Listen to Vampire Weekend's first new songs in six years

Vampire Weekend is back!

Six years ago, the indie rock band released their third album, Modern Vampires of the City, and were rewarded with critical acclaim and high placement on year-end lists. Nothing had been heard from them since. One prominent member, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, left the band in 2016 to focus on his solo album and production work, while singer and frontman Ezra Koenig developed the anime series Neo Yokio for Netflix. But now, the band is gearing up for the release of their long-awaited fourth album, titled Father of the Bride. On Thursday, Vampire Weekend released the first two singles from the album, "Harmony Hall" and "2021."

"Harmony Hall" is the main attraction from this duo. Clocking in at over five minutes, it features production from Ariel Rechtshaid, who worked on Modern Vampires of the City, and Batmanglij himself. It also has a direct lyrical callback to "Finger Back" from Modern Vampires of the City ("I don't wanna live like this, but I don't wanna die"), suggesting the band might still be very interested in themes of mortality and time. "2021" is much shorter, and feels like an interstitial track – the kind that Father of the Bride should have plenty of room for, given that it's apparently 18 songs long – as Koenig revealed in a recent Instagram post.

"It's a lot of songs but they all belong there," Koenig wrote on Instagram last week. "(If you disagree, you can always say it was 6 songs too long & make a lil 12-song playlist version of it.) At first, I wanted to make two 23-song albums on some human chromosome shit but then 23&me started doing Spotify playlists and I don't know…felt we'd been scooped.⁣ Is it a double album? The vinyl will be double so…yes? It's about 59 minutes long. We can talk more [about] that later – if [you] care. To me, it's just FOTB.⁣"

Koenig also promised that the band would be releasing "three 2-song drops a month" until Father of the Bride is released. Listen to the first two below. <iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5kXDF4OmM5COyeo6z97nEk" width="300" height="380" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allow="encrypted-media" class="" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" resize="0" replace_attributes="1" name=""></iframe>w·Z×Î^Û—ýí§ëzy¿|ÙÇ_ÛŽ½Õ·^qη

Related content:

• Ezra Koenig previews Vampire Weekend's fourth LP: ‘You want to age gracefully and not boringly'
• Rostam Batmanglij leaves Vampire Weekend