How Fatherhood and Turning 40 Helped Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig 'Finally' Feel Like an Adult (Exclusive)

Vampire Weekend's fifth album, Only God Was Above Us, is out now

Ezra Koenig is drinking from a Zabar’s mug when he logs onto Zoom, the famed New York City deli’s signature orange logo peeking out from behind a porcelain handle.

It’s proof that wherever the Vampire Weekend frontman goes, the spirit of the city in which he was born and in which he cut his teeth is right there with him.

It’s why the band’s fifth album, Only God Was Above Us, feels the way it does — a dynamic portrait of 20th century New York City like only a real New Yorker can, no matter the fact that it was recorded, yes, in New York, but also in Los Angeles, London and Tokyo.

“One thing’s for sure, this album has a city flavor,” Koenig tells PEOPLE. “I think all of our albums have a city flavor in the sense that I want them to capture the bustling, layered energy of a place with a lot of people and history. But above all, it was cool just being in all these different places. I think it just fired me up to really think about what I wanted to say and even freed me up to think about my relationship to New York.”

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Only God Was Above Us follows the 2019 album Father of the Bride, which won Vampire Weekend (Koenig, drummer Chris Tomson and bassist Chris Baio) its second Grammy Award for best alternative music album. Over 10 songs, the slimmer Only God harnesses the frenetic energy the group is known for into a lush sonic storyline of the city and of the intergenerational questions and, at times, resentment plaguing its residents. The record goes places darker than fans may be used to hearing, but never veers gloomy, and ends rather purposefully on a note of optimism.

A lot has happened since Father of the Bride. A global pandemic, for one, but Koenig is also now raising a 5-year-old, Isaiah, who was just a baby last album cycle. (Koenig has been dating actress Rashida Jones since 2016, and their son was born in 2018. In multiple recent interviews, Koenig has referred to Jones, 48, as his wife. When asked to confirm if they are indeed wed, he says the couple are “married in the eyes of God”). Then there’s the fact that he’ll be turning 40 on April 8, the same day Vampire Weekend kicks off a nearly 40-date North American tour.

It’s a milestone birthday he feels finally marks a plunge into adulthood.

“The last five years are very unique for history, but also I think for me, it happens to be the five years in my life finishing out my 30s,” he says. “I turn 40 in a week, and I was trying to describe what those five years felt like to me. The best way I could describe it is, finally feeling truly like an adult, in the basic sense that people talk a lot about the prolonged adolescence of the younger generations.”

Koenig has been releasing music since his early 20s, and the band’s self-titled debut album came out in 2008. But his 30s were a pivotal decade, as he notes that the spectrum of age and the idea of life and death was never more plain to see: on one side, friends and relatives and even himself welcoming children into the world, and on the other, watching the generations that raised him grow elderly.

“I just think having those things on either side of you starts to make you realize, right, I’m neither a kid nor am I elderly. I’m an adult,” he says. “We’re the grown-ups now. We’re the people. I don’t know. In some ways it’s interesting to have that correspond with the last five years, but certainly it just makes me feel older in a deeper way or something.”

It’s a theme that’s threaded throughout Only God, like in the song “Gen-X Cops,” where he sings, “Each generation makes its own apology.” Koenig says the track speaks to the idea that there comes a moment in life when it’s time to let go of generational pride, and points to internet discourse like the obsession with boomers, zoomers and “millennial cringe.”

But the song that best sums up the vibe of the new record, he says, is “Hope” — something that didn’t necessarily click with him when he was younger.

“When you’re a child, a teenager, 20something, even into your 30s, you can really have this feeling of like, ‘Wait, I can’t believe the world is like this. I can’t believe people are just born to die. I can’t believe there’s unfairness and conflict and all these things,’” he says. “That’s a normal fixation to have when you’re on the younger side. Then as you get older, you realize, ‘OK, maybe there’s never going to be a huge change. You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.’ ‘Hope’ and [new song] ‘The Surfer’ may be two sides of the same coin in describing this more ‘approaching 40’ worldview.”

When asked if raising a child has changed his worldview, Koenig mulls it over, and decides it’s “hard to say” one way or another. What he does know is that he often thinks about his hopes for the next generation, which include “a resilience and spirituality” amid uncertainty.

If his aspirations for the future are reflected in “Hope,” then there’s the past the colors much of the rest of the album. Koenig says New York City will always be the “world and culture” he feels most connected to, and the songs reference specific things special to the area, like Water Tunnel 3 (a still-in-progress project bringing water to the city from a Yonkers reservoir that began in 1970), the Sand Hogs (a nickname for the city’s underground workers, with whom Koenig’s father used to work as a tunnel inspector) and Mary Boone, a New York art dealer who famously went to prison for tax fraud.

“My goal with every album is to push into new territory that would’ve seemed surprising back in the day, but still maintaining a coherence,” he says. “That, to me, it’s always what we aspire to. When our band started out, I always felt like we, understandably, because we only had one album, there was something one-dimensional about our image and the way people saw us. I’ve looked at every album since then as an opportunity to add another dimension. I had a real sense of what could make us unique and what I wanted to say and what I thought the band could say at that moment. But I think if you had said, ‘Well, what if I told you your fifth album had a lot of feedback and distortion, some Wu-Tang sounding drums, I think I would’ve been like, that’s awesome. I’m excited to see how we get there.”

Only God Was Above Us is out now.

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