VAGABON RELEASES NEW SINGLE “DO YOUR WORST”
TOUR DATES:
7/22 - Chicago, IL @ Pitchfork Music Festival
10/21 - Detroit, MI @ El Club *
10/22 - Toronto, ON @ Velvet Underground *
10/24 - Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg *
10/26 - Somerville, MA @ Crystal Ballroom at Somerville Theatre *
10/27 - Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts *
10/28 - Hamden, CT @ Set Space Ballroom *
10/29 - Washington, DC @ The Atlantis *
10/31 - Barcelona, ES @ Sala Apolo ^
11/2 - Lyon, FR @ Le Transbordeur ^
11/3 - Milan, IT @ Alcatraz ^
11/4 - Lausanne, CH @ Les Docks ^
11/6 - Berlin, DE @ Astra Kulturhaus ^
11/7 - Utrecht, NL @ TivoliVredenburg - Grote Zaal ^
11/8 - Paris, FR @ Pitchfork Music Festival
11/9 - Antwerp, BE @ De Roma ^
11/11 - Glasgow, UK @ Old Fruitmarket ^
11/12 - Leeds, UK @ O2 Academy ^
11/13 - London, UK @ Pitchfork Music Festival
11/14 - Nottingham, UK @ Rock City ^
12/6 - San Francisco, CA @ The Independent *
12/8 - Seattle, WA @ Madame Lou’s *
12/9 - Vancouver, BC @ Biltmore Cabaret *
12/10 - Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios *
12/13 - Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room *
^ w/ Weyes Blood
* w/ Nourished By Time
Vagabon, aka Lætitia Tamko, releases a video for “Do Your Worst,” the explosive new single from her recently announced upcoming album, Sorry I Haven’t Called, out September 15th via Nonesuch Records. The song, produced by Tamko, Rostam and Teo Halm (SZA, Rosalía, FKA Twigs) combines dancefloor euphoria, breakneck-paced jungle beats, and a DJ’s sense of pacing through Vagabon’s signature lucid storytelling.
"I was nestled in the German countryside when Teo Halm, who co-produced this with me, and I were experimenting in my home studio late into the night, I was listening to a lot of club music and I set out to make an instrumental that drew from the music you’d hear at an underground club in Germany or the UK yet still lived in the Vagabon musical lexicon,” Tamko explains. “A year later, when I returned to the U.S, I got Rostam involved and he had a great idea of adding a layer of live drums on top of the breakbeat from my Germany session."
Sorry I Haven’t Called finds Tamko reinventing herself once again and features the most playful and adventurous music of her career. “I didn't feel like being introspective. I just wanted to have fun,” Tamko explains. Following her intimate 2017 debut Infinite Worlds, the New York artist favored expansive and evocative electronic textures in her breakthrough 2019 self-titled follow-up. But her latest LP feels like a wholly new era for Tamko, one that’s transformational and uncompromising. Across 12 vibrant tracks she wrote and produced primarily in Germany, she channels dance music and effervescent pop through her own confident sensibilities. These conversational songs are alive and unselfconscious, a document of an artist fully embracing her vision and reclaiming her joy.
In addition to her performance at Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago this weekend, Vagabon is hitting the road this fall on a tour that includes a headline run in the US with support from Nourished By Time as well as Europe dates with Weyes Blood.
The story of Sorry I Haven’t Called started in grief after her best friend died in 2021. This devastating and unexpected loss unmoored Tamko but also gave her a newfound clarity. “The things that I thought I cared about, I no longer cared about,” she says. “I had a realization that I need to make sure to feel everything that comes my way.” She decided to sell her things and move to a small lakeside village a few hours north of Hamburg in northern Germany to process everything. “There's no linear path to grief, and everyone handles it differently, but uprooting my life just felt like exactly what I had to do, ” says Tamko. “I needed a place to think and go through my discomfort privately but to also explore the newness and urgency I was feeling in my life.” In the village, her phone didn’t work and there were no close grocery stores or restaurants, so she spent her time alone working on music.
Despite the palpable absence in her life, her new songs were her most disarming and ebullient yet. The first one she wrote was “Carpenter,” a mesmerizing track anchored by a tangible bass groove, where she sings, “I wasn’t ready to move on out / but I'm more ready now.” It’s a fully-realized track and feels like the culmination of her catalog so far. “A lot of the music that I was making there had nothing to do with my grief at all,” says Tamko. “Once I gave myself permission to make a record that's full of life and energy, I realized that’s the point of this album. In the midst of going through all of these tough things, it became a record because of the vitality that these songs had.” For Tamko, there’s power in pursuing happiness.
While writing in Germany, Tamko nurtured her love for dance music and let it seep into her new songs. “The only things that were giving me access to a feeling were dance music and going to a rave in an extremely dark club where if I wanted to cry, I could do it and be around other people.” she says.
After a few months in Germany that included marathon writing sessions and a whirlwind romance, Tamko decided to stay with friends in Los Angeles and finish her record. She enlisted co-producer Rostam to help her unify her vision.
Sorry I Haven’t Called is a warm and resilient album about embracing the ecstatic moments wherever you can by knowing how you love and how you mourn. It’s an LP born of both communal dancefloor revelations and the clarifying peace from solitude, an emotional rebirth as well as an artistic one. “This record feels like what I've been working towards,” says Tamko. “When I think of this album, I think of playfulness. It's completely euphoric. It's because things were dark that this record is so full of life and energy. It’s a reaction to what I was experiencing at the time, not a document of it.”