" MY PASSION IN LIFE IS CHILLING "

In the five years since the release of Father of the Bride, Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig has lived across the world with his family, shed a cynicism that had followed him around since his teens, and made new album Only God Was Above Us, the band's most interconnected statement yet - all while discovering a new laidback philosophy

- WILL RICHARDS

Beginning an album with the lyric "fuck the world" is a bold and pointed choice, but Ezra Koenig has a few qualifiers to share.

"THERE'S SOMETHING PROVOCATIVE about opening with that line, but it was important to me that it was in quotation marks," he tells me from the sofa of a plush London hotel, where he's just wrapped his Rolling Stone UK photoshoot. "It says, 'Fuck the world / You said it quiet'. We're not out here on some Mötley Crüe bad boy shit. 'Middle fingers up, Vampire Weekend's back!""

Rather than a balls-out statement of intent, the lyric that opens 'Ice Cream Piano', the first track from the band's fifth album Only God Was Above Us, is a softly sung and solemn admission of cynicism. "It's about somebody who's either talking to someone or arguing with themselves," Koenig says of the song. "They're talking about a fatalism and a cynicism. It's a type of anger at life and at the world-fuck the world. There's definitely ambivalence and anxiety in that song, and there is a lot of that in the early songs on the record." 

You might not think it from listening to one of the sunniest, most buoyant bands of the 21st century, but cynicism has followed Koenig around since he was a teenager. Vampire Weekend emerged from the post-Strokes indie rock scene of New York City in the late 2000s. Defined by their preppy dress sense and Columbia education, their debut selftitled album from 2008 was full of sprightly rhythms and Koenig's polite, distinctive voice. It spawned generational hits 'A-Punk' and 'Oxford Comma' and set the band - Koenig, now-departed multi-instrumentalist and producer Rostam Batmanglij, bassist Chris Baio and drummer Chris Tomson on the path to becoming stars of 21st-century indie.