Everything Vampire Weekend Have Done Since Modern Vampires of the City

More than half a decade, one lineup change, two solo albums, and a ton of co-writes later, Vampire Weekend have finally announced their fourth studio album. It arrives this spring via the band’s new label, Columbia Records, and its initials are FOTB. (Full name forthcoming, but it definitely isn’t Mitsubishi Macchiato, the record’s working title.) To celebrate, we’ve compiled a list of (almost) everything Vampire Weekend have done since 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, from the wonderful and weird to the... just plain old weird.

January 26, 2014: Vampire Weekend take home the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album for Modern Vampires of the City. They were nominated in the same category three years earlier. “I think that loss to the Black Keys in 2011 really motivated us to work even harder on this album,” Ezra Koenig said, tongue firmly planted in his cheek.

March 2, 2014: Ezra performs with Karen O at the Academy Awards. They do a duet of “The Moon Song,” O’s Oscar-nominated original for Spike Jonze’s Her.

April 17, 2014: Ezra’s long-held bromance with Chromeo’s Dave 1 continues, as he appears on the funk duo’s album White Women with “Ezra’s Interlude.”

May 5, 2014: Vaunted memer @Seinfeld2000—real name Jason Richards—releases “The Junior Mint,” a web game based on the “Seinfeld” episode of the same name. Ezra inexplicably covers the show’s theme song for the game, singing each note of the bassline. Fortunately, after disappearing for years, the game has been restored to the web. This marks just one of many, many @Seinfeld2000 collaborations to come.

June 22, 2014: Ezra pops up on another song, this time appearing on masked producer SBTRKT’s single “New Dorp, New York.” It’s one of the most significant features he does during Vampire Weekend’s inactive period; the song even made it into Vampire Weekend’s most recent setlists.

July 12, 2015: One of the first Beats 1 programs, Ezra’s radio show “Time Crisis” launches with Jake Longstreth (brother of Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth) joining him as a co-host. For some reason, @Seinfeld2000 comes aboard as producer. The biweekly, two-hour show features Ezra, Jake, and guests (Jonah Hill, Rashida Jones, and Dev Hynes among them) talking about the news, music, snack foods, and quite literally anything else. Could you call it “a show about nothing”? Perhaps!

September 18, 2015: Bassist Chris Baio becomes the first member of Vampire Weekend to release a solo album: The Names, a loose exploration of electronic music, inspired by architecture and recorded during Baio’s time living in London.

January 26, 2016: Rostam Batmanglij—the founding member of Vampire Weekend who produced all of the band’s albums—leaves the group. At this point, Rostam has collaborated with the likes of Carly Rae Jepsen, Charli XCX, Haim, and more. In his announcement, he clarifies that he’ll still work with Ezra on future projects—including Vampire Weekend—but continues, “My identity as a songwriter and producer, I realized, needs to stand on its own.”

After the news breaks, Ezra posts a story to Instagram to assure fans that he agreed with Rostam’s decision. “A couple years ago, Rostam and I sat down at his house & talked about whether our collaboration was dependent on being members of the same band. We both firmly agreed that nope, it was not. In fact, we agreed that our collaboration was more important,” he writes. “I’m psyched about the work we’ve already begun for LP4 and I’m psyched to hear anything else Rostam is a part of.” Ezra also teases, for the first time, the working title of LP4: Mitsubishi Macchiato.

In the two years since Rostam left Vampire Weekend, he has collaborated with artists including Frank Ocean, Solange, and Lykke Li, in addition to releasing his own debut LP Half-Light and a collaborative project with the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine.

January 30, 2016: Vampire Weekend’s first show after Rostam’s departure is an unconventional one: Ezra, Baio, and David Longstreth perform alongside the University of Iowa’s a cappella group, the Hawkapellas, for a Bernie Sanders rally held at the school. Sanders even joins them onstage for a rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.” Ezra subsequently appears on CNN to stump for the Democratic candidate. “I see a consistency in him that’s rare in most human beings, let alone politicians,” he says.

