Best of 2024: Bailey Wollowitz (fantasy of a broken heart) Got Back Into Vampire Weekend This Year

Only God Was Above Us made them revisit the whole catalog.

I did not have “getting back into Vampire Weekend” on my 2024 bingo card, but sure enough, here we are. Only God Was Above Us reinvigorated an old flame I thought had long gone out; it rehashed some complicated thoughts I have about the band, and dunked all over those thoughts with the bliss of hearing a new VW project that felt just like Contra did in middle school, and Modern Vampires a few years later. The first record is really good too, of course.

But this brings us to my falling out with them: in 2017, Al bought us tickets to see the Father of the Bride release show at Webster Hall in NYC. The show was on a Sunday, three sets and almost five hours long, and started at 10 AM. The first set was a mix of some classics and a healthy amount of covers; the second a full run of FOTB complete with extended jams and a guest appearance from Danielle Haim; and the third, a career-spanning blast containing, according to my stats, virtually every released VW song. The final stretch included an overpowering rush of some of the 2010s’ biggest indie singles with relentless energy. The encore included a “The Boys Are Back in Town” cover and a Dev Hynes appearance. A bagel breakfast was served at the first intermission, and a pizza lunch followed in the second. All very New York-coded. Al and I were both vegan at the time and couldn’t eat any of it.

And thus my disillusionment. Is Vampire Weekend a band that is sustainable to watch for five hours? Are we here to see a band reinventing themselves as a seven-piece, Deadhead-tinged jam operation, or to experience the new record in its entirety, or just to wait it out for the hits? It seemed paradoxical that the emphasis was on this big band and extended improvisation when the featured new record was for many a frustrating departure from the classic VW unit. Rostam had left the band, and in his wake the resulting project — while surely a needed new era for the band that had completed its formative trilogy of records — is not just VW without a member, but perhaps VW without VW. A collection of great songs and some truly inspired production are present, but any sense that this is the same band pushing forward is not. Father of the Bride was noted immediately by critics to be an Ezra Koenig solo venture, including a number of high profile features and session musicians, and while his voice and leadership undeniably make this a Vampire Weekend record, the vibe is a bit all over the place. The record is long, and lusciously so. The live band was padded with multi-instrumentalists, and the arrangements were loosened and focused on experimentation with old material. (The new dual guitar lead version of “White Sky” was legitimately breathtaking.) But no one was really losing their mind to the new stuff, and “A-Punk” performed by seven people seemed redundant despite its raw power.

So where does that leave me, a devoted fan of yore who perhaps felt satiated after this concert, and ready to recognize the end of a personal fascination with a band that I seemed to no longer understand? It left me utterly unprepared, five years later, to casually put on Only God Was Above Us in the car weeks after its release (I think we were on tour with Friko), and be immediately taken back to the feeling that had gripped me 15 years earlier.

This record breathes nostalgia of the original VW sound, but leans more on the delicate baroque-isms than the much-discussed borrowed afropop language that defined the first record. The most present references to that album in particular are almost literal quotes, with the band allowing an iconic drum part off Vampire Weekend’s “Mansard Roof” to reappear as a ghostly apparition on this record’s “Connect.” The record is alive with a sense of sincerity both towards the band’s old work and towards the modern landscape it occupies. Most gripping to me was that this is the most developed the production has ever sounded on a VW record, thoroughly competent as a modern pop album while still deeply soaked in a love for lo-fi and analog cheekiness.

After discovering this record, I listened to it probably 10 times in the following weeks. And then, as these things go, I fell off and haven’t put it back on in six months. Is this my AOTY? I don’t think so. And yet, in another part of my heart, Only God Was Above Us is the closure that I long needed in understanding a lifelong relationship with a band that, let’s face it, has always been toeing the line between genuine Hall of Fame greatness and kitschy indie kid music. I love Vampire Weekend, and I also think it’s messed up that they didn’t have any vegan cream cheese at the bagel lunch.

fantasy of a broken heart’s Feats of Engineering is out now on Dots Per Inch.

fantasy of a broken heart is a Brooklyn-based band formed by Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz. Their debut record, Feats of Engineering, is out September 27, 2024 via Dots Per Inch.