DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM I BUILT YOU A TOWER
OUT JUNE 5TH ON ANTI- RECORDS
First single “Riptides” out now
UK tour dates announced for September
Photo credit: Shervin Lainez
Today, indie rock titans and eight-time GRAMMY nominees Death Cab for Cutie – Benjamin Gibbard, Nicholas Harmer, Jason McGerr, Dave Depper and Zac Rae – announce their 11th studio album. I Built You A Tower, will be released on June 5th via ANTI- Records. The move marks the band’s return to their independent roots after 20 years on Atlantic Records. Produced and engineered by John Congleton and assembled from a mere three weeks of sessions, I Built You A Tower was recorded at Animal Rites in Los Angeles, as well as the band members’ homes in Seattle, Bellingham, Los Angeles and Portland.
Alongside today’s album announcement, Death Cab for Cutie share the album’s propulsive first single, “Riptides.” Speaking on the single Gibbard says, “Riptides is about the challenge of dealing with personal struggles as the world around us experiences tragedy and loss on an unfathomable scale. And how when these two elements intertwine themselves in our psyches, it feels utterly paralyzing.”
Listen to the song and watch its Jason Lester-directed video HERE.
In recent years, Death Cab celebrated several historic milestones, including massive sold-out tours celebrating the 20th anniversaries of seminal releases Transatlanticism and Plans. Those tours were pivotal to the creation of I Built You A Tower, as behind the scenes, Gibbard weathered the greatest pressure of his professional life — fronting both Death Cab and the Postal Service on arena stages for hours a night — while struggling with the collapse of his personal life in the background. The strain felt too much for one person to bear, and the “tower” originated as a way to protect himself. “There’s this need to find a place in ourselves to put loss and grief,” he explains. “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 is an album of reconciling with past selves in order to locate a new future. “The anniversary tours exorcised any nostalgia in our systems,” Depper observes. “We felt part of this powerful force greater than all of us and went into the studio with a sense of, how can we capture that feeling and put it into something new?” Harmer continues, “The whole experience of this record got us back to the earliest versions of this band: If the musicians in the room like what we’re working on, that’s enough. We reconnected with the confidence that comes with that.” As such, this is not the dreaded “return to form” narrative, but a reclamation of a core ethos that has run through Death Cab’s 30-year history.
The band recently announced a North American summer tour, which is on sale now. Today the band also announces an autumn UK/EU tour, with tickets going on sale this Friday at 10 am locally. These performances come on the heels of a historic, sold-out global tour in marking the 20th anniversary of Transatlanticism plus their universally acclaimed 10th studio effort, 2022’s Asphalt Meadows. Sign up for early access to tickets at deathcabforcutie.com.
Tour dates:
May 29 – Denver, CO – Outside Days
July 10 – Minneapolis, MN – Armory *
July 11 – Milwaukee, WI – Miller High Life Theatre *
July 12 – Indianapolis, IN – Everwise Amphitheater at White River State Park *
July 14 – Cincinnati, OH – MegaCorp Pavilion *
July 15 – Cleveland, OH – Jacobs Pavilion *
July 17 – Philadelphia, PA – Highmark Mann Center for the Performing Arts ^
July 18 – Canandaigua, NY – CMAC ^
July 19 – Toronto, ON – RBC Amphitheatre ^
July 21 – Columbia, MD – Merriweather Post Pavilion ^
July 22 – Raleigh, NC – Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek ^
July 24 – St. Louis, MO – Stifel Theatre #
July 25 – Bentonville, AR – The Momentary #
July 26 – Council Bluffs, IA – Harrah’s Stir Cove #
July 28 – Sandy, UT – Sandy Amphitheater #
July 29 – Sandy, UT – Sandy Amphitheater #
July 31 – Phoenix, AZ – Arizona Financial Theatre #
August 2 – Los Angeles, CA – The Greek Theatre #
August 3 – Los Angeles, CA – The Greek Theatre #
August 4 – San Diego, CA – Gallagher Square at Petco Park #
August 6 – Las Vegas, NV – The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas &
August 7 – Paso Robles, CA – Vina Robles Amphitheatre &
August 9 – San Francisco, CA – Outside Lands
September 16 – Dublin, Ireland – 3Olympia Theatre
September 19 – Manchester, UK – O2 Victoria Warehouse
September 20 – Edinburgh, UK – Corn Exchange
September 21 – Gateshead, UK – The Glasshouse
September 23 – Bristol, UK – The Prospect Building
September 25 – London, UK – Troxy
September 29 – Utrecht, Netherlands – TivoliVredenburg
September 30 – Brussels, Belgium – Cirque Royal
October 1 – Berlin, Germany – Columbiahalle
October 3 – Paris, France – Elysée Montmartre
*with Jay Som
^with Japanese Breakfast
#with Nation of Language
&with Lala Lala
UK/EU tour poster
Album art
Tracklisting
1. Full of Stars
2. Punching The Flowers
3. Pep Talk
4. I Built You A Tower (a)
5. Envy The Birds
6. Stone Over Water
7. How Heavenly a State
8. Trap Door
9. Riptides
10. The Flavor of Metal
11. I Built You A Tower (b)
More on Death Cab for Cutie and I Built You A Tower:
You could easily mistake it for romantic tribute. I Built You A Tower, the phrase that gives Death Cab for Cutie’s 11th album its title, sounds like a paean or plea to a former love. An obelisk and work of art, a testament to what you had with one another. Something so great surely it could never collapse. But for Ben Gibbard it was quite different, a sturdy tomb of stone in which he could — temporarily and in vain — hide the past away just so he could push through when grief threatened to consume him.
