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Three years ago, Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig had just wrapped a successful tour behind his band’s third album, Modern Vampires of the City, which won a Grammy and topped critics’ lists (including ours) as well as the Billboard albums chart. But after about a decade of consistently leveling up in the industry while maintaining his artistic integrity—never an easy balance—Koenig found himself unsure of his next move. “For the first time, I didn’t have a strong sense of what I wanted to express as a songwriter, lyricist, musician,” he says.
So instead of just immediately making another album for the sake of it, he dreamed up “Neo Yokio.” The six-episode anime series, out now on Netflix, transports many of the same topics Koenig has explored in Vampire Weekend to an animated near-future New York City called Neo Yokio, where Washington Square Park is underwater, anti-bourgeoisie demons are on the loose, and members of high society are playing tennis matches on top of skyscrapers as so many others toil in slums below. “Certain themes like class, rich-people nonsense, and luxury items seem to be eternally relevant,” says Koenig, who created, executive produced, and wrote for the show.
But “Neo Yokio” isn’t an earth-scorching screed from the vocal Bernie Sanders supporter. It’s a comedy. And like much of Vampire Weekend’s work so far, the series slyly exposes both the humanity and the hypocrisy of its mostly well-off central characters and their obsessions with Cartier watches, field hockey, and blacker-than-black tuxedos. “Almost everything in ‘Neo Yokio’ is a loving tribute,” says Koenig. “Outside of maybe free-market capitalism, we’re not trying to drag anything.” Still, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that perhaps the most relatable character in the show isn’t a real person, but a robot butler voiced by Jude Law.
The Oscar-nominated actor isn’t the only boldfaced name offering their talents to “Neo Yokio.” The stacked cast includes Jaden Smith as the sad, deadpan quasi-hero Kaz Kaan, along with Susan Sarandon as his mercenary aunt, Tavi Gevinson as his maybe-possessed ex-girlfriend, Jason Schwartzman as his old-money rival, and Viceland hosts Desus Nice and Kid Mero as his wise-cracking buddies. Bolstering the show’s anime bona fides, Koenig worked with Japanese and Korean animation studios to bring the intricacies and oddities of “Neo Yokio” to bright, popping life.
Then, just as he put the final touches on the series, Koenig found himself excited to make music again. Earlier this month, he tweeted that the fourth Vampire Weekend album was 80 percent done; when we spoke last week, he was in L.A. hammering out that final 20 percent. “The good news is that all the difficulties of making an album—that sense of purpose—is not an issue,” he says. “That sense is back.”
Ezra Koenig: The initial idea of it being called “Neo Yokio” was slightly about seeing New York in an anime style. One of the things I’ve always loved about anime is that, even though it comes from Japan, it’s so international—so much of the big anime I love takes place in Italy or France or New York. There’s this really crazy, hyper-violent one about these gritty New York cops called Mad Bull 34 that made a big impression on me as a 12 year old. So working with anime artists to do New York in that style was intrinsic to the whole project. We would send these references to the animators—whether it was the Guggenheim, or a Cartier watch, or the Hamptons—and they’d do their thing. I like that layer of seeing the references through somebody else’s eyes.
There was something about a two-minute trailer getting such specific reactions that was a little bit surprising to me. But when I was thinking about making the show, my biggest concern was that we could only do it if we were working with Japanese partners. There is a lot of international animation that borrows heavily from anime style without actually employing Japanese people, and I didn’t want to be a part of that. I wanted to work with people who made the things that we’re referencing and paying tribute to. That was important to me.
The idea that people would get angry about the show because there’s an interracial kiss, or because there’s literally just black characters, or because I’m Jewish—that was less of a concern. There’s all sorts of weird connections in this world; I think anybody who has spent a lot of time on Twitter the last few years might have noticed the occasional alt-right tweet with an anime avatar. Reflecting on it, I can see why, for people who have strong feelings about cultural purity and race mixing, this show might seem like some degenerate Hollywood liberal shit. There are a lot of things that need to keep us up at night, but that probably shouldn’t be one of them.
