2007 Hot Issue

HOT NEW KIDS: Vampire Weekend

You'd think a band of four Ivy Leaguers would yearn for blogosphere approval from some place like Pitchfork. But New York's Vampire Weekend were much more excited to get their first rave from Benn Loxo du Taccu (bennloxo.com), written by a Canadian reporter who was living in Senegal and posting MP3s of obscure African pop tunes. The site had helped introduce the Columbia University band to the Afro-beat deep cuts that shaped their own distinct groove: a blend of ska, African music and New Wave pop that coalesces into addictive indie-rock tunes on their as-yet-unreleased album, due early next year on XL Recordings.

VW singer Ezra Koenig already knew what kind of artistic statement he wanted to make when he formed the band with pals Rostam Batmanglij, Christopher Tomson and Chris Baio in early 2006. "I'd taken a trip to India the year before and stopped in London for a few days on the way there," he says. "It got me thinking a lot about colonialism and the aesthetic connections between preppy culture and the native cultures of places like Africa and India."

For an assignment at Columbia, Koenig wrote a short story exploring those connections and called it "Cape Cod Kwaasa Kwaasa," which became the title of one of the band's first tunes.

But they know to steer clear of academic eggheadism. "If we worry too much about what's 'authentic' and it verges on ethnomusicology," says drummer Tomson, "it would take away from what we want to do, which is more like a mash-up."

Still, Koenig notes that there will always be a guiding principle behind Vampire Weekend's music. "The basis of our whole band is not playing modern rock," says the twenty-three-year-old New Jersey native, who got Nirvana's In Utero for his tenth birthday but quickly moved away from anything remotely "alt-rock." He feels confident they're on the right track: Earlier this year, while he was teaching eighth-grade English at a Brooklyn public school, he got the seal of approval from some of his toughest potential critics. "One of my students kept telling me, 'Mr. Koenig, you guys gotta take down the Fall Out Boys.' And this kid Koran said he was listening to our songs and his cousin said, 'What is this white-boy shit?' And Koran goes, 'No, man, listen to it, it's not like that.' I was like, 'Yeah!' " --JENNY ELISCU

LISTEN: "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa":