Vampire Weekend: The Graduates

Photographs by Matt Jones

Rostam Batmanglij, the child of actual immigrants (his mother is Najmieh Batmanglij, a cookbook author and leading authority on Persian cuisine), has a similar attitude. Growing up in Washington, D.C., he saw music not as an escape route or as a higher calling, but rather as a problem to be solved. "I got really interested in theory," he says, "in melodies and harmonies, and I just wanted to crack it."

He's also the man who defined crunk -- literally. "I interned at the Oxford English Dictionary a few summers ago," he says. "We each got to pick three new words to define, and I got crunk." This seems highly appropriate for a former flautist who is technical enough to scribble string arrangements in his spare time but also enough of a dreamer to believe that Discovery, his R&B side project with Ra Ra Riot's Miles, will unseat Usher from the hip-hop charts.

He and I are sitting in the bedroom of his shared apartment in tony Brooklyn Heights. The room is spartan, with most of the space dominated by very serious equipment: multiple Macs, a microphone, keyboards, an electric guitar. The shelf above the bed is filled with various pedals and fancy-looking effects boxes. Batmanglij is friendly but reticent. Questions are often met with stony silence or one-word replies. He requests that a discussion about his love for Wes Anderson be kept off the record. After a long conversation about how a passion for postmodernism and his hero, painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, infiltrated the planning of Vampire Weekend, Batmanglij suddenly pauses and announces that he eventually realized he "hadn't had a single real thought about postmodernism in four years."

A cynic could argue that it's Vampire Weekend's inflated profile mixed with their youthful precociousness that allows them to indulge in such intellectual conceits. But that seems shortsighted. The battles over authenticity, over appropriation, are ancient history to these guys. They are playing the hand they've been dealt, and their fast success is proof that they're playing it expertly.

It's hard to credit the rise of MP3 blogs with a revolution when they are in the midst of dramatic change themselves. While smaller blogs fight for exclusives, the heavyweights have begun sounding more and more like the old guard they seek to usurp. Listen to Stereogum's Amrit Singh on Vampire Weekend's long-term prognosis: "With the ball rolling and growing support overseas, there's an opportunity to make some money on the distribution and larger scale touring."

In fact, when seen through this prism, Vampire Weekend seem like the steadiest yacht in a bumpy sea. They've recorded their own album, booked their own tours, designed their own artwork. They can play well-attended shows at home and abroad, and they own their master recordings. Their DIY aesthetic is punk, even if nothing else about them is. And though he may be reluctant to read too much into what all this hubbub portends for his band, Koenig is too thoughtful and studious to resist contextualizing it. "It's not because of a lack of technology that those Black Flag–type bands had the lifestyle that they did. There was still a-ha blowing up off of one single, people getting excited and then forgetting about them."

His eyes twinkle for a moment.

"And who's to say we're not more like a-ha anyway?"