Death Cab for Cutie - I Built You A Tower

“I Built You a Tower is the proper embrace of their earlier sound, where Death Cab craft emotionally frank character studies, build earworm hooks without overthinking it, and sound more self-assured as a group. The band was once again forced to work through “loss and grief,” says Gibbard, but it’s how they address it that lets the music breathe with life. ” – Pitchfork

Indie rock titans and eight-time GRAMMY nominees Death Cab for Cutie – Benjamin Gibbard, Nicholas Harmer, Jason McGerr, Dave Depper and Zac Rae – will release their 11th studio album, I Built You A Tower, this Friday, June 5. Ahead of its release, the band is sharing one final preview of the album with “Stone Over Water.” On the track, they say, “‘Stone Over Water’ is a song about trying to convince everyone around you and most importantly, yourself, that you are okay when you definitely are not.”

To celebrate album release week, Death Cab for Cutie took to the stage at Jimmy Kimmel Live! to perform the album’s lead single “Riptides.”

I Built You A Tower, out this Friday on ANTI-Records, marks the band’s return to their independent roots after 20 years on Atlantic Records. Produced and engineered by John Congleton and assembled from a mere three weeks of sessions, the album was recorded at Animal Rites in Los Angeles, as well as the band members’ homes in Seattle, Bellingham, Los Angeles and Portland.

In recent years, Death Cab celebrated several historic milestones, including massive sold-out tours celebrating the 20th anniversaries of seminal releases Transatlanticism and Plans. Those tours were pivotal to the creation of I Built You A Tower, as behind the scenes, Gibbard weathered the greatest pressure of his professional life — fronting both Death Cab and the Postal Service on arena stages for hours a night — while struggling with the collapse of his personal life in the background. The strain felt too much for one person to bear, and the “tower” originated as a way to protect himself. “There’s this need to find a place in ourselves to put loss and grief,” he explains. “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.”

I Built You A Tower is an album of reconciling with past selves in order to locate a new future. “The anniversary tours exorcised any nostalgia in our systems,” Depper observes. “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?” Harmer continues, “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.” As such, this is not the dreaded “return to form” narrative, but a reclamation of a core ethos that has run through Death Cab’s 30-year history.

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