The title for the new Death Cab for Cutie album is Kintsugi. According to an interview with Rolling Stone, the album's name is a Japanese artform that captures where the band is currently. After 17 years, guitarist Chris Walla left the band in 2014, and now Ben Gibbard and Co. have to find a way to move forward without forgetting their humble past.
"It's a Japanese style of art where they take fractured, broken ceramics and put them back together with very obvious, real gold," bassist Nick Harmer said. "It's making the repair of an object a visual part of its history. That resonated with us as a philosophy, and it connected to a lot of what we were going through, both professionally and personally."
Walla announced his departure from the band in September, playing his final gig with Death Cab the following month.
"In the West, if you break an heirloom, you either throw it away or you make the repair as invisible as possible," he added. "But there's this artistic movement in Japan where the repair of it, the damage of it, is more important as part of the history of something than repairing it to its original state."
Despite not being in the band, Walla's presence will still be felt on the new album, out March 31. The song "No Room in Frame" features an instrumental intro that the guitarist laid down years ago. The lyrics also deal with some early touring memories in which the band's bus broke down in Coalinga, California.
This is new territory for the group, but the goal has never changed throughout the years.
"A lot of it has been like that, figuring it out as we go. But the one thing that united us all throughout the process was one goal: We wanted to make a really good record," Gibbard said.
Kintsugi Tracklist
01. No Room in Frame
02. Black Sun
03. The Ghosts of Beverly Drive
04. Little Wanderer
05. You've Haunted Me All My Life
06. Hold No Guns
07. Everything's a Ceiling
08. Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)
09. El Dorado
10. Ingénue
11. Binary Sea
