I Think Ur A Contra

Multi-instrumentalist/producer Rostam Batmangli discussed this contemplative break-up ballad in the band's track-by-track production notes: "This is the first Vampire Weekend song with acoustic guitar. At one point I wanted to rent a Kora to play the parts I was hearing in my head for the end. Even though this song is dark it ends in a place that's celebratory and cathartic. I used an 8-bit keyboard from the '80s to sample my own voice to create a bed of vocals. It ended up like a dirty, shaky Kate Bush, 'This Woman's Work.' The harmonies on this song are not like anything you'd find on our first record. I wanted the bridge to sound Americana."

When Vampire Weekend decided to name their sophomore album Contra, they knew that many would jump to conclusions. The older generation would assume it's a reference to the 1980s-era right- wing counter-revolutionaries of that name in Nicaragua, whilst the band's contemporaries would think of the series of run and gun video games. Frontman Ezra Koenig told MTV news: "To me, there's not an explicit connection... I think what attracted us to the word 'contra' was the root of it, thinking about the word and all the different implications of it. I did have a moment where I stopped and thought, 'Wow, everybody my age, when you say "Contra," thinks of the video game, and everybody my parents' age thinks of the counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua. It couldn't be two more different things. One incredibly serious and kind of f---ed up, you know? [Then-President Ronald] Reagan pouring money into that stuff, and the other one being a video game... and it's so weird. And that game came out in the '80s, too. Why did they name it 'Contra'? That maybe be neither hear nor there, but it's a weird thing." Koenig went on to explain that the album title is a concept that runs through most of the tracks, which reflects on how Vampire Weekend have been portrayed in the media since their rise to fame. "I do think it's related to our identity as a band. When you're in a situation where you all of a sudden get people writing about you and saying things about you, of course you're going to have a lot of people who try to identify you by a series of bulls--t signifiers," Koenig said. "They'll try to say because you wear this kind of shirt you come from this kind of family, or because you have a song with this word in it you must be of this political persuasion. So we did a lot of thinking about the idea of opposition, and how people try to place you in categories, and how we all do it - it's not just in terms of critics versus bands, or politicians, we do it in our personal life. It's very easy to get into that mindset, and I think a lot of things in our lives are trying to make us choose between these really basic things, when ultimately it's not a good way to look at the world."

Bassist Chris Baio told Drowned In Sound: "A lot of this song is played on Rostam's VSS keyboard - you get noises by singing into it and having it map your voice across the keys."