Vampire Weekend hits L.A. for upcoming album

By Mikael Wood

Jan. 6, 2013 7:21 AM PT

Two months after premiering a peppy new song, “Unbelievers,” on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Vampire Weekend has announced that its upcoming third studio album is set to be released this spring on XL Recordings. The still-untitled disc will follow up 2010’s “Contra,” which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

Speaking to SPIN, frontman Ezra Koenig and keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij said the band recorded portions of the album in Los Angeles with Ariel Rechtshaid, a former member of L.A.’s Foreign Born who’s since become known for his production and songwriting work with the likes of Usher and Sky Ferreira.

“I love being able to record in a room that’s surrounded by trees,” Batmanglij said of Rechtshaid’s home studio in Echo Park. “We actually recorded vocals ... with all the windows open, and you can hear it happening.”

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Vampire Weekend also worked in New York and on Martha’s Vineyard, where Koenig said the band felt free to experiment. “There wasn’t exactly that same time pressure [as on ‘Contra’] or that urge to show people our ideas really quickly, so we could focus very purely on songwriting,” the singer told SPIN.

In a separate interview with England’s Q magazine, Koenig described the new album as “darker” and more “organic” than its predecessors, and added that it feels “like the third chapter in a book” that began with “Vampire Weekend” in 2008.

“We created some characters on the first record, some of which are real people, some of which are ourselves,” he said, “so it’s not so hard to keep following them and see what their concerns are now and how their lives have changed.”

Watch the band’s “Kimmel” performance of “Unbelievers” below.