As Little Wanderer started to play through the first time I started wondering if this was going to be the one, if this was the point where Kintsugi, the new album from Death Cab For Cutie, started to fade after its impressive start. For a while, it seemed ok, passable, another perfectly decent Death Cab album track to pass the time between those other, more instant, more insistent Death Cab tracks.

And then back out into another verse, this time feeling ever so slightly lifted. By the end, the lyric calling back to the opening lines, a story has been told, characters and loves created.

Don’t judge too soon, is the moral of this story.

One moral. Another is that this twenty-first century habit of releasing a series of songs as teasers for a new album, can work wonders for building up excitement before a new album. No longer is there a need to release a big lead single, or even spend money on a video. Now you simply drip-feed tracks, one by one into the salivating mouths of indie bloggers and fans, relying on each new track to keep the pre-release anticipation up as the memory of the previous track fades. It seems to have worked for Modest Mouse, who released six tracks before Strangers To Ourselves was out, and now, with four of Kintusgi’s tracks out in the wild in advance of the album’s March 31st release, it’s doing the same for Death Cab For Cutie

If you pre-Order Kintsugi now you’ll get Black Sun, No Room in Frame, Ghosts of Beverly Drive and Little Wanderer instantly.

Pre-order HERE.