DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
ON TOUR IN THE UK
THIS SEPTEMBER
INCLUDING TWO NIGHTS AT TROXY, LONDON
FOLLOWING RELEASE OF NEW ALBUM
OUT NOW
Credit: Shervin Lainez,
Following the release of their new album ‘I Built You A Tower’, indie-rock titans Death Cab for Cutie are heading out on tour in the UK this September.
Earlier this summer, Death Cab for Cutie unveiled their reconciliatory new record ‘I Built You A Tower’ via ANTI- Records, marking a return to their independent roots. The album received acclaim from Pitchfork, Record Collector, Rolling Stone, Classic Rock and more, with the latter describing it as a “career peak.” Now, Death Cab are taking their eleventh studio LP out on the road, with a run of dates across the UK this September.
Kicking things off at O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester, the eight-time GRAMMY nominated band will make stops at the Corn Exchange in Edinburgh, The Glasshouse in Gateshead, and The Prospect Building in Bristol. The tour also includes two nights at Art Deco venue Troxy in London, before coming to a close on the seafront at the iconic De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill.
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’. This time, Death Cab will be joined on the road by Floridian math-rockers Pool Kids, who provide support across all UK dates.
Full tour routing below. Tickets available here.
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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.
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.”
LISTEN/ORDER ‘I BUILT YOU A TOWER’
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UK Live Dates
19th September – O2 Victoria Warehouse, Manchester
20th September – Corn Exchange, Edinburgh
21st September – The Glasshouse, Gateshead
23rd September – The Prospect Building, Bristol
25th September – Troxy, London
26th September – Troxy, London
27th September – De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
Tickets available here.
*****
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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