As promised, Vampire Weekend has dropped two new songs and revealed its album title

By Sam Barsanti | January 24, 2019 | 5:42pm

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As promised, Vampire Weekend has dropped two new songs and revealed its album title

You can stop listening to that two-hour loop of the guitar riff from “Harmony Hall,” as Vampire Weekend has come through on frontman Ezra Koenig’s promise to release two new songs this week with “2021" and the full version of “Harmony Hall.” These are the first new Vampire Weekend tracks since 2013's Modern Vampires Of The City and the first without regular contributions from longtime bandmember Rostam Batmanglij, who left Vampire Weekend in 2016—though Koenig said in a new Beats1 interview that he helped produce “Harmony Hall” and “worked very closely on” another new song. Koenig also told NPR that guitarist Greg Leisz performed the guitar solo on “Harmony Hall” and that Jenny Lewis does the “boy” bit on “2021" (which is a little weird, because it’s pretty distorted). You can hear both new songs below, but just be aware that the “Harmony Hall” video is a little… buggy. (Har har.)

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Along with these new songs, Vampire Weekend also revealed the album’s full name, which was previously teased with nothing but the initials “FOTB.” We collected some guesses as to what that might stand for, and, well:

Hot dog, we have a wiener. The album is called Father Of The Bride, though we don’t know if it’s actually because it’s each half of the double album is supposed to represent a different Steve Martin movie. We know from a press release that Koenig chose the title “years back” and that it’s not a reference to the fact that Koenig just had a son, but beyond a line about it having “multiple layers of meaning,” that’s all we really know about the significance of Father Of The Bride. Also, the album still doesn’t have a firm release date.