It's been six years since Vampire Weekend released an album, the last one being Modern Vampires of the City. And on top of that with news of Rostam Batmanglij's exit from the band, things looked really grim. But then VW started to do show festival's and the fans were delighted when Ezra teased them with new songs and started to take questions about their upcoming album. In August 2018, when the band performed in Chicago's Lollapalooza festival, VW played five new songs and Ezra also revealed there that their upcoming album is complete, it was just that they "we're mastering it."
Now cut to 2019, Ezra Koenig took to Instagram and indulged the band's fanbase with fresh new content. "It's called "FOTB" (well those are the initials - that's a VW tradition) and it's 18 songs," said Ezra about the upcoming album. "It's a lot of songs but they all belong there," Ezra assures in his post. He also confessed that initially, he was thinking of doing a 23- song album which would be about "some human chromosome s**t," but then while doing the Spotify compilation for Mitsubishi Macchiato, he felt "we'd been scooped."
He addressed the most important curiosity too, "Whether it will be a double album?" -"The vinyl will be double so…yes? It's about 59 minutes long."
But the best part about Ezra's post comes from here on. They will be releasing songs on online platforms for the next three month's or as Ezra puts it, "After all that waiting, you should have the general schedule: There will be three 2-song drops every month until the record is out."
Which means, for the next three months, VW will be releasing six songs, which means that in total there will be 18 songs that will be released, starting from next week, before the album hits shelves.