Vampire Weekend Bring ‘Only God Was Above Us’ Tour to Ascend Amphitheater Tonight, Oct. 11

It’s hard to be believe it’s now been more than 15 years since New York’s Vampire Weekend took the world by storm with their eponymous debut LP, released to an unbelievable mountain of hype just a few short years after first meeting and forming the band while students at Columbia. Back then, the power of blog buzz and the fever pitch of hipster culture and indie rock appetite was enough to land the group on the cover of SPIN (back when magazine covers were a big deal) before ever releasing an album. Though their first effort was certainly a masterpiece, and helped make them poster boys for that particular late aughts millennial musical area, VW always felt more like a right place, right time sort of band more than a reaction to the indie scene. With baroque pop and world beat tones, their sound immediately set them apart, and while bookish and literary, any sense of pretension the band embodied felt earned and natural, not put-on for the purpose of seeming interesting. 2010’s Contra proved that the breakout success and broad pop accessibility of their first album was no fluke, and by 2013’s Modern Vampires in the City, the group had spent half a decade cementing their legacy as one of their generation’s finest indie acts, regularly earning top-line spots at festivals and playing big venues around the globe.

Over the past decade since, however, indie rock’s boom has faded, seminal founding member Rostam Batmanglij departed (though remains a creative collaborator), and Vampire Weekend went uncharacteristically silent for a few years, before returning in 2019 with a brilliant fourth album, Father of the Bride, pushing their sound to new sonic bounds, earning some of the most enthusiastic critical praise of their career, and breaking through to a whole new Gen Z audience, which has kept them in the zeitgeist throughout the last several years, and cemented their legacy among enduring acts like Paramore or even Radiohead, who’ve successfully managed to grow behind a scene they were initially associated with, and to make meaningful and resonant music across multiple decades. After winning a Grammy and touring extensively for Father, and following the pandemic and another brief breather, the band regrouped- now all based in Los Angeles- for fifth album Only God Was Above Us, which arrived earlier this year and feels like a leaner, conceptual callback to the band’s New York indie rock days, and was once again met with ubiquitous praise.

In support of their latest, Vampire Weekend return to Ascend Amphitheater tonight, Oct. 11– where they played their last Music City show in 2019– along with New York indie pop favorites Cults, also celebrating a new LP. Sure to be one of the standout shows of the fall (Vampire Weekend have been wowing us live for nearly 20 years), a handful of tickets are still available right here while they last!

Vampire Weekend and Cults perform tonight, Oct. 11 at Ascend Amphitheater. The show is all ages, begins at 7 p.m. (doors at 5:30 p.m.), and tickets are available for $41.30-111.25.