Thank You for Today
If there’s one constant woven throughout Death Cab’s ninth LP, it’s change. *Thank You for Today* is the Seattle outfit’s first without influential co-founder Chris Walla, and their first to feature longtime touring members Zac Rae and Dave Depper. “What was really important to us was making an album as a *band*,” bassist Nick Harmer tells Apple Music. “We embraced having the process evolve.” That injection of fresh perspective can be felt not just in its often-intrepid arrangements, but in frontman Ben Gibbard’s lyrics as well: On “Gold Rush”—which features a sample from Yoko Ono’s avant-garde 1971 song “Mind Train”—Gibbard looks around his gentrifying neighborhood and pleads amid cascading guitars, “Please don’t change/Stay the same.” On the piano-driven closer “60 & Punk,” he addresses a struggling personal hero with questions that sound increasingly introspective: “When you\'re looking in the mirror, do you see/The kid that you used to be?” Taken together, it’s an album that imbues their pensive, time-worn indie-rock with a sense of new possibilities. “I think we struck a really good balance between where we’ve been and what we’re good at and where we want to go,” Harmer says. “I hope people can hear that.”
The ninth album from Ben Gibbard and Co. is their strongest album of the 2010s, a dubious achievement that nonetheless deserves recognition for its rare moments of shining, indie-pop songwriting.
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