How Death Cab for Cutie Recaptured Its Roots for ‘I Built You a Tower’

When the joint Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service tour – paying tribute to the indie classics Transatlanticism and Give Up, respectively – passed through the Washington, D.C., area in 2023, Ben Gibbard made an unexpected detour.

“I had been listening to an egregious amount of Fugazi, and I was reconnecting with that music that was so important to me when I was younger,” the Death Cab and Postal Service frontman says. “Nick [Harmer, Death Cab’s bassist] and I went to the Dischord House, and Ian [MacKaye, Fugazi and Minor Threat frontman and Dischord Records founder] showed us around. He was just showing us all this emphemera, and we’re sitting there talking in the basement that Minor Threat practiced in. You know, crazy s–t – like, 27-year-old me wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

But the visit was more than a pinch-me music nerd moment for Gibbard, now 49. “I started to take a lot from how they arranged their music,” he continues. “Their music was so unadorned.”

Death Cab’s 11th album, I Built You a Tower, due out June 5, is not a hardcore punk record. But the record does contain some of the band’s most direct music in years, stripped of many of the accoutrements that defined its material throughout the 2010s. The back-to-basics ethos conjures Death Cab’s early albums – and fittingly, Tower is the band’s first album on an indie label in more than 20 years. For the record, Death Cab signed with ANTI- Records, home to the likes of MJ Lenderman and The Beths, after two decades on Atlantic, and the move creatively reinvigorated it.

Even as Death Cab and Gibbard mine their pasts – through anniversary tours, revisiting old inspirations and resurrecting old recording techniques – the band remains a present-day force. “Riptides,” Tower’s lead single, became the band’s ninth No. 1 hit on Adult Alternative Airplay earlier this month, and Tower is continuing the creative renaissance that began with 2022’s acclaimed Asphalt Meadows.

“We feel so fortunate that, after all these years – and we’re coming up on 30 years in 2027 – people still care enough to come and see us play,” says Gibbard as the road warriors prepare for another summer of heavy touring. “We feel that we would be doing ourselves and the people who love this band a great disservice if we just phoned that part in.”

Gibbard connected with Billboard to discuss getting inspired by The Cure and AC/DC, eschewing studio perfection and why this divorce record is different from his last one.

Over the last few years, you’ve embraced the anniversary tour model where you play classic albums front to back. Why has that format appealed to you?

First and foremost, I’m a music fan. The older I get, I’ve been trying to think strategically in regards to how we tour, what we play on tour, how we make records, everything else from a fan’s perspective. “If this was my favorite band, what would I want?” In the same way that when I see The Cure is playing Disintegration in its entirety, in order [in 2019], like, Hooo-ly s–t, I guess I’m flying to Sydney. I wanted to see that so bad. And making no kind of comparisons between us and The Cure, but the reality is that there are a lot of people who have formed a bond with [Death Cab], with those records.

What was so fun about doing the records in order like that is that everybody knows what’s coming. You’re seeing a record in the order it was conceived as an album, but not necessarily how you would play it for dramatic effect when you’re doing it live. It’s really fun.

Did revisiting those records every night influence your creative process for this new one?

During the course of a normal Death Cab show, we’re toggling between eras in my life, and I’m playing a song I wrote when I was 20, the next song is something I wrote last year. As a performer, you’re living in that version of yourself for three minutes at a time. But doing [Transatlanticism and Give Up] back to back, I’m living in my 25-, 26-year-old version of myself for the evening. I was forced to think about how different some of my approach to writing music has been between 2001 and 2002, when I was writing those records, and how I had been writing music for the last couple records.

A lot of it just came down to process. When I was first writing music for the early Death Cab records, the first three or four albums, I was using a four-track. had to have it all written before I could record it. I decided that I really wanted to get back to starting from a similar place as I did on those first three or four records. As I was writing songs in this fashion, it was connecting me back to a creative M.O. that I had been using when I was younger that I was really inspired by, that I had kind of left on the side of the road 20 some years ago. But I’m still writing from the perspective of where I am now. I started to really like how those things hybridized with each other.

