Rostam

Change has done Rostam Batmanglij plenty of good. Five years ago, while Vampire Weekend were working on what would become their fourth album, Father of the Bride, he left the group to pursue his own career. He traded east coast for west, building a home studio in Los Angeles, accumulating production credits for alt-pop titans like HAIM, Clairo, and Lykke Li, and releasing an album of his own, Half-Light, in 2017. In the process, he gradually untethered his own sound from the baroque rigidity of his classical training and drifted toward janglier pop. His second album, Changephobia, isn’t so much an arrival as it is an assertion of perpetual motion, a collection of road-bound vignettes that attest to the kind of world we can build if we embrace what we often fear the most. Last month, Batmanglij sat down with The FADER’s Salvatore Maicki to talk about the the techniques and conversations that shaped the album into his loosest and liveliest yet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices