Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Releases "EOS"

Photo by Wes Miles

Vampire Weekend‘s Rostam Batmanglij has released a new single. It’s called “EOS,” and it’s out via XL digitally now and on 7″ in February. Find the track’s music video, which was directed by Rostam and features animation by Jon Race, below.

According to a statement from Rostam, the video is based on a 25-second exposure photograph taken during a trip to desert dunes outside Jaisalmer, India. Here’s what he said about the creation of the song:

I invited engineer Shane Stoneback to live with me for five day stretches to work on recordings. On the last day of his first trip I was fatigued from all the songs we’d worked on and wanted to start recording something new. … I had this one idea from a while back stored as a voice memo on my phone. It was the chorus of “EOS” and it had come out of me all at once: melody, lyrics and chords. It’s rare that that happens for me—I’m always collecting ideas on my phone but usually it’s individual building blocks of a song, this was the essential elements all coming out together. The rest of the song started to take shape because what I recorded kept reminding of a very specific place and time in my life. I wanted to capture that feeling, and finishing the song became about chasing it down.

In addition to Vampire Weekend, Rostam has previously collaborated with Charli XCX, Jenny Lewis, Wavves and Cloud Nothings, Carly Rae Jepsen, Ra Ra Riot, Hamilton Leithauser, and others. His project Discovery, with Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles, put out an album in 2009.

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