Today, indie rock band and eight-time Grammy nominees Death Cab for Cutie has announced their 11 studio album. I Built You A Tower, will be released on June 5, through ANTI- Records and the move marks the band’s return to their independent roots after 20 years on Atlantic Records. Produced and engineered by John Congleton and assembled from a mere three weeks of sessions, I Built You A Tower was recorded at Animal Rites in Los Angeles, as well as the band members’ homes in Seattle, Bellingham, Los Angeles and Portland.

You could easily mistake it for romantic tribute. I Built You A Tower, the phrase that gives Death Cab for Cutie’s 11 album its title, sounds like a paean or plea to a former love. An obelisk and work of art, a testament to what you had with one another. Something so great surely it could never collapse. But for Ben Gibbard, it was quite different, a sturdy tomb of stone in which he could, temporarily and in vain, hide the past away just so he could push through when grief threatened to consume him. 

Alongside today’s album announcement, Death Cab for Cutie has shared the album’s propulsive first single, “Riptides”, which is about “the challenge of dealing with personal struggles as the world around us experiences tragedy and loss on an unfathomable scale,” says Gibbard. “And how when these two elements intertwine themselves in our psyches, it feels utterly paralyzing.”

I Built You A House Track List

1. Full of Stars
2. Punching The Flowers
3. Pep Talk 
4. I Built You A Tower (a)
5. Envy The Birds
6. Stone Over Water
7. How Heavenly a State
8. Trap Door
9. Riptides
10. The Flavor of Metal
11. I Built You A Tower (b)

Photo Credit: Aldi Victoria