Description
Kintsugi, Death Cab for Cutie's eighth album, is a poignant breakup record inspired by the Japanese art of mending pottery with gold, symbolizing embracing flaws and history, reflecting frontman Ben Gibbard's divorce, with themes of loss, distance, and finding beauty in brokenness, featuring classic DCFC sounds alongside 80s synth-pop and catchy melodies, and marking guitarist Chris Walla's final album with the band.
Death Cab for Cutie are releasing their first album since the departure of guitarist and producer Chris Walla. Still it didn't stop Walla from contributing to Death Cab's new album, both as a musician and an inspiration for its title.
"The album's called Kintsugi," bassist Nick Harmer tells Rolling Stone. "It's a Japanese style of art where they take fractured, broken ceramics and put them back together with very obvious, real gold. It's making the repair of an object a visual part of its history. That resonated with us as a philosophy, and it connected to a lot of what we were going through, both professionally and personally.
"In the West, if you break an heirloom, you either throw it away or you make the repair as invisible as possible," he continues. "But there's this artistic movement in Japan where the repair of it, the damage of it, is more important as part of the history of something than repairing it to its original state."
In other words, Gibbard, Harmer and drummer Jason McGerr are making no attempt to hide their history with Walla. Instead, they've made it a part of this new chapter. But Kintsugi (due March 31st) isn't merely about moving forward. Songs such as "Black Sun" find Gibbard attempting to reconcile the past with the present — "A lot of these songs are kind of evocative, they're about my time in Los Angeles," he explains — and opener "No Room in Frame" begins with an ambient instrumental Walla had constructed on tape before featuring a direct lyrical callback to Death Cab's early days.
"It's kind of a traveling song, and I've always wanted to find a way to name-check Coalinga, California, because years ago our van broke down there," Gibbard says, laughing. "Every time I drive up and down I-5, I pass a sign that says 'To Coalinga,' and I'm always, like 'I don't want to go back.'"
Yet the frontman admits that Death Cab will probably always go back — their career has been marked with milestones (indie success, major-label security, side projects, splits) and running from the past isn't an option. So they've made peace with it, embraced it and now carry it with them as they enter the next phase of their career. Kintsugi isn't a coda, it's a continuation.
