Thank You for Today

If there’s one constant woven throughout Death Cab’s ninth LP, it’s change. <i>Thank You for Today</i> is the Seattle outfit’s first without influential co-founder Chris Walla, and their first to feature long-time touring members Zac Rae and Dave Depper. “What was really important to us was making an album as a <i>band</i>,” 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 neighbourhood 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.”