Vampire Weekend share eclectic new track ‘Mary Boone’
Things are looking good for Vampire Weekend’s upcoming fifth album. As the fourth and final teaser we’re going to get before its release on April 5th, ‘Mary Boone’ is another eclectic track with all the band’s beloved signatures.
By the time you’re releasing your fifth album, stagnation is all too easy. Especially for a group like Vampire Weekend, who came up and found success in a very distinctive musical moment, it would have been easy for them to stick in the 2000s indie zone and release ‘Ya Hey’ or ‘A-Punk’ over and over.
But we’ve seen where that gets you. So many of the bands that were their peers — Two Door Cinema Club or The Maccabees — have either totally plateaued and feel doomed to legacy act status already or have packed it in. The ones left behind seem to desperately be clutching at the straws of the so-called indie-sleaze revival, trying to act like they’re not in their mid-30s.
The answers for what they’ve done or how they’ve pulled it off remain elusive, but Vampire Weekend have dodged the curse. Similar to their last few singles, ‘Capricorn’, ‘Classical’ and ‘Gen-X’ cops, ‘Mary Boone’ is an expansive track that switches up time and time again. Rather than grabbing at straws of a genre or old scene, the band instead seem to be gathering up the threads of their career so far and weaving them together into something new but still recognisably theirs.
So much of that comes from Ezra Koenig. From his vocals to his distinctly maximalist production style, he’s remained a respected, recognised and beloved figure. He’s never seemed bogged down by staying the same, and it seems like as long as the band follows along with his own growth as a person and a musician, their music develops, too.
As this new record comes following an extended hiatus in which Koenig busied himself with co-writing projects, vocal appearances, and even writing a TV series, his artistic growth seems to have extended in the way of cinematic sounds, wordier lyricism and more bravery about integrating all that while still making it catchy.
That’s shown beautifully on ‘Mary Boone’. As the track opens up, there’s a moment of stripped-back simplicity. Koenig’s voice is joined by a children’s choir and a piano for a still moment, reminiscent of old fan-favourite tracks like ‘Hannah Hunt’. But as the beat comes in, adding electro additions along with classical strings, the band returns to maximalist form with their own unique genre-merging that seems to simply take the bits they like from anything and everything.
Dedicated to the famed art dealer Mary Boone, who merged the classical art world with the cool new contemporary scene run by the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the mixing sonics seem to paint a perfect picture of that muse.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out New Music Newsletter
All the latest New Music from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.