Photo: Vampire Weekend
Vampire Weekend have surprised fans by streaming their new album, Modern Vampires of the City, one week early.
The record is officially released on 14 May, but is already available for fans to listen to here on iTunes and pre-order. The band have already shared three of the tracks, 'Ya Hey', 'Diane Young' and 'Step' online with official lyric videos, but there are still nine other songs to check out.
The album was initially due to be released today (7 May) but had to be pushed back by a week because of "unanticipated delays in the production of physical copies of the record." Modern Vampires will instead be streamed online for a week before the official release.
The album is the follow-up to 2010's Contra and, in a recent interview with Q magazine, Ezra Koenig labelled it 'darker' and 'more organic' than the first two records.
"It really does feel like the third chapter in a book," the Vampire Weekend frontman said. "We created some characters on the first record, some of which are real people, some of which are ourselves, so it's not hard to keep following them and see what their concerns are now and how their lives have changed."
Fans can now listen to Modern Vampires of the City online
He also explained, "This third record feels like coming back home and taking stock. Maybe being in our late-20s is a good time to do that."
Keyboardist/guitarist Rostam Batmanglij also explained in an interview with Digital Spy that the band chose to keep the quality strong on the new record.
He said, "We kept a pretty high standard and if anything wasn't good enough, we had to leave it by the wayside. We had to do that more so than ever before. But ultimately, we knew when we started a good song. It wasn't a source of concern or worry."
Way back in 2010: Check out Vampire Weekend impressing fans at Brixton Academy
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