Label: Atlantic
Released: 17th August 2018
Rating: ★★★★
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” Wise words from Mary Shelley there, writing in Frankenstein, and confirming why so many of us are slovenly creatures of habit.
Change is indeed the order of the day for Seattle’s Death Cab For Cutie, having first evolved from DIY lo-fi college rockers into indie-pop darlings in the early-mid noughties, and then again into an alt-rock juggernaut outside of genre tags and labels since the start of the decade. ‘Thank You For Today’ certainly carries forward the trend seen in 2011’s ‘Codes and Keys’ and 2015’s ‘Kintsugi’, but it is also the first to be made without Chris Walla – not that such disorder appears to have affected Ben Gibbard and Co, proving that upsetting the machine can bear fruit just the same.
Ideas of change also colour ‘Thank You For Today’. Lead single ‘Gold Rush’ – an alt-rock anthem from the Beck school of thought – ruminates on ideas of gentrification, Gibbard finding himself at the mercy of a city forever evolving. And then there’s the old romantic Death Cab. ‘Summer Years’ finds them at their winsome best, but it’s surely not too much of a leap to the equally lovely ‘Autumn Love’; just as relationships change, so do the seasons, and here, Death Cab are happy to spell it out in radiant, technicolour glory.
But for all this talk of change and upheaval, worry not; ‘Thank You For Today’ is a quintessential – classic, even – Death Cab album, and arguably their most cohesive since 2008’s ‘Narrow Stairs’. Cuts like ‘Near/Far’, ‘Your Hurricane’ and sentimental closer ’60 & Punk’ are prime examples, subtly infectious and breezily accessible.
Now nine studio albums into their career, ‘Thank You For Today’ is the sound of a band calmly navigating a path forward through troubled waters and a changing world. Considering the background turmoil, it could have been a messy, half-baked return but, reassuringly, DCFC have barely skipped a beat. The future for one of America’s outstanding indie bands looks brighter than ever.
