Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us 2LP Vinyl

Why you'll love it

This 2LP set spreads the album over four sides and includes a poster with the lyrics. Pitchfork named it Best New Music with an 8.6, and it scored 88 on Metacritic.

This edition

2LP set
Lyric poster included

About the album

The cover comes from a 1988 New York Daily News front page about a jet that lost its roof mid-flight, with a passenger's quote that gave the album its title. It's an odd, gripping image, and it suits the record: Vampire Weekend's grittiest, most New York album, steeped in subway grime and old tabloid paper.

Ezra Koenig wrote the lyrics over 2019 and 2020, and the band recorded in Manhattan, Los Angeles, London and Tokyo with longtime producer Ariel Rechtshaid, plus contributions from Chris Tomson and former member Rostam Batmanglij. Dave Fridmann mixed it, which explains the glorious crunch. "Capricorn" and "Gen-X Cops" arrived together as the first singles, "Classical" and "Prep-School Gangsters" bristle with distorted piano and strings, "Mary Boone" samples Soul II Soul's "Back to Life" and the eight-minute "Hope" closes things in a long, lovely fade.

Steven Siegel's Subway Dreams photographs fill out the artwork. It's the first album the band made as a trio of Koenig, Chris Baio and Tomson, and they kicked off the tour in Austin on Koenig's 40th birthday, during a total solar eclipse. Most of us just get a cake.

Also at Kops: more Vampire Weekend on vinyl · browse Alternative