April 7, 2016: Ezra mentions on Twitter that Vampire Weekend were asked to cover the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” for the Shrek Forever After soundtrack, after the cover’s original performers, Weezer, got into a bus accident. “I refused to capitalize on Weezer’s misfortune,” he writes. “In the end, Weezer was able to record the cover after all. I was left with no tangible connection to the Shrek soundtrack universe.”

April 23, 2016: Surprises on surprises: Beyoncé releases Lemonade, an unexpected album and accompanying film that features contributions from Jonny Greenwood, Diplo, Father John Misty, Ezra, and countless others. Ezra contributed to the writing of “Hold Up,” a striking future-single with an instant-classic video of Beyoncé smashing car windows. His idea stemmed from a 2011 tweet inspired by Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2003 classic “Maps.” “Songs become tweets, tweets become songs,” Ezra muses. “It’s the way of the world.”

February 24, 2017: Drummer Chris Tomson releases his debut solo album, Youngish American, under the moniker Dams of the West. It was produced by Patrick Carney of the Black Keys.

March 24, 2017: Finally: Ezra gives an update on the next Vampire Weekend album in a lengthy Instagram post. Twenty-sixteen was spent “writing LP4, long days in the library researching w/ the grad students,” he writes, while 2017 would be spent recording and finishing the record. He also reveals two working song titles—“Conversation” and “Flower Moon”—and confirms the working title for the album is still Mitsubishi Macchiato, calling it “a helpful concept.”

September 3, 2017: Responding to a fan on Twitter, Ezra states that the new album is “80% done but the last 20% is always the hardest.” This kicks off an extensive running joke about percentages and how close to completion the record is.

September 22, 2017: After a few weeks of teasing, Ezra releases “Neo Yokio,” an animated series chronicling the lives of young “magistocrats” in an alternate timeline version of New York that’s half-submerged in water. The Netflix series features the voice-acting talents of Jaden Smith, Susan Sarandon, and Jude Law, who apparently recorded his parts as a robot butler in between shooting “The Young Pope.”

January 3, 2018: A real treat to start the new year: Cardi B posts a meme about grocery store samples… that happens to star Ezra. “When you take a free sample and pretend to care about the product,” the meme states, accompanied by an image of a pensive Ezra. “This is me at Whole Foods trying out Cheese and In the Teriyaki spot 😂😂😈😈😈,” Cardi captions the photo. Cardi later deletes the post, but it has since been archived.

February 16, 2018: Perhaps feeling the sting of rejecting Shrek Forever After, Ezra dips his toe into the world of songwriting for animated films. He pens “I Promise You” for James Corden to sing as the titular bunny of Peter Rabbit. He then shares his demo version, which he performs himself.

March 6, 2018: VW add two new fans to their arsenal thanks to Baio, who spent a considerable amount of time showing online love for Sting, Shaggy, and their collaborative debut 44/876. In a thank you video sent to Baio, Sting declares, “We’re gonna have a Vampire Weekend this weekend.” A few weeks later, Baio returns the favor by remixing the duo’s “Dreaming in the U.S.A.”

May 30, 2018: Along with announcing a handful of California shows, the band provides a crucial update: LP4 is 94.5 percent finished.

June 16, 2018: Vampire Weekend play their first proper show in four years, at Ojai, California’s Libbey Bowl. Ezra, Baio, and Tomson are joined by new touring members Greta Morgan (of Springtime Carnivore) and Brian Robert Jones (of Human Natural).

August 4 and 5, 2018: Percentages be damned. During a set at Lollapalooza, Ezra declares that LP4 is done (aka 100 percent finished). All that’s left, he says, is mastering. At an afterparty, Ezra plays new songs from his phone.

August 22, 2018: Ezra and his partner Rashida Jones reportedly welcome their first child: a baby boy named Isaiah Jones Koenig. Mazel Tov!

January 17, 2019: The wait is nearly over: Ezra Koenig announces that Vampire Weekend’s LP4 is coming soon and that, beginning next week, the band plans to release “three 2-song drops every month until the record is out.” (So that would suggest an April release date.) He also teases the initials of the album’s final title: FOTB, prompting some amusing guesses. Fam: Obtain This Bread—could it be?