Death Cab For Cutie Share New Single “Punching The Flowers”

Indie rock titans and eight-time GRAMMY nominees Death Cab for Cutie, recently announced their 11th studio album. I Built You A Tower, will be released on June 5 via ANTI- Records, and today the band shares the second single off of the forthcoming record. “Punching The Flowers,” out now, and is a gnarled angular rock song in which Gibbard spins a real-life experience of a toddler throwing a tantrum literally punching flowers outside a bodega into a metaphor for a man who has something beautiful and sees its hold over him as a cage, a frustration. Listen to the song and watch its Jason Lester directed-video now HERE.

“’Punching the Flowers’ is a song about stagnation and the feeling of being imprisoned by The Known. And about the damage done when someone ventures deeper into the unknown,” explains Gibbard.

I Built You A Tower, out this Summer, marks the band’s return to their independent roots after 20 years on Atlantic Records. Produced and engineered by John Congleton and assembled from a mere three weeks of sessions, the album as recorded at Animal Rites in Los Angeles, as well as the band members’ homes in Seattle, Bellingham, Los Angeles and Portland.

In recent years, Death Cab for Cutie celebrated several historic milestones, including massive sold-out tours celebrating the 20th anniversaries of seminal releases Transatlanticism and Plans. Those tours were pivotal to the creation of I Built You A Tower, as behind the scenes, Gibbard weathered the greatest pressure of his professional life — fronting both Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service on arena stages for hours a night — while struggling with the collapse of his personal life in the background. The strain felt too much for one person to bear, and the “tower” originated as a way to protect himself. “There’s this need to find a place in ourselves to put loss and grief,” he explains. “A place that can hold it so we can move on with our lives. But there are these moments where the trauma breaks out of that shell we created for it.”

I Built You A Tower is an album of reconciling with past selves in order to locate a new future. “The anniversary tours exorcised any nostalgia in our systems,” Depper observes. “We felt part of this powerful force greater than all of us and went into the studio with a sense of, how can we capture that feeling and put it into something new?” Harmer continues, “The whole experience of this record got us back to the earliest versions of Death Cab for Cutie: If the musicians in the room like what we’re working on, that’s enough. We reconnected with the confidence that comes with that.” As such, this is not the dreaded “return to form” narrative, but a reclamation of a core ethos that has run through Death Cab for Cutieb’s 30-year history.

PRE-ORDER I BUILT YOU A TOWER

Death Cab for Cutie will be touring across Europe and the UK this September and October, with support from Pool Kids. These performances come on the heels of a historic, sold-out global tour in marking the 20th anniversary of Transatlanticism plus their universally acclaimed 10th studio effort, 2022’s Asphalt Meadows. See below to find a show near you, and get your tickets HERE.

Death Cab for Cutie EU/UK Tour Dates

September 16 – Dublin, Ireland – 3Olympia Theatre
September 17 – Dublin, Ireland – 3Olympia Theatre
September 19 – Manchester, UK – O2 Victoria Warehouse
September 20 – Edinburgh, UK – Corn Exchange
September 21 – Gateshead, UK – The Glasshouse
September 23 – Bristol, UK – The Prospect Building
September 25 – London, UK – Troxy
September 26 – London, UK – Troxy
September 29 – Utrecht, Netherlands – TivoliVredenburg
September 30 – Brussels, Belgium – Cirque Royal
October 1 – Berlin, Germany – Columbiahalle
October 3 – Paris, France – Elysée Montmartre