Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard made another divorce album. This time, he wanted to get it right

Ben Gibbard isn’t famous. At least, that’s what he tells me on a call from his home in Seattle, at the tail end of a weeks-long media circuit, during which he’s hardly had a chance to catch his breath. But even if you haven’t heard of him, there’s a good chance you know Death Cab for Cutie, the band he’s fronted for close to three decades.

When we speak, Gibbard, who turned 50 in August, has been promoting Death Cab’s much-anticipated 11th album, I Built You a Tower. Releasing a record is tough, but Gibbard isn’t complaining. The positive reception to his latest work has been, he says, a pleasant reminder that the band’s egos have not degraded their taste.

“We were quietly confident when we were making it [the album] but there’s always that moment where you’re like, ‘Oh my god, did we actually make something good or are we just completely deluding ourselves?’” he says.

Gibbard, and bass guitarist Nicholas Harmer, are the two remaining original members of Death Cab, which formed in Bellingham, Washington in 1997 and became renowned for injecting heartfelt emotion into ’00s indie rock. I Built You a Tower – recorded in just three weeks and released in early June – marked the band’s return to an indie label, ANTI Records, after 20 years with Atlantic Records.

For the past four years, the band’s back catalogue has been getting a workout – not just on the playlists of decades-long fans, but on stages at sold-out shows around the world – as Gibbard celebrated 20 years of Transatlanticism and The Postal Service’s Give Up, the sole album borne out of a side project in which he and producer Jimmy Tamborello collaborated long-distance, mailing each other demos on CD. In 2025, the band also completed a small North American tour revisiting their 2005 Grammy-nominated album Plans.

While onstage Gibbard was steeped in the nostalgia of his own music, his personal life was collapsing in the background. In 2023, Gibbard and his wife – photographer Rachel Demy, who he married in 2016 – separated; the pair’s divorce was finalised in 2024. It was during this period that I Built You a Tower came to life.

“It’s a record about the compartmentalisation of grief, how we compartmentalise grief to get through our days,” says Gibbard. “In the story of my actual life, the precipitous moment was a divorce.”

Gibbard says that, with this album, he didn’t want to write a book report about the dissolution of a marriage. “It’s not a blow-by-blow account, it’s not a tell-all – it’s an investigation of the internal,” he says.

The divorce was Gibbard’s second. In 2015, following his split from New Girl actor and musician Zooey Deschanel, Death Cab released Kintsugi, an album well-known to be about their breakup.

Compared to I Built You a Tower, Kintsugi was scathing. The album’s opening track, No Room In Frame, is thought to be about the couple’s move to Los Angeles and Deschanel’s rising television success. Gibbard doesn’t mince words in the song’s chorus, asking: “Was I in your way? When the cameras turned to face you.”

“I wouldn’t change anything about that record – it was the record I felt I needed to write at the time,” says Gibbard. “When I was younger, I’d write songs that had a lot of finger-pointing or bitterness or anger. And I’m just not interested in writing from that place any more.”

On the new album’s title track, Gibbard describes building a metaphorical tower in his mind, to keep someone locked away out of his thoughts, only for it to spectacularly fail. On Pep Talk, he describes waking up at sunrise, needing to convince himself he can survive the day ahead.

What else has the man known for writing about lost loves learnt about relationships following his second divorce? “People make mistakes. People hurt each other. But at the end of the day, this relationship was eight great years and two kind of bad ones,” he says. “And I don’t think I would change anything about it.”

I Built You a Tower has earned critical raves. Pitchfork said the album showcases Gibbard’s “best musical impulses in a decade” and suggested it “evokes the band’s golden era”, rare acclaim for any band entering their third decade.

If you ask local Death Cab fans where they first heard the band, most (the Millennials among them, at least) will give you the same answer: on The O.C. According to Gibbard, before The O.C. premiered in 2003, bands like Death Cab, Modest Mouse, The Shins and Bright Eyes weren’t being played on the radio and “certainly weren’t getting airtime on MTV”. All of them found a new audience through the teen drama.

In the series, Death Cab became a character in its own right, consistently referenced as the favourite band of main character Seth Cohen – which fan hasn’t repeated his now-iconic “Hey, do not insult Death Cab” line? – and even made a live cameo. This exposure became a way of circumventing the traditional ways of finding new listeners outside college radio stations or the indie rock scene.

“I won’t lie, it went from ‘This is an interesting novelty’ to ‘Are we being exploited by the Fox Network?’” says Gibbard. But 19 years after the series wrapped, any concerns about the band losing credibility through their affiliation with it have been put to bed.

“However we might have felt at the time, or how snarky or dismissive people wanted to be, I think it’s very clear we got the better end of that stick,” he says.

With local fans still mourning missing out on both 20th anniversary tours, which didn’t travel to Australia, there are high expectations for Death Cab’s visit to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in November for their first tour in seven years.

For the past 20 years, Gibbard has kept the set list for every single show the band has done. Before visiting a new city on tour, he looks back to the last time the band was there, checking what songs were played or missed. Except for the songs fans expect to hear at every show – he’s not looking to cause a riot by skipping I Will Follow You into the Dark – Gibbard curates a new set list, with the past one in mind, to make sure he’s giving people a new Death Cab experience.

“I love that we have what seems to be a really loyal fan base and yet, we’re not famous,” he says. “We make a good living and, you know, I think we’re still doing good work.”

Death Cab for Cutie’s I Built a Tower is out now. The band performs at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion on November 12, Melbourne’s Margaret Court Arena on November 13, and Brisbane’s Fortitude Music Hall on November 15.

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