. So, do you have any non-Vampire Weekend songs you’d like to hear?”

They then proceeded to play partial versions of songs shouted out or displayed on phone screens, sometimes quite poorly. “Graceland,” “Creep” (Radiohead, not TLC), “Just Like Heaven,” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” all were attempted to varying degrees of success. Being so close to the stage, I was able to yell out loud enough to be heard by Koenig, and he magically took my suggestion. He and the band then dove into a fantastic rendition of the first verse from “Psycho Killer,” just because I asked them to. They even played a portion of “Hold Up” by Beyoncé, from her phenomenal 2016 album Lemonade (under-ranked at #6 in 2016), which Koenig famously has a writing and production credit on.

I must make a quick tangent here to relate something I just learned that ties all of this together. A lot of you are probably aware that Koenig interpolated a line from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s song “Maps” in a random tweet back in 2011, the entirety of which said “Hold up… they don’t love you like I love you,” which then became the core of Beyoncé’s “Hold Up.” Beyond that, amazingly enough, you can actually hear Koenig’s original demo verse for the Beyoncé hook here in this recording from Koenig’s Time Crisis podcast from back in 2016. In the original verse, he actually had the line “can’t you see there’s not other god above you,” which Beyonce changed to “…no other man above you” in the final version of the song, leaving Koenig’s original line on the cutting room floor. In the audio clip above, Koenig goes on to talk about the origin for that line, which is from a bible verse. Surely it can’t be pure coincidence that, here we are nine years post-altered-line-on-Lemonade and Vampire Weekend’s newest album is called “Only God Was Above Us.” But I digress.

It will likely be years before we get another Vampire Weekend record, if their history is any indication. I hope when that future album does come out, I remember this feeling from right here, right now: Vampire Weekend can really do no wrong. They’ve proven over five stellar albums that they make nothing but great music, entirely unique to themselves (having broken free of the very early references to Paul Simon and his Graceland album, specifically). I’m excited for a future of more Vampire Weekend music. And I’m guessing you are, too.