Death Cab for Cutie
I Built You A Tower Tour with support from Pool Kids
Epic. Emotional. Indie rock greats surviving and thriving.
Death Cab for Cutie’s 11th studio album, I Built You A Tower, marks the band’s return to their independent roots. Produced and engineered by John Congleton and assembled from a mere three weeks of sessions, the album was recorded at Animal Rites in Los Angeles, as well as the band members’ homes in Seattle, Bellingham, Los Angeles and Portland. The album’s first single, “Riptides”, is the band’s 9th #1 at Adult Alternative radio.
In recent years, the band 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, Ben Gibbard weathered the greatest pressure of his professional life — fronting both Death Cab for Cutie 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,” Dave 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 for Cutie’s 30-year history.
Need to know
What they say
“If someone comes up to me and tells me a story about how something that I’ve written has impacted them or has marked time in their life, it sounds kind of hokey, but it really is one of the greatest compliments you can be given.”
– Ben Gibbard, Death Cab for Cutie
About the band
Formed in 1997 in Bellingham, Washington, Death Cab for Cutie became known for Ben Gibbard’a earnest, erudite (yet still accessible) lyricism inspired by the likes of The Smiths, The Cure, Elliott Smith and Modest Mouse.
Nearly three decades after Gibbard recorded his bare-bones debut cassette, You Can Play These Songs With Chords, DCfC have grown from underground indie contenders to pillars of the modern alternative-rock landscape.
Not only did Gibbard’s onetime passion project blossom into a full-fledged music career — complete with ten studio albums (three of which have been platinum-certified), seven EPs, and eight Grammy nominations — it became the very soundtrack to fans’ lives. In 2021, Gibbard and DCfC were honoured as one of the 200 Most Important Artists of Pitchfork’s First 25 Years.
