Vampire Weekend: The Graduates

Photographs by Matt Jones

When Ezra Koenig was a sophomore at Columbia University, his main extracurricular activity was his (white) rap duo, L'Homme Run. They composed and performed verbally dexterous songs with titles like "Pizza Party" and "Interracial Dating" (which reflected on finding long black hairs in the shower), and co-opted the Lacoste alligator as their official mascot. The group was meant to be funny, but they weren't a joke -- a subtle but key distinction that ultimately doomed the project. "It was hard for me to take seriously because no one else would take it seriously," Koenig says.

Some of that same eyebrow-raising cultural smash-and-grab is on display in Vampire Weekend, the baby-faced Koenig's suddenly successful indie band, which appropriates African and Caribbean rhythms for its gleefully polyglot pop. The memory of L'Homme Run lives on, however, at Columbia, where Koenig's one bit of underage civil disobedience remains on display: Just below a second-floor window at his old dorm, in black spray paint, is the alligator. It's a sunny, freezing late December day when Koenig points out the graffiti to me, and he's caught somewhere between sheepish pride and genuine concern that its revelation might somehow cause trouble. I tell him that the logo of a polo shirt company isn't exactly an anarchy symbol, but he just grins and keeps walking.

There would be a lot of those inscrutable smiles and uncomfortable silences during my time with Vampire Weekend, a young band rocketing to fame -- or whatever passes for fame in these bifurcated, bloggy times -- thanks to an explosion of online buzz and that rarest of rarities, a (self-titled) debut album that is actually worthy of the hyperbolic hosannas. Because, for a bunch of 23- and 24-year-old recent college graduates who get to play music for a living, they don't seem particularly elated by the attention. Indeed, they are, like Koenig, pitched somewhere between cocky pride and self-conscious reserve.

Over coffee in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood a few days after playing a sold-out show in Massachusetts, the band members -- singer/guitarist Koenig, keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij, bassist Chris Baio, and drummer Chris Tomson -- are characteristically low-key about their rapid ascent. Just two years since their fumbling first practice in a dorm room, they have self-produced an album, played to rapturous crowds on both coasts, toured Europe with the Shins, signed a worldwide record deal, and now share management with the White Stripes and M.I.A. Yet when asked if things have been crazy -- or at least exciting -- Koenig, clad like his bandmates in tasteful plaid, looks back blankly. "It hasn't gotten crazy," he protests. An awkward silence.

"I think because we're not 30 and haven't had four bands and tried it before, this is just what it is," Tomson elaborates, sporting a thick scruff that his bandmates don't look capable of replicating. "I mean, we hear that it's fast and, taking a look at other bands, maybe it is. But to us it kind of feels smooth." There are nods and murmurs from around the table. If they seem defensive, that's only because they know their unprecedented rise -- Vampire Weekend are, for example, the first band ever to be shot for a Spin cover before they'd even released an album -- inevitably makes them a target of the very same machine that brought them this recognition: influential music blogs that champion unsigned, unheralded acts, only to turn their backs once those acts become signed and heralded.