Vampire Weekend finds energy

LOS ANGELES — The members of Vampire Weekend are very good at this.

Gathered on a recent afternoon to talk about the band’s fifth album, “Only God Was Above Us,” frontman Ezra Koenig, bassist Chris Baio and drummer Chris Tomson have agreed to play a little game in which they’ll try to name from memory LP No. 5 by half a dozen high-profile acts.

Five out of six they get right: U2 (“The Joshua Tree”), Kanye West (“My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”), Bruce Springsteen (“The River”), Bob Dylan (“Bringing It All Back Home”) and Coldplay (“Mylo Xyloto”). But even with the one they flub — Koenig initially misidentifies Madonna’s fifth album as “Like a Prayer” before correcting himself to “Erotica” — they make a pretty solid case for their mistake.

“So she becomes Madonna over the course of the first three, then ‘Like a Prayer’ consolidates it,” Koenig says. “Maybe a bit early. Doesn’t ‘Like a Prayer’ have fifth-album energy?”

It’s no surprise that these unabashed music nerds would crush this challenge, given that Vampire Weekend has been peppering its indie rock, for the better part of two decades, with references and allusions drawn from an attentive and enthusiastic study of pop history.

On tour this year, the band has been performing a country-themed medley it calls “Cocaine Cowboys” that links Vampire Weekend’s “Married in a Gold Rush” with the Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Sin City” and “All the Gold in California” by the Gatlin Brothers; for an encore, the musicians take requests from the audience and attempt to cover songs they don’t necessarily know how to play, including Steely Dan’s “Peg” and “Rock Lobster” by the B-52’s, both of which they (mostly) managed to get through at the Hollywood Bowl in June.

But they’re also acutely aware of the creative arc built into a discography and the story it tells about an artist or a band. The way Koenig sees it, Albums 1, 2 and 3 are about establishing an identity; Album 4 represents a chance to stretch out and “spend a little of that capital.” The fifth LP, he says, should be “a confident distillation of what you do. It shows that you know who you are and that you’ve still got gas in the tank.”

Koenig, 40, remembers seeing the video for the Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic,” the lead single from the rap trio’s 1998 “Hello Nasty” — “a classic fifth album,” he reckons. “They’d never done anything quite like that, but you knew them well enough at that point to think it was perfect. It’s like: different, but of course.”

That’s an apt description of “Only God Was Above Us,” which jams together styles and textures with the band’s usual intricacy — check out the way “Ice Cream Piano” moves between genteel balladry and galloping rock — while relishing a newly noisy edge.

“On every album, they make complexity irresistible,” says Thomas Mars of the French band Phoenix, which drafted Koenig to appear on the song “Tonight,” from 2022’s “Alpha Zulu” LP. “Their music is so layered and it grabs from so many directions. Yet it always sounds like them, which is what a true artist does.”

Phoenix has invited Koenig to play “Tonight” onstage several times over the last couple of years, including during the closing ceremony of this past summer’s Olympic Games in Paris and at May’s Just Like Heaven festival in Pasadena, where Koenig stuck around after “Tonight” to join Phoenix for its hit “1901.” “He was just riffing on his guitar, surrounded by six other musicians, and he made the song sound like Vampire Weekend,” Mars recalls with a laugh.

Titled after a headline in the New York Daily News shown on the album’s cover, “Only God Was Above Us” — which may bring Vampire Weekend its fourth nomination for alternative music album at the Grammy Awards — threads together thoughts on some of the cultural figures and political maneuverings that shaped the band’s former hometown. Vampire Weekend formed in 2006 while the members were students at New York’s Columbia University, though Koenig, Baio and Tomson all now live in Los Angeles. (Koenig’s partner, with whom he shares a 6-year-old son, is actor Rashida Jones, who — fun fact — was directed by Mars’ wife, Sofia Coppola, in 2020’s “On the Rocks.”)

As a New Yorker transplanted to L.A., Koenig draws a line between his lyrical preoccupations and the fact that the New York-obsessed “Seinfeld” was shot here and that the Beastie Boys “were living in L.A. when they made ‘Paul’s Boutique,’ which has so much New York flavor.” Koenig has driven past the real-life facade of Jerry Seinfeld’s fictional apartment building in Koreatown. “It’s a period building, not like some West Hollywood condo,” he says, sprawled with his bandmates on a sofa at their manager’s office. “But the more you look at it, the more you’re like, ‘Yeah, I can tell.’”

The members attribute the new album’s relatively raw sound to the many hours they spent playing together in a rehearsal space that Baio and Tomson keep in Eagle Rock. Yet Ariel Rechtshaid, who co-produced the last three Vampire Weekend albums — and who’s also worked with Haim, Usher and Charli XCX — notes that in some ways the recording process was more elaborate than on the band’s tidier earlier records.

“It gives the illusion of being less produced,” Rechtshaid says. “But this was a s— ton of human performance”: people plucking guitars, people blowing saxophones, people sawing away at cellos and violins. Indeed, Koenig’s singing has never been more expressive — wistful in “Mary Boone,” tender yet suspicious in “Prep-School Gangsters” — which according to Rechtshaid is always the goal in the studio. “Nothing is more important than the voice that’s talking to you through the speakers,” he says. “Everything else is just there to serve that.”