A-Punk

Vampire Weekend formed at Columbia University in 2006, Ezra Koenig, Rostam Batmanglij, Chris Tomson, and Chris Baio — and made their debut album in a way that reflected their circumstances exactly. Recorded across a series of unlikely locations in 2007: a Columbia lecture hall, Tomson's family barn, several Brooklyn apartments, a studio in DUMBO. The self-titled debut was released on XL Recordings on January 29, 2008, produced entirely by Batmanglij, and debuted at number 17 on the Billboard 200.

A-Punk runs two minutes and seventeen seconds and contains more ideas per second than most bands deploy in an entire album. Released as the second single on February 28, 2008, it peaked at number 25 on the Billboard Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart and reached number 48 in the UK. The band made their network television debut performing it on the Late Show with David Letterman. The song was certified Gold by the RIAA in July 2013. The guitar figure is instantly recognisable, the tempo is relentless, and the whole thing is over before you've properly decided how you feel about it, which is the point. Koenig's lyric, oblique and literary in the way all his best writing is, sits inside the speed without being consumed by it.

The backlash arrived almost simultaneously with the acclaim, the band's Ivy League backgrounds and the debt to Afropop both becoming targets for critics who found the combination suspicious. The argument has faded with time. What's left is the music, which holds up entirely on its own terms. Vampire Weekend went on to make Contra, Modern Vampires of the City, and Father of the Bride, each one reaching the UK Top 5. Batmanglij left the band after Father of the Bride. A-Punk is from before any of that, the debut single of a band that had no idea what was about to happen to them, recorded in a barn and a few Brooklyn apartments, two minutes and seventeen seconds of something that sounded like nothing else in 2008.