Wiki
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Length
5:47
”The Surfer” is the sixth track from Vampire Weekend's fifth studio album, Only God Was Above Us. This is the only song on the project that features Rostam Batmanglij as a producer and composer.
”The Surfer has a long history, it was a demo that I started with Rostam years ago, and it wasn’t melancholy, it was very upbeat, different chord progression, different tempo, there was something very cool about it but I never really understood what it was trying to say, and then years later I was working on a different piece of music and started singing the melody and words on top of it and realized this tone suits it more, or at least I understood what it was trying to say better… we wanted to have a grittiness – I always thought the opening sounded like Cypress Hill or Wu-Tang…”
- Ezra Koenig on BBC Radio X
This might begin to explain why, throughout the long intro, the upper frequencies sound haunted by the ghost of a vocal track that was imperfectly scrubbed out by a digital plugin. Or maybe it’s another sound entirely giving it that ghostly grit.
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