Death Cab for Cutie have returned with a new song, "Riptides," the first off their upcoming album, I Built You A Tower, out everywhere on June 5. Don't miss the WORLD PREMIERE now playing right here and on the free Audacy app.
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"I think at its core of the song is about how when we're going through something personally, oftentimes, certainly in the modern world, there are things going on on the global scale or the national scale that are incredibly traumatic for a lot of people and affect people very deeply," Ben Gibbard shares during an Audacy Check In. "Certainly the last couple of years, you know, there's been innumerable tragedies and atrocities around the world. And you know when someone is going through their own, trying to manage their own life after dealing with something painful or a trauma or something like that, oftentimes we find ourselves saying things like, 'well, I really can't complain,' you know, we were saying this during the pandemic too. 'Well, I really can't complain, I mean, I have a roof in my head,' but it's like, yeah, that's true, but also you're going through something incredibly difficult, and it's OK for you to focus on that, you don't need to qualify that there are other people suffering even because we all know that."
"It's an even more debilitating effect on you emotionally because you feel what you feel, but also you feel the suffering of other people, and then you're comparing that suffering to what you're going through, and then it diminishes how you're feeling," he adds. "You just all of a sudden you just find yourself exhausted by the confluence of these things happening at the same time. And so that's kind of what the song is about."
Don't miss the WORLD PREMIERE of Death Cab for Cutie's "Riptides" and hear more from the band here.