Death Cab for Cutie – Riptides

Death Cab for Cutie formed in Bellingham, Washington in 1997, spent their early years on Barsuk, crossed over to Atlantic in 2005 with “Plans”, and have spent the two decades since as one of the more reliable names in indie rock. Now, with their eleventh album “I Built You a Tower” due June 5 on ANTI- Records, they’re back on an independent label for the first time in twenty years. That’s the context. The music is the point.

“Riptides” is the first single, and it builds slowly — guitar and Gibbard’s voice doing most of the early work before the band fills in around a bridge that earns its weight. Three weeks is how long the whole album took to record, split between Animal Rites in Los Angeles and the various home studios of a band spread across Seattle, Bellingham, Portland, and LA. John Congleton produced and engineered. “We weren’t afraid of a deeply human sound, some messiness”, Gibbard says. “This isn’t an airbrushed photograph. This is what we look like, this is what we sound like”. What caught me is how the chorus lands — not big, not cinematic, just tired and precise, which suits the lyric exactly.

The album’s title came out of a specific pressure point: the anniversary tours for both “Transatlanticism” and “Plans”, during which Gibbard was also fronting The Postal Service nightly on arena stages while his marriage was falling apart. “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”. “Riptides” is about what happens when those two things — personal grief and the weight of a world in difficulty — compound each other into paralysis. “I’m too tired to talk / I’m too tired to end the war / And I can’t seem to hold it together / Anymore”, Gibbard sings. It’s specific enough to feel honest and vague enough to land somewhere broader.

For the rest of the band, the anniversary tours cleared the slate rather than weighing on it. “The anniversary tours exorcised any nostalgia in our systems”, Dave Depper says. “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”? Nick Harmer adds: “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”. Eleven albums in, that’s harder to sustain than it sounds.

The eleven-track “I Built You a Tower” arrives with a full North American summer tour and a UK/European leg in the autumn. “Riptides” is here because it does what Death Cab have always done at their best — it sits in a specific feeling without overexplaining it, and the arrangement serves the song rather than dressing it up. I hadn’t expected to find it this affecting on first listen.

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Tracklist:

1. Full of Stars
2. Punching the Flowers
3. Pep Talk
4. I Built You a Tower (a)
5. Envy the Birds
6. Stone Over Water
7. How Heavenly a State
8. Trap Door
9. Riptides
10. The Flavor of Metal
11. I Built You a Tower (b)

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Tour Dates:

North America:

• 29 May — Denver, CO — Outside Days Festival
• 10 July — Minneapolis, MN — Armory *
• 11 July — Milwaukee, WI — Miller High Life Theatre *
• 12 July — Indianapolis, IN — Everwise Amphitheater at White River State Park *
• 14 July — Cincinnati, OH — MegaCorp Pavilion *
• 15 July — Cleveland, OH — Jacobs Pavilion *
• 17 July — Philadelphia, PA — Highmark Mann Center for the Performing Arts ^
• 18 July — Canandaigua, NY — CMAC ^
• 19 July — Toronto, ON — RBC Amphitheatre ^
• 21 July — Columbia, MD — Merriweather Post Pavilion ^
• 22 July — Raleigh, NC — Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek ^
• 24 July — St. Louis, MO — Stifel Theatre #
• 25 July — Bentonville, AR — The Momentary #
• 26 July — Council Bluffs, IA — Harrah’s Stir Cove #
• 28 July — Sandy, UT — Sandy Amphitheater #
• 29 July — Sandy, UT — Sandy Amphitheater #
• 31 July — Phoenix, AZ — Arizona Financial Theatre #
• 2 Aug — Los Angeles, CA — The Greek Theatre #
• 3 Aug — Los Angeles, CA — The Greek Theatre #
• 4 Aug — San Diego, CA — Gallagher Square at Petco Park #
• 6 Aug — Las Vegas, NV — The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas &
• 7 Aug — Paso Robles, CA — Vina Robles Amphitheatre &
• 9 Aug — San Francisco, CA — Outside Lands Festival

Europe:

• 16 Sept — Dublin, Ireland — 3Olympia Theatre
• 19 Sept — Manchester, UK — O2 Victoria Warehouse
• 20 Sept — Edinburgh, UK — Corn Exchange
• 21 Sept — Gateshead, UK — The Glasshouse
• 23 Sept — Bristol, UK — The Prospect Building
• 25 Sept — London, UK — Troxy
• 29 Sept — Utrecht, Netherlands — TivoliVredenburg
• 30 Sept — Brussels, Belgium — Cirque Royal
• 1 Oct — Berlin, Germany — Columbiahalle
• 3 Oct — Paris, France — Élysée Montmartre

* with Jay Som ^ with Japanese Breakfast # with Nation of Language & with Lala Lala