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Vampire Weekend to release double album FOTB in 2019

The first new songs are set to drop next week

Jack Saddler
Friday 18 January 2019 13:11 GMT
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(Getty Images)

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Vampire Weekend have announced plans to release a new double album this year.

Frontman Ezra Koenig revealed on Instagram that two new songs from the 18-track record will be released in packs each month – starting next week – until the eventual full release.

The album, their first body of work in over five years, was originally given the title Mitsubishi Machiato, but Koenig has since confirmed the album’s initials are now FOTB. The full title has not been revealed.

Koenig’s post also revealed when the tracks will be released, along with presumably the initials each tracks.

“There will be three two-song drops every month until the record is out,” he wrote. ”1. Hh/2021 2. s/bb 3. tl/uw. (Plans can change that’s the plan).”

Although no exact date has been penned for the album’s full release, the timings point towards FOTB dropping around March and April.

Koenig said: “I know that five to six years is considered a long time between records. Personally, I think it’s a dignified pace befitting a band that’s already placed three albums in stores but everyone has their own sense of time.”

Their last album, Modern Vampires of the City, debuted at number one in the Billboard 200, and it reached number three in the UK charts.

“Many of you have been hungry for information and we’ve given you very little,” Koenug continued. “I don’t like talking ab[ou]t a project while in the middle of making it. I usually regret everything I say cuz it turns out to be wrong (so disregard anything I may have said in the past 5 years.)”

FOTB will be Vampire Weekend’s first record without founding member Rostam Batmanglij, who left the band in 2016. Upon his departure, he said: “My identity as a songwriter and producer, I realised, needs to stand on it’s own.”

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