New York indie maestros Vampire Weekend have confirmed that the recording for their fourth album has been completed. Th album will be the group’s first effort since 2013, and the highly anticipated album was initially due for release earlier this year, but faced delays.
During an appearance at Dorset’s End of the Road Festival, a fan shouted from the crowd about the progress of the new album. Frontman Ezra Keonig responded “When’s the new album coming out?” Keonig replied. “Oh, who cares? No, it’s done. We’ll talk about that later.”
Later on in the set, he explained “We don’t wanna make big deal about it, but this is our first time playing in the UK since Reading & Leeds 2014. We agreed to do [End of The Road 2018] a long time ago and, yeah, we hoped we’d be doing a victory lap with our new album. But, you know, this is what happens. Life goes on. We promise we’ll come back to the UK and we’ll play new songs. And they’re good – I promise.”
Keonig also took this opportunity to introduce the new members of the band, Brian Jones and Greta Morgan, who replaced the departing Rostam Batmanglij. The singer described Morgan as his “third cousin by marriage.”
Despite the progress of the album, and Keonig’s willingness to talk about it, no new songs were played during the band’s set at End of the Road, however, they did give five new songs their live debut at a Lollapalooza aftershow last month