HOPE

Vampire Weekend doesn't want your defeatist grousing

- AMANDA PETRUSICH

For a while, in the late For two-thousands, it was extremely fun to dunk on Vampire Weekend. Formed at Columbia University in 2006, the band made perky, bleating indie rock about Cape Cod, mansard roofs, and Oxford commas. The singer and guitarist Ezra Koenig wore khakis and sometimes loosely knotted a sweater around his shoulders, a look that everyone knows is the unofficial uniform of rich, scummy boyfriends in high-school movies. The band's vibe was preppy but lightly debauched, somewhere between "Dead Poets Society" and "Less Than Zero." Vampire Weekend felt slightly out of step with the arch, fuzzy, forward-thinking indie rock of the time. Its music was polished and sunny, a little cocky, with melodic sensibilities indebted to the dynamic, sensitive songs and songwriters of the seventies and eighties: the Beat's "Save It for Later," Paul Simon's "Under African Skies," Harry Nilsson's "Gotta Get Up." "

The band's second album, "Contra, released in 2010, débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. The songs were idiosyncratic but had shockingly broad appeal. That winter, the single "Holiday," a reggae-inflected rock track that, for better or worse, could have been airlifted from a third-wave ska compilation, appeared in two major television commercials at the same time. More albums followed-"Modern Vampires of the City," in 2013, and "Father of the Bride," in 2019.