Vampire Weekend: The Graduates

Photographs by Matt Jones

Vampire Weekend -- named after a comic horror movie set in Cape Cod that Koenig and friends made a few summers back (the trailer is on YouTube) -- is a New York City band but free from the skinny-trousered baggage that label usually entails. The group formed not in artsy Brooklyn, but rather at prestigious Columbia University, on Manhattan's genteel Upper West Side, where their idiosyncratic influences and decidedly unpunk technical chops were free to develop undisturbed and unmocked. And, despite all the preppy clothes and passport-friendly style sourcing, the resulting songs are effortlessly infectious, imbued with a sense of whimsical, dancey abandon that's missing from most "college" bands, not just ones featuring former music majors. "That's the great thing about them," says Rich McLaughlin, format manager for Sirius Satellite Radio. "They appeal to a lot of different audiences: indie, mainstream alternative, even jam-band fans."

"Being a New York band but living where they did meant they were free to come into their own," says Kris Chen, the A&R rep who signed the band to XL Recordings in the U.S. "That's why I fell for them immediately: They didn't give a shit about being cool. We all know that's the ultimate in being cool."

Koenig, an English major, remembers encountering Batmanglij at a party in the fall of 2002, their freshman year, and instantly wanting to join forces. Though their interests were disparate (Batmanglij listed as his then-favorite bands "Coldplay, Radiohead, and Sigur Rós -- in that order," and Koenig, whose tastes leaned toward folk and hip-hop, recalls thinking that Batmanglij had the order wrong), they shared a passion for exploration and performance. Tomson, a genial recovering Phish phan, met Batmanglij in harmony and composition classes and eventually served as L'Homme Run's hypeman. A year later the trio met Baio -- who was one year younger but able to play Metallica riffs from memory -- and thus a gang was born.

Midway through his senior year, Koenig became obsessed with a compilation of pop from Madagascar at the same time that Batmanglij returned from a trip to England with a worn cassette by Brenda Fassie, the late South African singer known as "the Madonna of the townships." Doubly inspired, the two, with Baio and Tomson on board, began planning what would become Vampire Weekend. "The name and some of the ideas were talked about for a while," says Baio. "It took actually booking a show to start practicing." Indeed, long before their first concert, the group produced a "band manifesto" that either doesn't actually exist (according to Batmanglij) or, to hear Koenig tell it, lurks on his laptop, written out in a font stolen from Tintin comic books. Ranging from a policy of no T-shirts onstage (Koenig prefers cable-knit sweaters and boat shoes) to a canonical appreciation for Johnny Marr's clean, almost African guitar riff on the Smiths' "This Charming Man," the manifesto lays out the group's core conceits, and whether it physically exists or not, suggests that this is a band highly conscious of its own mythmaking. They care deeply about appearing not to care, which, country-club trappings aside, is about as old-school rock-star as it gets.

Vampire Weekend's first gig was a battle of the bands thrown by some engineering students in February 2006. They played future album standouts "Oxford Comma" and "Walcott" in slightly different forms, and the reaction from friends was positive. Still, they finished third out of four. "The judges did an American Idol postperformance critique," remembers Koenig. "So we had to stand there and listen to these guys say, 'Hey, you're pretty good, but I don't really like hipsters!' Which was funny -- even at the first show I thought we were dressed very unhipstery." Subsequent shows were played at a frat house–cum–literary society on Riverside Drive, a photo of which graces the cover of Vampire Weekend.