It’s strange to think about Death Cab for Cutie without Chris Walla, the former co-founding member who officially left the group last year after playing one final show. But before he quit, he helped record the band’s next album, which is entitled Kintsugi and will be released March 31 via Atlantic Records.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, bassist Nick Harmer gave insight into the meaning of the album’s 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.
In the West, if you break an heirloom, you either throw it away or you make the repair as invisible as possible,” he continues. “But there’s this artistic movement in Japan where the repair of it, the damage of it, is more important as part of the history of something than repairing it to its original state.
Death Cab are not hiding the history or departure of Walla, but instead are making it a part of their new album and journey as a band.
Ben Gibbard followed Harmer’s statement with one of his own:
This is an opportunity for the band to become something it could only become by losing a founding member. 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.”
The last part is an interesting one, making me wonder what kind of record that they have in store. Something tells me that it will be one of their most personal ones in many years, but also rather different.
Gibbard explained that a lot of the songs are attempts to reconcile the past with the present, about his time in Los Angeles (maybe Zooey related?).
Rolling Stone ended their interview with this telling bit of information:
There will only be three of us in the photos now, and we’ll augment the live band for the time being and if we find ourselves playing with people that we feel can contribute on records, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. A lot of it has been like that, figuring it out as we go. But the one thing that united us all throughout the process was one goal: We wanted to make a really good record.
Sign me up. I’m excited to see what the band deliver with Kintsugi. Find it’s 11-song tracklist shared below.
1. No Room in Frame
2. Black Sun
3. The Ghosts of Beverly Drive
4. Little Wanderer
5. You’ve Haunted Me All My Life
6. Hold No Guns
7. Everything’s a Ceiling
8. Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)
9. El Dorado
10. Ingénue
11. Binary Sea
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