In Aug. 2014, multi-instrumentalist Chris Walla quit Death Cab For Cutie, yet the band resolved to continue without the founding member. Today (Jan. 12) marks a major step in Death Cab’s new chapter, as it has announced a new album, its first as a trio.
Kintsugi, the band’s eighth studio album, will drop March 31 via Atlantic, the band’s home for the past decade. No new music has been shared officially, yet the band released the album artwork and tracklist today.
The album gets its title from a style of Japanese art where broken ceramics are pieced back together and fused with gold between the fragments. “It’s making the repair of an object a visual part of its history,” bassist Nick Harmer told Rolling Stone. “That resonated with us as a philosophy, and it connected to a lot of what we were going through, both professionally and personally.”
Death Cab has no immediate plans to replace Walla, who had produced all of their albums to date. Instead, they plan to tour with additional players and, as frontman Ben Gibbard puts it, “If we find ourselves playing with people that we feel can contribute on records, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Chris Walla Leaves Death Cab For Cutie
Walla did work on the entire album, which was completed before he departed the band. Track one, “No Room in Frame,” begins with an ambient instrumental he’d recorded earlier. Elsewhere, Gibbard hints the lyrical content will be reminiscent of much of Death Cab’s catalog to date: “A lot of these songs are kind of evocative; they’re about my time in Los Angeles.”
Check out the track listing:
1. No Room in Frame
2. Black Sun
3. The Ghosts of Beverly Drive
4. Little Wanderer
5. You’ve Haunted Me All My Life
6. Hold No Guns
7. Everything’s a Ceiling
8. Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)
9. El Dorado
10. Ingénue
11. Binary Sea