In retrospect, a less charitable listener could almost call Veckatimest opportunistic - straddling the line between the soon-to-be-watered-down chamber-folk wave led by Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver and the psych-pop revival MGMT left in their wake. But a Volkswagen third-quarter Super Bowl sync still seemed out of the realm of possibility for a band pursuing challenging art-rock while coveting “Album Of The Year” nods from critics across the board. With its peppy overtures and flooring crescendos, “Two Weeks” was primed for ubiquity. Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold recently christened it as such when he notoriously discussed the current cultural state with the Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth over social media, stating, “I feel like 2009, Bitte Orca / Merriweather / Veckatimest, was the last time there was a fertile strain of ‘indie rock’ that also felt progressive w/o devolving into Yes-ish largesse.” That comment is funny both because Grizzly Bear unironically covered Yes the same year they came onto anyone’s radar, and because 2009 was the heydey of indie rock soundtracking car commercials. With only a decade of distance, the time period feels like an entirely bookended historical chapter. The soil laid by the density of widely heralded landmark releases would be what allowed for bands like the Black Keys and Vampire Weekend to become arena acts, ones that promoted Grammy-nominated singles by going on The Colbert Report to compete in a “Sell-Out-Off.” This was the year the Yeah Yeah Yeahs became source material for A-Trak remixes, and Phoenix released the album that would eventually propel them to be Coachella headliners. Carried forward by the colossal crossover hit “Two Weeks,” the album turned the quartet from critical darlings and Jonny Greenwood’s proclaimed “favorite band” to principal figures in this century’s commercial peak for indie music - the summer of Merriweather Post Pavilion, xx, and Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (which, alongside Veckatimest, all made Stereogum’s Top 5 albums of 2009). The fever pitch portended the heights Veckatimest would go on to clear.
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Across the internet, the leak turned hype into seeming hyperbole, which started to seem more like prophecy come May 26th.
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That’s not only because of just how fervent the anticipation was for what the band would do next after their stunning breakout Yellow House and the announced follow-up’s instant-canon pre-release singles it’s because what people finally heard exceeded expectations beyond what even the band’s then-most ardent supporters realized they could have set. The “release” of Grizzly Bear’s third studio album 10 years ago this Sunday was an event, in a way that it might not have been had its rollout gone as planned. None of them have to, because the attention their albums will be paid even after they come out proper won’t amount to half that received by the muddled, low-quality rip of Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest, months before anyone would hear a fraction of just how beautiful the thing actually was. Yet none of those artists are writing blog posts expressing their anger, disappointment, and ultimately resigned hopes for how listeners receive their stripped-from-context creations.
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As such, the frenzy that once accompanied pirating unreleased music has become an artifact of an older era of the Internet.Ĭonsider that this past week you could have gone to a torrent site and picked up each of today’s anticipated new releases from Flying Lotus, Mavis Staples, and Morrissey, among others. Nowadays it’s not only expected but sometimes even encouraged that your fans will have heard your new music long before they can actually purchase it (assuming you’re one of those artists whose fans still buy albums). Once considered breaking news, album leaks have become largely an innocuous nonentity.