I Built You A Tower is an album of reconciling with past selves in order to locate a new future. This was true for Death Cab for Cutie as much as it was for Gibbard himself. After 20-odd years in the major label system, the band returned to their indie roots and signed with ANTI- Records. The move coincided with Death Cab embarking on a writing and recording process more akin to their initial run of albums in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, filtered through lessons learned through the textural experimentation of their ‘10s records and a decade-plus with their current quintet lineup: Gibbard, bassist Nick Harmer, drummer Jason McGerr and multi-instrumentalists Dave Depper and Zac Rae.
Before all that, Death Cab for Cutie first revisited the past. The 2023-2025 tours celebrating the 20th anniversaries of seminal releases Transatlanticism and Plans were pivotal to the creation of I Built You A Tower. Spending so much time in the world of beloved old releases reminded the quintet the connection they could achieve with fans and each other through more stripped-down songs relative to the layered, maximalist work they had favoured in recent years. Soon after wrapping the Plans shows, the band gathered in the studio once more with producer John Congleton, harnessing the post-tour energy to record a raw, vulnerable new set of songs from Gibbard with the urgency they demanded.
After 2018’s Thank You for Today found the quintet figuring out how to record together and 2022’s Asphalt Meadows’ pandemic gestation necessitated a remote “chain letter” writing process, I Built You A Tower provided an opportunity to represent the interplay that had developed since Depper and Rae first joined as auxiliary touring members in support of 2015’s Kintsugi.
Trusting Congleton after their collaboration on Asphalt Meadows, Death Cab let him lead them into a more pared-down, immediate aesthetic — songs sometimes caustic (Harmer and Depper’s angsty co-write “How Heavenly a State”) and sometimes wistfully twilit (“I Built You A Tower (a)”) always delivered with the lean muscle of the five men in the room with minimal ornamentation. The album came together in a mere three weeks and change, the fastest since The Photo Album. “We weren’t afraid of a deeply human sound, some messiness,” Gibbard asserts. “This isn’t an airbrushed photograph. This is what we look like, this is what we sound like.”
For Gibbard, keeping these songs visceral and undistilled served other purposes, echoing the personal turmoil they depicted and the malleability I Built You A Tower took on over time. During those anniversary tours, Gibbard weathered the greatest pressure of his professional life while struggling with the collapse of his marriage in the background. Though heartbreak remains eternally fertile ground for songwriters, Gibbard was seeking something else when the songs poured out amidst the anniversary tours. I Built You A Tower is not a divorce record, but rather a record about the aftermath — running from or sidelining grief, coming to terms with the emotional debt that accrues, one man’s at-times harrowing reckoning with himself and the past lives left in his wake. There is no score-settling, no bitterness. At least, none aimed at another person. Across the album, you hear Gibbard build a tower while he dismantles himself.
There is a specific arc across the project, from the bad thoughts creeping up in “Pep Talk,” to Gibbard explicitly confessing “I’m trying to hold it together” in “Stone Over Water,” until the propulsive “Riptides” exposes a desperate admission it’s not working. I Built You A Tower captures coping mechanisms failing at every turn, yet nevertheless arrives at a decision to carry on. By the end, the shape of the tower changes.
I Built You A Tower is the sound of loss, compartmentalisation and then grief bursting out from the seams. But it’s also the sound of the growth that comes after falling apart, of acknowledging pain without letting it destroy you. “I see the tower existing on your emotional horizon,” Gibbard concludes. “You don’t always have to look at what’s inside it, but it’s a reminder that it happened. You know it’s there. You have to face it.”
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