hmas vampire tour

HMAS Vampire passes through Sydney Harbour for major conservation work

A decommissioned warship usually on display at the Australian National Maritime Museum has been moved through Sydney Harbour to Garden Island for conservation work.  

Key points:

• The ship had its keel laid in 1952 and was used by the Navy between 1959 and 1986
• HMAS Vampire is Australia's largest museum ship
• It is expected to return to the museum in mid-February

The HMAS Vampire was moved by three tugboats from Darling Harbour as the ship has no functioning engine. 

The vessel, which sits on the water while on display at the museum, will undergo $3 million in repairs, including work on its hull. 

The museum's chief executive, Daryl Karp, said the ship was due for major conservation work. 

"Her keel was laid 70 years ago [and] we've had roughly five million visitors go on to her," Ms Karp told ABC Radio Sydney .

"As with anything that sits on the water — saltwater and museum objects [are] not a good mix."

Ms Karp said while the ship took a lot to maintain, it was important to have the display on the water.

"We're continually having to take it onto dry dock, to check it for rust, to repair things," Ms Karp told Breakfast presenter James Valentine.

"And to make sure that she remains absolutely safe for all our visitors."

The last of its kind

HMAS Vampire was built on Sydney's Cockatoo Island in the 1950s, with its keel laid in 1952. 

The ship was one of three Daring class destroyer ships built in Australia.

Ms Karp said the vessel was one of the last big gun ships to be built, as subsequent fighting ships were equipped with missile weaponry.

"She and her two sister ships were the first all-welded ships to be constructed in Australia," Ms Karp said.

"There's an enormous sense of pride and achievement in these ships being manufactured locally."

Despite its intimidating size, Ms Karp said the warship had a relatively peaceful career.

The ship was used to escort soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s.

It was then turned into a training ship in 1980, before being decommissioned in 1986 and given to the museum in 1997. 

A special sight on the harbour

The manoeuvring ship turned the heads of people out walking around Sydney Harbour on Wednesday.

Jim from Coogee was walking his grandson in Barangaroo Reserve when they stopped to see the boat turning around just off Darling Harbour. 

"With this harbour, it's so magnificent — every day you come down here is special, no doubt about that," he said. 

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HMAS Vampire to ‘sail’ again on Wednesday – send us your photos

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Daring-class destroyer HMAS Vampire will be moved from the the Australian National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour to Garden Island on 18 January 2023.

CAPTION : HMAS Vampire, Australia’s largest museum vessel, will be moved for maintenance in January 2023. Photo courtesy Australian National Maritime Museum.

The museum-piece ship will undergo essential maintenance at the Royal Australian Navy’s eastern base.

The movement is scheduled to commence at 8am on Wednesday 18 January.

Vampire will be ‘towed in state’, attended by three tugboats and a pilot vessel and should make for spectacular and poignant photo opportunities at many locations across Sydney Harbour – especially under the bridge.

CONTACT would love for fans to send us their photos (to editor@militarycontact.com ), which we’ll attach to this story, below  [but, in answer to an emailed question, no payment is offered for photos – just the thrill of the chase and the buzz of the by-line – and a hyperlink, if you want one].

According to the Australian National Maritime Museum, Vampire is scheduled to be back on display and open to the public on 17 February (assuming (but not confirmed) the return move from Garden Island to Darling Harbour to happen a day or two before that).

Approximate timings (on 18 January): UPDATE : Timings delayed by 90 minutes

• 0800 departure and turning in Cockle Bay
• 0840 tow toward Barrangaroo
• 0850 passage under Harbour Bridge
• 0900 past Opera House
• 1000 reach Garden Island Naval Base

SUBMITTED PHOTOS

Saw your article this morning on the Bat getting her new paint job. Here’s a shot I took in Sydney for her 60th Birthday Reunion. I was a Kellick ETP on her when she decommissioned.

Steve “Scotty” Glasgow

See a separate page of old photos from friends of Vampire, here . Feel free to add this collection too.

Vampire served in the Royal Australian Navy from 1959 to 1986.

Her arsenal included three twin turrets housing 6 x 4.5-inch guns (still in place); two single-gun and two twin-gun Bofors anti-aircraft guns (still in place); five anti-ship torpedo launchers (removed in 1970); and, anti-submarine mortar tubes (removed in 1980).

Despite her firepower, Vampire had a peaceful career, even while escorting troops to Vietnam in the 1960s.

In 1977, Vampire had a brush with royalty as the RAN escort for HMY Britannia during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee tour of Australia.

Vampire was the third of three Australian-built Daring-class destroyers in the Royal Australian Navy, and one of the first all-welded ships built in Australia, at Cockatoo Island.

She was commissioned on 23 June 1959 and decommissioned on 13 August 1986, after sailing almost 1.5million kilometres in Australia’s service.

