Ezra Koenig has given another update on Vampire Weekend’s new album.
Taling to Entertainment Weekly, the frontman explains how writing for Kanye West initially made him want to get “200 people” working on the record.
“Increasingly that seems like that’s the way that people work,” he says. “It’s not just pop, that pop way of working starts to encompass the whole music industry.”
After a while, though, that urge went away: “At the end of the day, the people I’ve ended up enjoying working with are the people I already knew.”
That includes previous Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij, who left the band last year to work on his own material, as well as producer Ariel Rechtshaid.
And as for what it sounds like? “Songwriting as a concept is the single most important thing on this record,” Ezra notes. “To me, that’s the untapped frontier for Vampire Weekend; nobody wants to hear the Vampire Weekend trap album.”