Vampire Weekend – “This Life” Video
Earlier this month, Vampire Weekend returned from a six-year silence with the generally excellent new album Father Of The Bride. And they’re also getting back into making music videos, many of which feature famous friends and well-wishers. Their “Harmony Hall” video had appearances from Jonah Hill and Dev Hynes, while their Hill-directed “Sunflower” video had Jerry Seinfeld and Fab 5 Freddy. Today, the band has shared another video — this one for “This Life,” the quizzical meditation that the band played so well on The Tonight Show.
Emmett Malloy, a longtime Vampire Weekend collaborator who last helmed the “Harmony Hall” video, directed the “This Life” clip. It’s built around a giant Passover dinner in Palm Springs, California, and it features a whole lot of friends and collaborators of the band, including Danielle Haim, Ariel Rechtshaid, Mark Ronson, SOPHIE, Despot, Jovan Hill, and Simi & Haze.
Malloy films the video in crackly black-and-white, staging it like a road trip in an old foreign movie. A massively bearded driver (played by Kyle Fields of Little Wings) squires Ezra Koenig and his friends through the desert in an old classic convertible, and Koenig gets to look iconic, playing his enormous Rickenbacker against a vast sky, while windmills fill up the frame behind him. The lyrics appear as subtitles on the bottom of the screen. Check it out below.
Father Of The Bride is out now on Columbia. Read our cover-story feature on Vampire Weekend here.