How evident do you think this approach is on the final product?

In a limitless multitrack world of compute recording and computers, we have had a number of moments where we’re just spending way too much time triple-tracking the guitar with different sounds to give it some shape, or whatever, rather than just moving on to the next thing — and telling ourselves, “This is important.” The songs that I was writing for this record, they didn’t seem to need that. I kind of had a manifesto [for this album] where I was like, “Look, I really don’t want to overstack stuff. If the guitar sounds good, that’s the guitar.” You listen to an old AC/DC record, there’s nothing on those songs. They’re not triple-tracking those guitars. They sound fine; they sounded huge. Everybody realized that this was going to work.

This was your second album working with John Congleton (Courtney Barnett, Sleater-Kinney), after he produced Asphalt Meadows. What did he bring to the table?

The two albums [2015’s Kintsugi and 2018’s Thank You For Today] we had made before Asphalt Meadows were arduous processes. And that wasn’t [producer] Rich Costey’s fault, that had as much to do with the material we came in. The songs I had brought in weren’t complete. They weren’t arranged. There’s some stuff on there I really like, but it just took a long time. Those records took longer to make than any records we’d ever made. I’d put the majority of that on us, the band. But when we made Asphalt Meadows, that was the quickest record we had made —soup to nuts, tracked — since The Photo Album in 2001.

We made I Built You a Tower in even less time — three and a half weeks. I love that John just moves really fast. He just keeps everybody on track — and he won’t let you sit there and play your guitar line 50 times to get it perfect. We’ll do a song two or three times, and you’ll hear him come over the intercom, and he’ll be like, “Hey, man, you can do it again if you want, but I got it.” Like, we don’t need to do this. He studied under the great Steve Albini; he takes a lot of stuff from Steve.

One of the things he would tell us all the time is, like, in six months, you’re not going to hear any of this stuff. Nobody is going to listen to this record and be like, “Ooh, Dave kind of f–ked up that note.” That’s something that I really have taken to heart when it comes to everything in my performance. I’m not going to get bogged down in the weeds — because then you run the risk of chipping away what makes that performance special.

It’s always interesting to hear how, even for a veteran artist, a producer can still change how they think about their craft.

Well, you also have to go in wanting to be produced. We have talked to John about some of the artists he’s worked with where he’s like, “We started working on the record and it became apparent they didn’t want a producer.” Before we made Asphalt Meadows, he talked about that, and was like, “If you tell me you want it to be like, A, B, C, D and E, and that’s why you’re hiring me, I’m gonna do that. So don’t get weird when I start doing the thing you asked me to do, and it makes you uncomfortable because it doesn’t sound like your old records.” I was like, “No problem, man, go for it.” Because I don’t want to make Transatlanticism again, you know? I just don’t.

This album follows your second divorce, and a major lyrical theme is compartmentalizing grief. For some artists, grief can make writing more difficult, but for others, it can act as a creative accelerant. How did the challenges in your personal life impact this record?

I had made the decision that in writing about a divorce for the second time, this wasn’t going to be a bitter record or an angry record or a score-settling record. I didn’t have any desire to tell that story. I really wanted to focus on what this experience had brought out in me, and to talk about the more internal side of what this experience was, rather than “here’s what happened.” Kintsugi is a bit of a “here’s what happened” record; I’d already written that record.

I felt that if I wrote about this experience and the compartmentalization of this kind of experience to just get through the day and to do my job, that there would be elements of that story that would be relatable to people who maybe hadn’t gone through a divorce, but who had experienced some other kind of loss. It’s never been my goal to write a universal song or record. But I felt that if I spoke about this in a little broader internal terms, that there would be more in this that people would find relatable than me just telling a story about my life.