Death Cab For Cutie Return To NPR’S Tiny Desk
Indie rock titans and eight-time GRAMMY nominees Death Cab for Cutie – Benjamin Gibbard, Nicholas Harmer, Jason McGerr, Dave Depper and Zac Rae – return to NPR for an incredible new Tiny Desk concert. The band first performed a Tiny Desk in 2015 as a trio, and now – over 11 years later – they are back, this time as a full band and with a catalogue-spanning performance.
Death Cab for Cutie played two tracks off of their just-released 11th studio album, I Built You A Tower. “Pep Talk” and “Stone Over Water” are followed by Transatlanticism track “Title & Registration” and Plans’ “Soul Meets Body.”
Check out the performance now…
I Built You A Tower, out now 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.
This November the band head out on an Australian headline tour, which is on sale now. These performances come on the heels of a historic, sold-out global tour in marking the 20th anniversary of Transatlanticism plus their universally acclaimed 10th studio effort, 2022’s Asphalt Meadows.
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
AUSTRALIAN HEADLINE TOUR DATES
November 12 – Hordern Pavilion. Sydney, NSW
November 13 – Margaret Court Arena, Melbourne, VIC
November 15 – Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane, QLD
TICKETS ON SALE NOW
