Vampire Weekend Discography Ranking

5. Father of the Bride (2019)

Ok ok, hear me out. Yeah, this album has some of the band’s best material! There’s no arguing that songs like “Harmony Hall” and “This Life” are among the group’s best, and that’s not even including songs on here that are just great like the orchestral “How Long?” and “Sunflower” with Steve Lacy. This is just the album of theirs with the most songs that feel like filler. For example, let’s look at the first few songs. Yes, both “Harmony Hall” and “This Life” are in the first four songs on the tracklist, but immediately after each song, is one that lasts under two minutes. Following up something as grandiose as those songs, each with a little track like that feels undeveloped hurts the flow of the album. This might also be because I am running out of time to get this out before Bonnaroo, so as I’ll mention later a few times as well, I couldn’t live with these albums as much as I would’ve liked to. Also, this album was made as a solo album by Ezra, but it was still released through the band’s name. The other two members weren’t a part of making the album, they were only a part of the tour. Still though, the album is easily enjoyable, and the best tracks on here are clearly some of their best!

4. Contra (2010)

This is where I really wish I had more time to really live with each album, but alas, I set myself the deadline of having it done before Bonnaroo. Even after listening to this album 3-4 times, it’s still confusing me. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the album. It’s a lot of fun to listen to, and there are quite a few songs that are easily classics! They just try a lot of things on here, and I just haven’t been able to wrap my head around some of them. For example, let’s look at the song “California English”. The instrumental, and especially the drums, are classic Vampire Weekend, but Ezra is borderline rapping in heavily distorted autotune, to the point where you can’t understand a single thing he’s saying. It’s intriguing, but even after a few listens, I can’t tell if I like it or not. But as I said earlier, there’s plenty of immediately enjoyable songs on here too, including “Holiday” and “Cousins”. Even the song “Diplomat’s Son”, where they experiment with song structure and tempo changes, is an immediate favorite! I do hope to live with the album more after this project, because this one seems like it requires a lot of time to fully digest.

3. Modern Vampires of the City (2013)

This is yet another example of an album I really wanted to live with longer, because I feel like each listen has changed how I’ve felt about it. It’ll flip from one listen being eh on the album, to the next listen having me think it’s one of the group’s best projects. The album does experiment really well though, which is something I can give it! “Diane Young” does the pitch-shifting and Autotuned vocals much better than “California English”, and I especially love the organ introduction of “Don’t Lie”. It feels straight out of the late 60s! My personal favorite track is definitely “Step”! There’s just something about the melody of Ezra’s chorus, especially when he says “I feel it in my booooones” for the second time. The oscillating piano and synth is also fantastic, but I especially love the beginning lines of the bridge, which goes, “Wisdom's a gift, but you'd trade it for youth. Age is an honor, it's still not the truth”. It is also worth saying that this is the last album the band made with former member Rostam Batmanglij. Rostam was the group’s main producer, and he made the vast majority of this album with Ezra only, so his loss was a big deal to the group. He left to focus on solo material and other producing opportunities, which seems to have worked out as over the years, he’s gone on to work with people like HAIM, Carly Rae Jepsen, Maggie Rogers, and even names like Frank Ocean and Solange! He has shown up on the newer two Vampire Weekend records as well for a song or two, so there’s no bad blood between him and the band. Either way, Modern Vampires of the City shows that the group can do more than one thing not only good, but great!

2. Vampire Weekend (2008)

I knew at least half of the songs on here already. Of course, the album has some of their biggest hits, including “Oxford Comma” and the ever-iconic “A-Punk”, but even some of the deeper cuts sounded familiar. I don’t know if it’s because my family likely played the album around me a lot in elementary school, or if I had listened to the album somewhere in middle school or early high school and forgot about it. Besides immediately recognizing plenty of songs, the next thing that stood out to me was the percussion. Whatever hand drum they were playing, or even just the tambor of the drums themselves, really stood out to me! “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” is the easiest example to see this, especially during the second half of the song where they strip away most of the instrumentals except for the drums. Besides the drums, the other instruments feel whimsical, almost Disney-esque at points. Just listen to the strings on “M79” or the glittering synth melody on “One (Blake’s Got a New Face)” and tell me those wouldn’t fit perfectly on a Disney soundtrack. Those sounds make the album have this sense of levity and accessibility, like it’s something you can play around people of any age that enjoy any type of music, and they’ll enjoy themselves. Vampire Weekend knocked it out of the park for their self-titled, debut album!

1. Only God Was Above Us (2024)

Without a doubt, this is the best Vampire Weekend album! Everything about the album just feels so detailed and intentional. Heck, let’s start with the very first line. Is there a more memorable opening three words to an album in the past couple years than, “F*** the world”? That could mean so many different things, and throughout the album, that energy takes on many forms. They tackle hopelessness in relationships later on the very same song, but also the state of the world and their generation in “Gen-X Cops”, class consciousness and dichotomy in “Prep-School Gangsters”, and the seemingly fruitless possibility to have hope in the world today on the closer, “Hope”. Sonically, this album has many more hits of what I can only describe as noise. Sure, sometimes it just sounds noisy because there’s a lot of clashing instruments, like on “Classical”, but then there are moments like on the chorus of “Capricorn” where the guitar chords are distorted so heavily I’m not sure it’s possible to figure out what is actually being played. Instrumentally though, it’s the piano that really grabs me and what turns a great song into an amazing one! “Connect” wouldn’t be anywhere near as good if it didn’t have that piano solo in the middle, and it’s the piano melody on “Hope” that really brings the emotion out of that song! I wonder where the band could go next because there aren’t many bands that are almost two decades into their career, and still releasing their best material!