I had met Jude before—he’d been to a Vampire Weekend show, and I had went out to a bar with him and some other people—so I think that helped. It wasn’t a fully cold call. Obviously, he is a movie star but he’s also a pretty idiosyncratic, interesting guy. He has picked a lot of unusual roles. Also, with animation, the time commitment isn’t crazy, so he popped in here and there. Almost the whole time we were recording, he was in Italy making “The Young Pope,” so any time we recorded him it was like 4 a.m. in L.A. So I’d set my alarm, wake up, have a cup of coffee, get on Skype, and sit in my bathrobe talking to Jude.
Since he’s a serious actor, I wondered if the recording sessions with him would be super serious. But then we’d be like, “Hey, would you be down to try any other roles besides the butler?” And he’s like, “Yeah sure, what kind of accent?” “Can you do an American accent?” “I haven’t done an American accent in a while, let me try.” The Talented Mr. Ripley is one of my favorite movies of all time, so I was like, “Maybe you can do your American voice from Talented Mr. Ripley.” And he’s like, “That’s a good idea.” Then he started to remember the role and was saying lines from that movie, and I was like, “This is sick.” He’s such a cool dude.
Well, you’ve got to imagine that we were writing that episode almost three years ago. At the time we were just trying to come up with New York–type things, almost like some “Law & Order” shit: “Ripped from the headlines.” It all actually started because Taylor went to a Knicks game, and Desus made a joke, like, “The Knicks are cursed.” So we had this idea that we should do something about a pop star who moves to Neo Yokio and goes to a basketball game. That’s all it was. It definitely wasn’t like, “We really need to talk about what Taylor Swift means.” I really don’t want it to come across as a takedown, because it’s not. I want to make clear the point of view of this show is that Sailor Pellegrino is kind of cool.
Also, calling her Sailor was partially just a reference to Sailor Moon. And I wanted to mix it up, so we gave her blue hair, which at the time seemed to signify Katy Perry, and made her super country and Southern, kind of like Miley Cyrus. It was supposed to be a blend of pop stars, but the fact that the show’s coming out in the midst of a Taylor Swift album cycle means that people are going to go to that. We just wanted to make an episode that was about how people have all these crazy expectations of what a pop star’s motives are. So much of the episode has people saying she sucks or people sucking up to her, and everybody has to have an opinion, but nobody actually knows that maybe Sailor Pellegrino just wants to destroy the bourgeoisie.
We live in such extreme times that I think we all have a responsibility to be aware of what’s happening and talk about it. But one funny thing about this show—especially because it vaguely references things like politics and terrorism, albeit in a pretty bizarre way—is that we made it before the primaries for the last election. So even if we wanted to reference the drama of the rise of Trump, we wouldn’t have been able to.
But that said, on a personal level, reaching this point in my career where I made three albums with Vampire Weekend, one cartoon with Jaden, and a handful of songs with other people, I do feel like I’m entering a new phase. In terms of not being scared to say what you want to say, that’s pretty important. If I can’t do that at age 33, I’ll probably never be able to do it. As you enter your thirties, things get a little more squiggly, with life spreading out in different directions. All of that makes me think that now’s the time to do what you really want to do and not have that same type of youthful anxiety about every step. I really drove myself crazy in a lot of ways between those first three albums, so trying to have candor, whether that’s about political beliefs or emotions, feels a lot fresher to me at this point in my life.
We’ll see. I always see Vampire Weekend on a scale where it can either do something that moves to the left or to the right—not politically, but artistically, in my own bizarre sense of what that means. On every album, I’ve always wanted to go in both directions at the same time. It gets harder and harder to continually do artistic things that I haven’t done before and also write songs that connect in a deeper way than before, but I don’t think those things should necessarily be mutually exclusive.
So this next album is pushing in a lot of different directions. There’s one or two things that make me nervous, but there has always been some sense of that with anything that I’ve ever been a part of that was good. I still have a million issues—right after I get off the phone with you I’ll be back in the studio criticizing drum sounds and vocal takes, and that will continue to be a nightmare for me for the next few months. But the thing that I’ve always feared most is truly losing an artistic sense of purpose. That’s most artists’ nightmare, that you don’t remotely have that sense of vision that you had when you were younger. Whether or not people fuck with the vision, that’s a different story. But as long as you have the vision, at least your career will have some meaning to you.
