In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Death Cab for Cutie members Ben Gibbard, Nick Harmer, and Jason McGerr discussed their latest album, Kintsugi (due out March 31st), the follow-up to 2011’s Codes and Keys, and their first without founding member and producer Chris Walla. Bassist Harmer explains the album title, “It’s a Japanese style of art where they take fractured, broken ceramics and put them back together with very obvious, real gold. It’s making the repair of an object a visual part of its history. That resonated with us as a philosophy, and it connected to a lot of what we were going through, both professionally and personally.”
The departure of Walla was something that affected the band deeply, and something that resonated with them throughout the making of the album. “This is an opportunity for the band to become something it could only become by losing a founding member,” Gibbard says. “It’s our goal to make records that rank amongst the best work we’ve ever done. I completely respect and understand why people love Transatlanticism or We Have the Facts… or Narrow Stairs. And I would hope that as we move forward, people listen with as little prejudice as they can and try to hear the music for what it is and not what they want it to be.”
Walla left the band last year, and after 17 years, the group decided that instead of bringing in a fourth member, they would write and record as a trio, and bring on additional musicians for any live performances. And it seems they have settled into that role, attempting to move forward while still retaining the history that brought them to this point.
Kintsugi Tracklist:
01. No Room in Frame
02. Black Sun
03. The Ghosts of Beverly Drive
04. Little Wanderer
05. You’ve Haunted Me All My Life
06. Hold No Guns
07. Everything’s a Ceiling
08. Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)
09. El Dorado
10. Ingénue
11. Binary Sea
[via Rolling Stone]
