Vibes ready for summer once again, it’s nice that we’re starting to get all the summer music through now. Indie rock titans and eight-time GRAMMY nominees Death Cab For Cutie have shared ‘Punching The Flowers’, the second single from their 11th studio album I Built You A Tower, out 5th June via ANTI- Records. An EU/UK tour follows in autumn.
What works about this one is that it’s easy listening, but it’s not completely happy music the whole time. Sometimes you just want something like that, the same way you’re occasionally in the mood for it to rain. Really looking forward to hearing the whole tone of the upcoming album.
The track is described by frontman Benjamin Gibbard as a gnarled, angular rock song built around a real-life moment of a toddler having a tantrum and literally punching flowers outside a bodega, transformed into a metaphor for a man who finds something beautiful but feels caged by it.
“‘Punching the Flowers’ is a song about stagnation and the feeling of being imprisoned by The Known,” Gibbard explains. “And about the damage done when someone ventures deeper into the unknown.”
The Jason Lester-directed video is out now. I Built You A Tower marks Death Cab’s return to their independent roots after 20 years on Atlantic, recorded across just three weeks of sessions at Animal Rites in Los Angeles and at the band members’ homes in Seattle, Bellingham, Los Angeles and Portland, with John Congleton producing.
The album emerges from a particularly intense period in Gibbard’s life, fronting both Death Cab and The Postal Service on arena stages while his personal life unravelled in the background. The “tower” of the title became a way to protect himself. “There’s this need to find a place in ourselves to put loss and grief,” he says. “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.”
Bandmate Dave Depper adds that recent anniversary tours for Transatlanticism and Plans were pivotal: “The anniversary tours exorcised any nostalgia in our systems. 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?”
EU/UK tour dates with support from Pool Kids:
- Sept 16 & 17 – Dublin, 3Olympia Theatre
- Sept 19 – Manchester, O2 Victoria Warehouse
- Sept 20 – Edinburgh, Corn Exchange
- Sept 21 – Gateshead, The Glasshouse
- Sept 23 – Bristol, The Prospect Building
- Sept 25 & 26 – London, Troxy
- Sept 29 – Utrecht, TivoliVredenburg
- Sept 30 – Brussels, Cirque Royal
- Oct 1 – Berlin, Columbiahalle
- Oct 3 – Paris, Elysée Montmartre
