Rostam of Vampire Weekend shares new track ‘EOS’

Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij has shared his first solo song since 2011, ‘EOS’.The track, out now digitally via XL Recordings, comes with an animated lyric video by Jon Race. Despite collaborating with everyone from Charli XCX to Cloud Nothings outside of Vampire Weekend, strictly solo material from Rostam has been in short supply.Talking about the song, he said: “I invited engineer Shane Stoneback to live with me for five day stretches to work on recordings. On the last day of his first trip I was fatigued from all the songs we’d worked on and wanted to start recording something new. … I had this one idea from a while back stored as a voice memo on my phone. It was the chorus of “EOS” and it had come out of me all at once: melody, lyrics and chords. It’s rare that that happens for me—I’m always collecting ideas on my phone but usually it’s individual building blocks of a song, this was the essential elements all coming out together. The rest of the song started to take shape because what I recorded kept reminding of a very specific place and time in my life. I wanted to capture that feeling, and finishing the song became about chasing it down.”Rostam follows Vampire Weekend bassist Chris Baio in releasing solo material, with his BAIO project releasing its debut album ‘The Names’ late last year.Stream ‘EOS’ below.