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Managing Editor Contact Publishing Pty Ltd PO Box 3091 Minnamurra NSW 2533 AUSTRALIA

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13 thoughts on “ hmas vampire to ‘sail’ again on wednesday – send us your photos ”.

And a few more from JB in Feb ’84

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdaymateowyagoin/6893148573/in/album-72157624669003664/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdaymateowyagoin/6893146917/in/album-72157624669003664/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdaymateowyagoin/6893153461/in/album-72157624669003664/

Here’s one I took from JB in Feb ’84

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdaymateowyagoin/6893154707/in/album-72157624669003664/

I joined Vampire in June 65 as an able seaman Tas UC and left in January 68, she was a wonderful ship, we had a great ships company all of very well trained, my berth was 2 charlie mess Portside forward top bunk. I have so many memories that I wouldn’t know where to start. I have a picture of Vampire doing work up exercises in a large swell.

My dad, Keith McPherson was a Petty Officer on Vampire. ?

My husband was a crew member when it was commissioned in 1959. He did 3 trips to Hong Kong on her . He painted the bat wings on the radar tower this ship has been his talking point all our lives it was his first love I reckon we do have lots of photos but will need time to go through them

On her last up top trip before modernisation,[ 1969?] Vampire and HMS London participated in an exercise , outside Singapore, where Vamps discharged the last 21 inch torpedo fired in the RAN, and London did a gunnery offset shoot with her 4,5 inch guns. Set to run deep, London sent a signal which read ” congratulations , Vampire, your torpedo passed under our bow . B.Z. ” Judging by the accuracy of Londons gunnery, if it was real we may not have gotten close. My oppo & I were off watch from the boiler room, up in the spud locker, rubbernecking, and poor old Vamps nearly shook herself to pieces, by goodness she flew. That was an eventful trip, we ended up escorting Melbourne back to Singapore after the Evans collided with her. Very sad.

HMAS Vampire was named after HMS Vampire. But why was HMS vampire named vampire?!

HMAS Vampire 1 was a V&W class destroyer in WW2. Waterhen, Vampire,Voyager,Vendetta along with S class HMAS Stuart made up the Scrap Iron Flotilla. Vampire was renamed from Wallace to Vampire in 1917, don’t know why?

It’s the ‘why’ that’s bugging me lol

I remember Her decommissioning well….or at least Her paying-off run, which featured a final circumnavigation of Australia. Brisbane was Her first stop on that trip, and She berthed alongside us [HMAS TOBRUK L50] for Her 4 day Port call.

See….the thing is…She was a Steam Ship, and, as a consequence, She could blow black soot out of Her Funnels any time She chose.

We aboard HMAS TOBRUK were preparing for Admirals Rounds set to occur at 10:00 that Monday morning. TOBRUK was tickty-boo and shone like a new pin…which was a shame as when VAMPIRE sailed at about 08:15, She blew black soot over the entire ship….BASTARDS!!!!….We could hear them laughing still as they rounded Bulimba Point outbound on the river.

I don’t know how we did it, but we washed the Ship down and got into Our Sunday-go-to-meetin clothes just before the old Boy lobbed. And received a satisfactory as the old feller wouldn’t want to spoil us. Life in a Blue Suit.

Not sure that was our decommissioning trip…May 86 we visited Brisbane where the former? Governor passed away (ex RAN WW2) and we on Vampire performed a State Funeral with the Navy Band and Nirimba Gun Carriage team joining us. Sailed straight after for Townsville, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa and NZ.

LOL – good story Rick

Hate to disagree Fish…I was the POSY onboard and we didn’t do a final circumnavigation of Australia as you state….we were visiting Brisbane when former Governor Ramsay died and we were kept in Brisbane for more than a week to do the State Funeral with a Gun Carriage being brought to Brisbane from HMAS NIRIMBA…. from Brisbane we sailed to Townsville then to the South West Pacific before decommissioning on 12 August 1986….and I’m sure the Stokers would agree – we didn’t blow soot “on demand”….I remember on many occassions CMDR E had to front the CO on the bridge and explain why they blew black smoke …..

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• Jan 22, 2023

HMAS Vampire D11

The Daring Class destroyer design evolved in Britain during the Second World War. Requirements for a new fleet destroyer for the Royal Navy saw the first of eight ships ordered in March 1945.

The new ships were so far beyond accepted destroyer design that many naval authorities claimed they should be classified as light cruisers.

Construction of the Daring Class ships in Australia opened a new era in local shipbuilding.

The ships were the first all-welded hulls to be erected in Australia and, for the first time, aluminium was used extensively as a structural material.

The Australian built Daring Class destroyers were similar to the vessels of the Royal Navy's Daring Class however, they were modified for Australian conditions.

