Death Cab for Cutie will launch a U.S. tour Friday in Minneapolis in support of their new album, I Built You a Tower. While they plan on playing I Built You a Tower material, the band hopes to craft a setlist that touches on their whole discography.
“We’ll do kind of a version of what we always do, which is try to lean into the new record but not play too much of it, make sure that we’re representing the whole history of the band,” frontman Ben Gibbard tells ABC Audio. “This is our 11th record, so even if we’re playing an average of, like, two songs from every record before that, we’re kind of running out of runway.”
Gibbard acknowledges that playing new material can sometimes feel like “you’re hitting a speed bump” — “You have to really buckle down and concentrate,” he says — but in the instances where Death Cab has gotten to perform songs off I Built You a Tower so far, he feels they’ve translated well to the live setting.
“For the most part, the new songs we were playing, they just felt very natural kind of coming in and out of the old songs,” Gibbard says.
“Famous last words, but I feel like the new songs are going to play really well against the older stuff,” he adds.
I Built You a Tower, the follow-up to 2022’s Asphalt Meadows, is out now. It includes the single “Riptides.”
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