Death Cab For Cutie Are Back Where They Belong on “Punching the Flowers”

Death Cab for Cutie spent twenty years on Atlantic Records and two more years playing sold-out anniversary tours for Transatlanticism and Plans on arena stages every night. What they walked away with, apparently, was clarity. I Built You a Tower, their 11th studio album, comes out June 5 on ANTI- Records — their first on an independent label since the early days — and it sounds like a band that remembered exactly what they were good at and went straight back to it.

“Punching the Flowers” is the second single and a gnarled, angular rock song built from a real image: a toddler throwing a tantrum, literally punching flowers outside a bodega. Gibbard spins it into something bigger — a man who has something beautiful and can only feel its hold over him as a cage. The video was directed by Jason Lester. The album was recorded in just three weeks with producer and engineer John Congleton at Animal Rites in Los Angeles, with additional sessions at band members’ homes across Seattle, Bellingham, LA, and Portland.

The anniversary tours exorcised whatever nostalgia was still in the system. What’s left on I Built You a Tower is a band reconciling with past selves in order to find something new — emotionally frank, hook-driven, and completely uninterested in making the dreaded “return to form” record. This is just Death Cab, doing what they do, thirty years in. Pre-order it below.

Pre-order I Built You a Tower ↗

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)”