Still cute, but maybe stuck in time?
Death Cab for Cutie @ Victoria Warehouse | 19th September 2026
Reviewed by Peter Wild
My Death Cab journey starts a little over 20 years ago – at some point between their 2003 album Transatlanticism and their 2005 major label debut, Plans. My love affair with REM had been waning ever since Monster and I was looking for a new replacement favourite band. To my mind, it felt like Transatlanticism was their Document, and Plans their Green. Whatever followed would be stratospheric, surely. Narrow Stairs was the follow-up in 2008 – I caught them at the Manchester Apollo on that tour – and, whilst it wasn’t their Out of Time, it did well for them, getting nominated for Grammies and selling hundreds of thousands of copies. It didn’t set my world on fire like Plans did, but I would have still described myself as a fan. And yet here we are, some 18 years later and Death Cab seemingly fell out of my world.
This is the context for the Victoria Warehouse gig. What went wrong? Why did I stop listening? I think I gave 2011’s Codes and Keys a cursory listen but Kinsugi (2015), Thank You For Today (2018) and Asphalt Meadows (2022) all passed me by. I think it might be the music though. Death Cab for Cutie are the proverbial elephant surrounded by blind men – depending on where you grab them, you might say they were emo, electronica (or indietronica as they are sometimes referred to), college rock or just flat-out guitar pop. It’s admirable for a band to try and change things up each time they record – but Death Cab came to strike me as a band chasing legitimacy, exploring different influences without necessarily doing anything interesting with the convergence.
This is borne out as they take to the stage at the Warehouse like conquering heroes, in good shape for their collective ages, rattling out the hits and the deep cuts with the kind of urgency that might leave you feeling like the band had something to prove. They open with ‘Riptides’, the lead single from their most recent album, I Built You a Tower: “I’m too tired to talk,” Gibbard sings, “and I can’t seem to hold it together.” Thankfully bassist Nick Harmer helps power things along with a Hooky-esque bassline (Gibbard has credited New Order as a major influence). This is followed by ‘Roman Candles’ (the lead single from previous album Asphalt Meadows) – which sounds like Violator-period Depeche Mode (Gibbard has credited Depeche Mode as a major influence) in that it’s abrasive and dissonant, at least when set against Gibbard’s resolutely pop voice.
Next up we get ‘The New Year’ (from Transatlanticism) – the first bona fide DCFC classic and you can tell from the roars it elicits from the crowd. What’s more, it’s a song that sounds like no one other than DCFC. The lyrical refrain – “This is the new year / I don’t feel any different” – might well be a common Gibbard trope but it still lands. “I wish the world was flat like the old days / Then I could travel just by folding the map,” remains a great line.
The band revert to the new album (‘Punching the Flowers’ – more Violator-period Depeche Mode) and tracks from Kinsugi (‘The Ghosts of Beverly Drive’ and ‘Black Sun’ which are kissing cousins of songs by The Cure(yes, Gibbard has cited them as a huge influence). “There was little feeling,” Gibbard sings on ‘The Ghosts of Beverly Drive’,“please work with what is left.” It’s all fine, of course: consummately professional, delivered with aplomb>. But you can’t shake the feeling that for all the urgency, for all of the jumping up and down, for all of the energy exerted, the band have missed their window and can’t quite work out which way is up and what sound they want to call their own.
The proof of this comes in the form of ‘I Will Follow You Into the Dark’ (and to a lesser extent ‘Summer Skin’ and ‘Crooked Teeth’) – DCFC’s biggest hit by some way – when the crowd comes together in a form of collective rapture. For all of their sales, for all of their critical plaudits, for all of their songs used to grace American films and TV shows, the band stalled here back in 2006. Which isn’t to say that they don’t have songs that are fine (‘Trap Door’ and ‘Stone Over Water’ on the new album are worth a listen – even though, yes, they sound a bit like New Order) and more to say that the urgency with which they propel themselves through the set is largely as a result of their patchwork sound and the way in which their back catalogue is comprised of uncomfortable bedfellows.
They have tunes undoubtedly, songs that people feel passionately connected to (see ‘Soul Meets Body’, see – unfathomably – ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’), but they remain perennially second tier, a band that would like to be taken as seriously as, say, The National, but lacking their gravitas (either vocally or lyrically). Their last but one song at the Warehouse is ‘The Sound of Settling’ – and that might be the last word on the experience of seeing them.
Reviewed by Peter Wild