If anyone can write a great breakup album, it’s Ben Gibbard. For almost 30 years, the Death Cab for Cutie frontman has channelled misery into such emotionally ruinous songs as 2003’s “Tiny Vessels”, with its cool and cruel detached lover, to “The Sound of Settling”, a lesson in unending, unrequited pining.
Today, though, Gibbard is reluctant to call the band’s new project a “divorce record”, despite the fact that, yes, it was written in the aftermath of his marriage ending. “Oftentimes those records are someone saying, ‘I’m going to bring this into the court of public opinion and tell my one-sided story about how this went down,’” he says. “You know the phrase, only a fool goes to court thinking the jury are bound to see it their way?”
