They see Mansard Rooves through trees. They write odes to unrequited loves crossing college campuses. One of their tunes chronicles the tale of a vampire hunter getting the hell outta Boston.

 Oh, and they also write some of the very best pop songs heard in 2008 and – yes! – they’re coming to Australia for Splendour in the Grass. Ladies and gentlemen, Vampire Weekend may very well be you’re new favourite band.

Of course, they may not. As usually happens with a band hyped to the nines before their self-titled debut album was even released in February of this year, Vampire Weekend have split the vote. Some love them, some hate them. But surely it’s better to engender genuine passion (either side of the divide) than it is to provoke apathy?

Bassist Chris Baio agrees. “Any time a band comes out with a new album and gets popular pretty quickly then people will feel really passionately about them. People react to that passion and then say negative things. But in saying that I feel like every tour we’ve done has been bigger and bigger, and every tour we’ve done has been better and better.”

Vampire Weekend really did burst into the general consciousness earlier this year, seemingly coming from nowhere to be lauded by all and sundry as the latest greatest thing almost overnight.

But it was thanks to the hyperbolic enthusiasm for their demos in the blogosphere that they really began to make people sit up and take notice. Indeed, many of the tracks on The Blue CD-R were revisited on Vampire Weekend, with only two ‘new’ songs – “M79” and “I Stand Corrected” – making the grade for their debut. The former was the last song they wrote – and that was back in February, 2007. So they’ve been living with the songs for a long time; now the key is to follow it up.

“We have different ideas, different sketches for songs,” he says of what they want to do when it comes to recording again. “We’ve got 2 songs that we’ve been playing live that will probably be on the next record, and we definitely want to turn it around as quick as possible – hopefully get a second record out before the middle of next year.”

Despite the fact that they’ve been road-testing the new material, Chris is uncertain as to what direction it will go – only that it will, of course, sound like Vampire Weekend. “We have an approach where we’re not afraid of making any song sound too different from any of the others songs – there’ll always be something coherent about an entire album of ours. I think there’s always some thread that connects them,” he says of the wide variety of songs on the band’s debut, from the rapid-fire “A Punk” to the moody “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance”.

“We don’t set any rules for ourselves when we’re making music,” Chris continues. “I think we’re going to try and experiment with different things and I think it’s already taking on a different shape from some of the things that we’ve been working on – we’ll approach it similarly to the last open, with the approach being open-mindedness.”

The thing that stands out most about Vampire Weekend is the songs – they’re smashing pop nuggets of pure joy. If you dig ‘em, you REALLY dig ‘em, with the infectious enthusiasm that the band clearly feel for their own creations coming through loud and clear.

“That’s something that we wanted to do, and what we’ll definitely do on the next record,” Chris says of the band’s approach to recording. It’s brilliant pop music, the sort that sounds utterly effortless, and completely charming. “I definitely think that that’s an important part – we started off playing college parties and we tried to bring fun to people, and I think there’s something in our songs that people would be able to enjoy on a purely visceral level, but then at the same time we try to have complexity to look beyond the surface.

“It’s part of what we do,” he explains of the band’s approach to pop music, “but it’s definitely not the whole picture.”

It’s definitely something that sets the band apart – they manage to touch on the immediacy of pop music, but with insightful, intelligent and occasionally hilarious lyrics. It’s Ezra Koenig’s words that have sparked some of the backlash toward the band, with his preppy approach and label-dropping (from Benetton to Louis Vuitton) earning brickbats from some press.

But it’s this whimsical and occasionally sarcastic approach married to glorious pop music that makes the band so special – they don’t pretend to be anything other than Upper West Side Soweto, fusing the influences of Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads to a collegiate English literature idiom. As such, they can speak to the audience on two levels; the visceral and the cerebral.

Vampire Weekend have also done everything by themselves – apart from booking early tours and generating their own word of mouth, they also self-recorded their debut album, with the group’s multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij at the production helm.

“I think it’s still a conversation that we need to have,” he admits. “Maybe we’ll work with someone who’s can engineer if there’s a specific type of sound that we want to get. But as far as it goes now we’ll produce it and work on it in a pretty similar manner. This band is all our jobs – it’s what we’re doing. When we were making our first record we couldn’t devote ourselves full-time, just doing things sporadically whenever we had the chance to, but I think that’ll be the big difference working on the next record as opposed to the first one.”

With the band now their one and only concern, has that changed their approach at all, from songwriting to performing to recording?

“I think as far as songwriting goes it’ll still be the same process,” Chris speculates. “Ezra or Rostam bring in a part and then the four of us work on it together into crafting it into a song. It’s just four of us in a room.”

Yet for Vampire Weekend Rostam dominates the playing and performing – he played a heap of instruments, as well as producing it. “That’s the way that we worked that record,” he says, “but we’ll wait to see how we work the next one.”

Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut is out now, with the band touring for Splendour in the Grass.

Side Show Dates are:
Monday 4 August @ Metro Theatre, Sydney (18+)
Ticketek 132 849 or www.ticketek.com.au;
Metro Theatre Box Office
02 9550 3666 or www.metrotheatre.com.au

Wednesday 6 August @ Prince Bandroom, Melbourne (18+)
Ticketek 132 849 or www.ticketek.com.au;
Prince Bandroom 03 9536 1168 or www.princebandroom.com.au