Death Cab For Cutie Announce New Album and Share First Single, “Riptides”

Band Death Cab For Cutie has announced a new album and shared its lead single.

Their 11th studio album, I Built You a Tower, will be released on June 5. It’s their first album in four years. The record was inspired in part by the 20th anniversaries of Death Cab For Cutie’s Transatlanticism and Give Up, by Ben Gibbard’s side project, The Postal Service.

“‘I Built You A Tower’ is an album about loss and the ways by which we attempt, ultimately unsuccessfully, to compartmentalize grief,” the band said in a Facebook post announcing the album. “We compartmentalize because we need to keep ourselves together to do our jobs, raise our families, etc. But the structures we build within ourselves to hold our grief at bay are only so strong. Eventually, the grief spills over and we are forced to face it. And sometimes it is more than we can bear.”

Gibbard elaborated on the idea of the tower in the title symbolizing an emotional shield. He said, “There’s this need to find a place in ourselves to put loss and grief. 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 will be Death Cab For Cutie’s first with new label ANTI- Records. Back in January, they announced they’d parted ways with their major label, Atlantic, after 20 years. They noted they would be working with ANTI- moving forward. Much of the album was recorded at Animal Rites, the Los Angeles studio of producer John Congleton, over the course of about three weeks.

Death Cab For Cutie also shared the album’s first single, called “Riptides.” The song shares the album’s theme of grief and is accompanied by a new music video directed by Jason Lester.

“‘Riptides’ is about the challenge of dealing with personal struggles as the world around us experiences tragedy and loss on an unfathomable scale,” Death Cab For Cutie shared on Facebook. “And how when these two elements intertwine themselves in our psyches, it feels utterly paralyzing.”

Death Cab For Cutie also announced added dates to their previously announced tour, which will kick off in North America in the summer and will head to Europe through early October.