There’s different tiers of grief: the self-induced (watching your home team’s first-ever World Series appearance slip through their mitts by one game), the tragic (a marriage dissolving despite weathering a claustrophobic pandemic), and the unspeakable (the deaths of loved ones, taken in a flash or drawn out over years). In recent years, Ben Gibbard, one of indie rock’s prevailing figureheads, has unwittingly endured all three. That much is clear on I Built You a Tower, Death Cab for Cutie’s first album in four years. Sorrow has always been a songwriting wellspring for Gibbard, who built his band’s reputation on an ability to sort tangled pain into unique talismans: styrofoam plates, loaned letter jackets, and the formation of the Atlantic Ocean. As he’s aged into a more stable adult, Death Cab for Cutie’s songs have similarly mellowed out. However, this latest batch of hardships, particularly a divorce from his longtime wife, pushed Gibbard to a place of such exhaustion that he’s practically come full circle to his younger, more overwhelmed self—and with it, his best musical impulses in a decade.
Despite compartmentalizing these problems, Gibbard couldn’t admit their compounding weight until 2023, when he started heave-crying midway through a 100-mile ultramarathon in volcanic mountains; shaking and puffy-eyed, he tapped out. It’s a sentiment echoed on “Riptides,” where he confesses: “I’m too tired to end the war/And I can’t seem to hold it together.” I Built You a Tower reckons with the moment that agony begins to spill over, but without invoking a victim complex or the wounded limping of past narrators. Gibbard hides from rain, opts for Irish goodbyes, and resorts to giving himself pep talks to drag himself out of bed. His body keeps the score, but his age grants a new perspective: “How heavenly a state/The acceptance of collapsing,” he later sings, and means it.
Yet that weariness doesn’t plague the music itself. Death Cab for Cutie spent the 2010s drifting through meandering electronics, stilted lyrics, and toothless indie-pop, only to rebound with creative momentum in 2022 with Asphalt Meadows. They made that record, in part, by revisiting four-tracks from 1996 and using their new perspective to deconstruct those old songs. Throughout I Built You a Tower, Death Cab for Cutie revive the yearning that propelled their original indie rock, alongside an insatiable focus and hunger for more: gnarled post-punk in “How Heavenly a State,” ambient synth-pop in “Trap Door,” twinkling guitars in “Punching the Flowers.” Nick Harmer swings his bass like white-knuckled punches and rakes lines through dirt on those songs, rivaling his command on Narrow Stairs. It’s the closest Death Cab for Cutie have sounded to their golden era since the 2014 departure of guitarist and producer Chris Walla, while still reflecting the mature band standing in the present.
The uncomplicated nature of the songs on I Built You a Tower means the record flickers with hallmarks of the band’s early era: that dejected guitar melody over cymbal hiccups on “I Built You a Tower (A)” resembles We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes; the drum machine behind bleary synth in “Stone Over Water” could pass for Something About Airplanes with cleaner production. Even their pop instincts get punched up in “The Flavor of Metal” with the intuitiveness of Plans. This quality isn’t a result of nostalgia bait, studying old tapes, or the band’s nearly two-year-long anniversary tour for Transatlanticism, but the fact that this current iteration of the group—Gibbard, Harmer, drummer Jason McGerr, guitarist-keyboardist Dave Depper, and multi-instrumentalist Zac Rae—prefers a less-is-more approach. After several records of muted ideas, Death Cab for Cutie sound emboldened again while recalling the songwriting traits that once set them apart in a sea of indie-rock bands who’ve since petered out.
As he did on Asphalt Meadows, producer John Congleton plucks the right tones from Death Cab for Cutie to draw a blend of intimacy and energy on I Built You a Tower. While roving guitars jut out on “Envy the Birds” or the escalating melody in “Riptides” mimics a panic attack, Gibbard sings about craving silence and reluctant acceptance. “There’s nothing more to accomplish with writing songs from an aggrieved place,” Gibbard told The Line of Best Fit. The heartbreak and grief is near-constant in I Built You a Tower, but it’s met with a measure of stabilizing levelheadedness. These characters squeeze their eyes closed to imagine screaming matches replaced by wordless arguments, freeze in place as a boulder tumbles straight their way, and question which is worse: if God laughs or he doesn’t. Gibbard puts it clearest in “Stone Over Water”: “I’m seeing the end drawing nearer/And I can scream and shout/Or learn to live without.”
I Built You a Tower is a record of acceptance: that grief won’t ever fully vanish, that heartbreak is a two-party problem, that discomfort is best resolved by sitting with it. The album begins with “Full of Stars,” a gentle stir of acoustic guitar and piano, and concludes with “I Built You a Tower (B),” a frigid rock song washed in feedback. Sonically, the two bookends would traditionally swap places: a rousing, loud opener and a reflective, gentle closer. But alongside the songs’ lyrics, it becomes clear that Death Cab for Cutie’s ordering reflects the maturity and selflessness underpinning this release: Ask for forgiveness first; rebuke your faults last. After decades of sketching protagonists who squirm under crumbling relationships and fixate on depressive patches, here, Death Cab for Cutie enter a new era: one without self-pity or reproach; one stable enough to stand in the midst of diametrically opposed feelings and hold them both in equal measure.
