DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE släpper nya albumet I Built You A Tower den 5 juni via Anti-Records

Första singeln "Riptides" är ute nu! Dessutom åker de på Europa-turné i september!

Lyssna på "Riptides" här: https://deathcabforcutie.ffm.t...

Indierockjättarna och åtta gånger GRAMMY-nominerade Death Cab for Cutie – Benjamin Gibbard, Nicholas Harmer, Jason McGerr, Dave Depper och Zac Rae kommer med sitt elfte studioalbum. I Built You A Tower som släpps den 5 juni via ANTI-Records. Flytten markerar bandets återgång till sina rötter efter 20 år på Atlantic Records. Albumet, som producerades och komponerades av John Congleton och satts ihop under bara tre veckor, spelades in på Animal Rites i Los Angeles, samt i bandmedlemmarnas hem i Seattle, Bellingham, Los Angeles och Portland.

I samband med albumlanseringen delar Death Cab for Cutie med sig av albumets första singel, "Riptides". Gibbard säger om singeln att: "Riptides” is about the challenge of dealing with personal struggles as the world around us experiences tragedy and loss on an unfathomable scale. And how when these two elements intertwine themselves in our psyches, it feels utterly paralyzing."

Under senare år har Death Cab firat flera historiska milstolpar, inklusive massiva slutsålda turnéer för att fira 20-årsjubileet av de banbrytande albumen Transatlanticism och Plans. Dessa turnéer var avgörande för skapandet av I Built You A Tower, då Gibbard bakom kulisserna utstod den största pressen i sitt yrkesliv – att fronta både Death Cab och Postal Service på arenascener i timmar varje kväll – samtidigt som han kämpade med kollapsen av sitt privatliv i bakgrunden. Påfrestningen kändes för stor för en person att bära, och "tower" uppstod som ett sätt att skydda sig själv. Han berättar: “There’s this need to find a place in ourselves to put loss and grief. 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 är ett album om försoning med ett tidigare jag för att hitta en ny framtid. “The anniversary tours exorcised any nostalgia in our systems” Depper berättar: “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 fortsätter: “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.” Som sådan är detta inte den fruktade berättelsen om "återgång till form", utan en återupprättelse av ett etos som har präglat Death Cabs 30-åriga historia.

Nu tillkännager bandet även en höstturné i Storbritannien/EU, med biljetter som släpps på fredag klockan 10.00. Dessa framträdanden kommer i kölvattnet av en historisk, slutsåld global turné i samband med 20-årsjubileet av Transatlanticism plus deras universellt hyllade tionde studioalbum, 2022 års Asphalt Meadows.

Biljetter hittar du här: deathcabforcutie.com.

EU/UK Tour dates:

September 16 - Dublin, Ireland - 3Olympia Theatre

September 19 - Manchester, UK - O2 Victoria Warehouse

September 20 - Edinburgh, UK - Corn Exchange

September 21 - Gateshead, UK - The Glasshouse

September 23 - Bristol, UK - The Prospect Building

September 25 - London, UK - Troxy

September 29 - Utrecht, Netherlands - TivoliVredenburg

September 30 - Brussels, Belgium - Cirque Royal

October 1 - Berlin, Germany - Columbiahalle

October 3 - Paris, France - Elysée Montmartre

Tracklisting

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)

MER om Death Cab for Cutie och I Built You A Tower:

You could easily mistake it for romantic tribute. I Built You A Tower, the phrase that gives Death Cab for Cutie’s 11th album its title, sounds like a paean or plea to a former love. An obelisk and work of art, a testament to what you had with one another. Something so great surely it could never collapse. But for Ben Gibbard it was quite different, a sturdy tomb of stone in which he could — temporarily and in vain — hide the past away just so he could push through when grief threatened to consume him.

I Built You A Tower is an album of reconciling with past selves in order to locate a new future. This was true for Death Cab for Cutie as much as it was for Gibbard himself. After 20-odd years in the major label system, the band returned to their indie roots and signed with ANTI- Records. The move coincided with Death Cab embarking on a writing and recording process more akin to their initial run of albums in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, filtered through lessons learned through the textural experimentation of their ‘10s records and a decade-plus with their current quintet lineup: Gibbard, bassist Nick Harmer, drummer Jason McGerr and multi-instrumentalists Dave Depper and Zac Rae.

Before all that, Death Cab for Cutie first revisited the past. The 2023-2025 tours celebrating the 20th anniversaries of seminal releases Transatlanticismand Plans were pivotal to the creation of I Built You A Tower. Spending so much time in the world of beloved old releases reminded the quintet the connection they could achieve with fans and each other through more stripped-down songs relative to the layered, maximalist work they had favoured in recent years. Soon after wrapping the Plans shows, the band gathered in the studio once more with producer John Congleton, harnessing the post-tour energy to record a raw, vulnerable new set of songs from Gibbard with the urgency they demanded.

After 2018’s Thank You for Today found the quintet figuring out how to record together and 2022’s Asphalt Meadows’ pandemic gestation necessitated a remote “chain letter” writing process, I Built You A Tower provided an opportunity to represent the interplay that had developed since Depper and Rae first joined as auxiliary touring members in support of 2015’s Kintsugi.

Trusting Congleton after their collaboration on Asphalt Meadows, Death Cab let him lead them into a more pared-down, immediate aesthetic — songs sometimes caustic (Harmer and Depper’s angsty co-write “How Heavenly a State”) and sometimes wistfully twilit (“I Built You A Tower (a)”) always delivered with the lean muscle of the five men in the room with minimal ornamentation. The album came together in a mere three weeks and change, the fastest since The Photo Album. “We weren’t afraid of a deeply human sound, some messiness,” Gibbard asserts. “This isn’t an airbrushed photograph. This is what we look like, this is what we sound like.”

For Gibbard, keeping these songs visceral and undistilled served other purposes, echoing the personal turmoil they depicted and the malleability I Built You A Towertook on over time. During those anniversary tours, Gibbard weathered the greatest pressure of his professional life while struggling with the collapse of his marriage in the background. Though heartbreak remains eternally fertile ground for songwriters, Gibbard was seeking something else when the songs poured out amidst the anniversary tours. I Built You A Tower is not a divorce record, but rather a record about the aftermath — running from or sidelining grief, coming to terms with the emotional debt that accrues, one man’s at-times harrowing reckoning with himself and the past lives left in his wake. There is no score-settling, no bitterness. At least, none aimed at another person. Across the album, you hear Gibbard build a tower while he dismantles himself.

There is a specific arc across the project, from the bad thoughts creeping up in “Pep Talk,” to Gibbard explicitly confessing “I’m trying to hold it together” in “Stone Over Water,” until the propulsive “Riptides” exposes a desperate admission it’s not working. I Built You A Tower captures coping mechanisms failing at every turn, yet nevertheless arrives at a decision to carry on. By the end, the shape of the tower changes.

I Built You A Tower is the sound of loss, compartmentalisation and then grief bursting out from the seams. But it’s also the sound of the growth that comes after falling apart, of acknowledging pain without letting it destroy you. “I see the tower existing on your emotional horizon,” Gibbard concludes. “You don’t always have to look at what’s inside it, but it’s a reminder that it happened. You know it’s there. You have to face it.”

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