After inking with indie label ANTI- Records following two decades on major-label Atlantic, Death Cab for Cutie will unveil its 11th album, the John Congleton-produced I Built You a Tower, on June 5. The first single, “Riptides,” is out now in tandem with a video directed by Jason Lester.
Frontman Ben Gibbard says the song “is about the challenge of dealing with personal struggles as the world around us experiences tragedy and loss on an unfathomable scale. And how when these two elements intertwine themselves in our psyches, it feels utterly paralyzing.”
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The album was inspired by the recent mutual 20th anniversaries of Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism and Gibbard’s side project the Postal Service’s Give Up, as well as what Gibbard admits was “the collapse of his personal life. There’s this need to find a place in ourselves to put loss and grief — a place that can hold it so we can move on with our lives. But there are these moments where the trauma breaks out of that shell we created for it.”
In translating those emotions into music, “we felt part of this powerful force greater than all of us and went into the studio with a sense of, how can we capture that feeling and put it into something new?” bassist Nick Harmer says. “The whole experience of this record got us back to the earliest versions of this band: if the musicians in the room like what we’re working on, that’s enough. We reconnected with the confidence that comes with that.”
I Built You a Tower is the follow-up to 2022’s Asphalt Meadows, which spawned two No. 1 hits on Billboard‘s Adult Alternative Airplay chart in “Here to Forever” and “Pepper.”
Death Cab’s summer tour in support of I Built You a Tower begins July 10 in Minneapolis and runs through Aug. 7 in Paso Robles, Ca. Beforehand, the group will perform at Denver’s Outside Days festival on May 29.
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