Death Cab For Cutie - Thank You For Today

It’s hard to think of Death Cab For Cutie without looking back at 'Transatlanticism'. It’s an album that’s taken on something of a mythic quality; a turning point album that transformed a sub-genre of indie rock into something to be name-checked in mainstream popular culture (see: The OC). It’s also an album that Death Cab will, no doubt, be forever defined by.

But the truth is that that Death Cab is long gone; preserved in amber by the melancholic yet sprawling indie rock that inspired a generation. What has replaced it seems to be a band trying to once again bottle that magic; a shadow of its former self. 'Plans' and 'Narrow Stairs' have got the closest, bringing us some of the most iconic songs of that The OC-era, but Ben Gibbard et al have spent the past decade or so trying to rebuild themselves.

It’s led to them getting progressively broader and broader, the intimacy of 'Transatlanticism' lost in an attempt to capture a wider audience. When Chris Walla quit the band before the release of 2015’s 'Kintsugi', who acted as something of a check on Gibbard, it begged the question: why continue? Especially when the forgettable and overly glossy 'Kintsugi' was actually released.

It was a band that felt distant, overly reliant on metaphors that seemed focus-group approved rather than capturing something in a poetically new way. 'Transatlanticism', after all, was coined by Gibbard to mean an incomprehensible gap that was more an emotional than literal distance.