Six years is a long time between albums in any era, but it’s an eternity in the age of streaming, when the prevailing strategy is to keep an artist’s fan base engaged with a steady flow of music.

Vampire Weekend’s last record, 2013’s “Modern Vampires of the City,” won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album, cementing the project’s status as the masterly culmination of the group’s creative work to that point thanks to its sharpest songwriting and richest arrangements.

But the now-popular band was once just one indie rock band among many. Singer, songwriter and guitarist Ezra Koenig has always been the band’s leader and primary creative force, ever since he teamed up with drummer Chris Tomson, bassist Chris Baio and multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij while all were students at Columbia University.

When Vampire Weekend released its self-titled debut album in 2008, its modus operandi was to incorporate the clean, chiming sound of Afropop into ultra-catchy indie rock; Paul Simon’s 1986 album “Graceland” was an early touchstone, as was the fusion of global pop and post-punk pioneered by David Byrne and Talking Heads. Songs like “Mansard Roof” and “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” were modest and low-key but also clever and self-aware, and the band was soon playing much bigger rooms.

Its sound grew richer on the 2010 album, “Contra,” and by 2013, Vampire Weekend was making highly orchestrated chamber pop. Mr. Batmanglij’s contributions were essential to these developments—he co-produced “Modern Vampires” and co-wrote most of the music. He had also become an in-demand producer and songwriter, contributing to songs by Frank Ocean, Solange and more.


So it came as a jolt for fans when Mr. Batmanglij announced in 2016 that he had left the band. He would continue to collaborate with Vampire Weekend on individual songs, but he would no longer be their producer.

“Father of the Bride” (Columbia/Spring Snow), the group’s fourth album, suggests that Mr. Koenig’s band is able to roll with the changes. The record, out Friday, is weighty enough to justify its yearslong gestation—its 18 tracks stretch for almost an hour, and each is filled with deft asides and intricate editing.

Most of “Father” was co-produced by Ariel Rechtshaid (who also worked on “Modern Vampires”) and Mr. Koenig. While the melodies and chord changes are solid, the production puts the album over the top. These songs are constantly being tweaked as they unfold, with something new seemingly being added every 20 seconds.

Sometimes, that busyness makes the record seem a little fussy and labored over, but that’s not unusual for Vampire Weekend. Mr. Koenig approaches music as a kind of puzzle, trying to see how many ideas and references can be crammed into songs that go down easy.


This careful and structured approach to songwriting makes dabbling in country music, in which narrative efficiency and lyrical detail are leveraged in service of broad emotions, a natural fit. Mr. Koenig has said that he was inspired by the songwriting of Kacey Musgraves, whose sun-kissed and lightly psychedelic album “Golden Hour” (2018) topped many critics’ year-end lists.

The opening “Hold You Now,” which finds Mr. Koenig duetting with Danielle Haim, lays out the record’s tension between simplicity and referentiality. It has country elements like pedal steel and plucked acoustic guitar, and the song’s words find Mr. Koenig telling the story of a daughter on the verge of marriage, complete with a line—“I can’t carry you forever but I can hold you now”—timeless and universal enough to be written on a wedding cake.

But then we hear Mr. Koenig put down his guitar, and a chorus comes crashing in, sampled from Hans Zimmer’s score for Terrence Malick’s 1998 war film “The Thin Red Line.” Ms. Haim then enters, telling the daughter’s side of the increasingly complex story. It’s a song of thrilling possibility, suggesting that anything could happen from one moment to the next when samples and genres collide.

Much of the album delivers on that initial promise. “Rich Man” features a looped guitar sourced from an early 1960s song by Sierra Leone singer S.E. Rogie, and its tinny fidelity is set against a gorgeous and colorful string arrangement.


New meets old again on “2021,” which has a twinkly synth borrowed from a 1985 album by Japanese composer Haruomi Hosono but mixes it with a refrain built from an Auto-Tuned voice, twangy guitar, and a delicate vocal from Mr. Koenig. It’s a sweet gumdrop of a composition that lasts slightly longer than 90 seconds.

Many of the lyrics on “Father of the Bride” center on romantic relationships, but they rarely stay in one place for long. “Married in a Gold Rush” is another duet between Mr. Koenig and Ms. Haim with country inflections, and it’s both a love song and a critique of materialism.

“This Life,” one of several songs featuring the chiming guitars and rhythmic propulsion of the band’s early work, is light and breezy and instantly likable, but its comparatively dark words are about being aware of all the things that can destroy a relationship, feeling sure that won’t happen to you—and then watching it all fall apart.

“Father of the Bride” has a dozen great songs, which makes it an exceptional release if far from a perfect one. Historically, the classic double LP has a few off-the-wall experiments and moments that shouldn’t work but do, but Mr. Koenig is too focused a songwriter for such indulgences.


This is a long album, but it never sprawls. Instead, it’s packed with exquisitely rendered miniatures that are immediately engaging but which, dense with layers and allusions, will almost certainly mean even more in the long run. And it suggests that Mr. Koenig’s open-minded creativity is robust and adaptive, and ready for whatever happens next.

—Mr. Richardson is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Follow him on Twitter @MarkRichardson.