On Friday, September 16th, Death Cab for Cutie’s tenth album came out with much anticipation from me at the very least. Although not identifying as a lockdown album, Asphalt Meadows is undeniably fueled by the thoughts and themes of a forty-year-old man questioning ‘what happened to the world?’ after a pandemic and a Trump regime. At times astute and at other times dated, Asphalt Meadows is yet another Death Cab album that finds itself so timely it almost needs to age out of that time to shine on its own.

Before jumping into the nitty-gritty of the review, I need to supply some context for my personal relationship with Death Cab for Cutie. Being the child of two ex-hipsters I basically grew up on the songs off of ‘Plans’ and ‘Transatlanticsm’ and ‘Narrow Stairs’. My parents had the ‘Open Door’ EP on vinyl hung up on our wall my whole youth and I spent a lot of time in coffee shop drive-throughs with songs like ‘Soul Meets Body’ accompanying my wait. And so naturally I’ve grown up with Death Cab as one of my favorite bands. So much so that I have the artwork for that same ‘Open Door’ EP tattooed onto my forearm and I just recently saw the band live in April.

So needless to say the release of this album was always going to be a highlight of September for me. The last album, ‘Thank You For Today’ was something I found bland and too far from the old Death Cab sound when I first listened to it, but after exploring it again this year, I found songs like ‘Gold Rush’, ‘Northern Lights’, and ‘When We Drive’ to be really interesting and complex songs both musically and lyrically. And so I was prepared for this album to sound like an angsty sister album to the minimalistic and cheerful ‘Thank You For Today’.

And it does, but it also doesn’t. This album has left me lost as to how I really feel about it. The first half of the album feels a little cliche and stale to me. Musically its either too similar to the minimalistic sound of ‘Thank You For Today’ or awkward because every time a song builds up to something it quickly retreats before the listener can identify a chorus or hook. Lyrically it’s that of a Gen X man who finds himself disillusioned by modern politics and reality and cell phones. And although I understand the world has very quickly changed and I’m sure the state of things today is disheartening to anyone past the age of twenty-five (as it should be), for someone my age who has grown up in this world, it can’t help but feel reminiscent of an old man lamenting on “the good old days”.

But there is a massive shift in the song ‘Foxglove Through the Clearcut’. A beautifully unique and lyrically elaborate song that finally feels like the first “evolved” Death Cab song since at least ‘Thank You For Today’s ’60 and Punk” if not all the way back to ‘Kintsugi’. Gibbard sing-speaks the song, similar almost to Slaughter Beach, Dog’s Jake Ewald in ‘At the Moonbase’. This spoken word format lets the swelling orchestral really shine, but also honors the poetry of the lyrics and makes for one of the best songs of 2022.

And the rest of the album (minus the honestly boring ‘Wheat Like Waves’) is a standup good Death Cab album! Some songs do shine brighter than others (‘I Miss Strangers’ is easily the second-best song on the album) but overall the latter half of ‘Asphalt Meadows’ leaves me perfectly satisfied as a die-hard Death Cab fan.

And so I’m left feeling torn as to how this album lines up compared to other releases to me. I think ‘Asphalt Meadowns’ is better than ‘Thank You For Today’, perhaps only because of the genius ‘Foxglove Through the Clearcut’ but still nowhere close to the glory of pre-2016 Death Cab For Cutie. Nonetheless, Ben Gibbard knows how to write a damn good song, and even more than that knows how to write some genius lyrics. While not a new ‘Transatlantisicsm’, ‘Asphalt Meadows’ is a clear step up on the modernized, grown-up, Death Cab For Cutie sound.