HMAS Vampire, the third Daring Class destroyer for the Royal Australian Navy, was ordered from Cockatoo Island Dockyard on 3 December 1946. Fabrication commenced in September 1948, and the keel was laid on 1 July 1952.

On 27 October 1956, HMAS Vampire was launched by Lady Slim, wife of the Governor-General, Sir William Slim, KG, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, GBE, DSO, MC, KStJ. Vampire underwent three years of fitting out following her launching.

HMAS Vampire commissioned at Sydney on 23 June 1959 under the command of Captain Eric J Peel, DSC, RAN. The next 4 months involved post commissioning trials, ship familiarization and her first deployment, a 27 day voyage to New Zealand and back to Australia.

Members of the Nepean Blue Mountains Sub-Section who served on the Vampire

From Left to Right: Colin Kelson, Des Harper AM & Robert (Monty) Montgomery

From October 1959 to March 1960, Vampire exercised with Australian and New Zealand naval units off the east coast of Australia and in the Tasman Sea. After visiting New Zealand she returned to Sydney in March 1960 and in June proceeded to Singapore for service in the Strategic Reserve

During her tour of duty she visited Hong Kong, Sandakan (Borneo) and Trincomalee (Ceylon). Vampire returned to Sydney in December where she underwent an extensive refit until April 1961. In September 1961 she again took her place in the Strategic Reserve, operating from Singapore and Hong Kong. She returned to Sydney in April 1962.

During the remainder of 1962 Vampire exercised with Royal Australian Navy and Royal New Zealand Navy units and also visited several ports in New Zealand. In January 1963 she departed Sydney for her third tour of duty as a unit of the Strategic Reserve, during which she participated in the 1963 South East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) Exercise SEA SERPENT and also visited Japan. She arrived back in Sydney in August 1963 and underwent a long refit.

In February 1964 Vampire was back at sea exercising with other Australian units. In May 1964, after carrying out anti-submarine exercises with USS Sculpin, she proceeded to Port Moresby, Manus Island and Subic Bay, preparatory to taking part in Exercise LITGAS with units of the Royal Navy, Royal New Zealand Navy and United States Navy. On completion of the exercise Vampire continued to operate in Asian waters until her return to Australia via Manus Island in February 1965.

After a leave and maintenance period Vampire conducted exercises with the French Navy Ship Doudart De Lagree in April 1965 on passage to Manila. In May 1965 she escorted HMAS Sydney (III), for part of her maiden voyage to Vietnam before proceeding to Sydney to undergo refit from July until December 1965.

Vampire departed for another Far East deployment in February 1966. The ensuing months were busy with involvement in patrols off Malaya and Borneo during the Indonesian Confrontation, escort duty for HMAS Sydney (III) from Manus Island to Vietnam and participation in the SEATO Exercise SEA IMP. Vampire returned to Sydney in August and the remainder of 1966 was taken up with local exercises, mid cycle docking and participation in a four nation exercise in the Solomon Sea off New Guinea.

In January 1967 Vampire, in company with HMAS Duchess, sailed for a lengthy Far East deployment. Both ships arrived in Singapore on 19 January. During local area exercises in February, Vampire gave assistance to the SS Maha Thevi which had run aground on Palau Pemanggil. The SEATO Exercise SIYASAT and visits to Manila and Bangkok occupied the month of March, prior to Vampire proceeding to Manus Island to escort HMAS Sydney (III) to Vietnam. This was the first of two trips to Vietnam during April, the second being from Singapore to Vung Tau with HMAS Sydney (III) later in the month. The remainder of the deployment included participation in the SEATO Exercise SEA DOG in July, followed by visits in August to Chinhae and Inchon in South Korea. The Indonesian ports of Jakarta and Surabaya were visited in September on the voyage home to Sydney, where Vampire arrived on 19 September.

A long refit was carried out in Sydney between September 1967 and May 1968. Work-ups and further participation in local area exercises followed this. Vampire deployed again to the Far East from March to October 1969, during which she undertook self-maintenance in Singapore and Hong Kong.

In early 1970 Vampire was involved in junior officers training plus goodwill visits to Adelaide, Brisbane and Lord Howe Island. This was a prelude to her paying off on 29 June 1970 to undergo an extended refit. This half-life modernisation, which took until November 1971, saw Vampire receive new gun turrets and fire control systems, new aircraft warning and navigation radar, plus replacement of a major portion of her superstructure.

Vampire recommissioned on 17 November 1971 under the command of Captain GJH Woolrych RAN at Dockyard Pier, Williamstown, and conducted work-up trials before arrival back in Sydney in March 1972.

A trip to New Zealand was undertaken in August before her first Far East deployment in her new guise from October 1972 until March 1973, during which she participated in the SEATO Exercise SEA SCORPION.

In April 1973 Vampire visited Suva and Apia and hosted the Australian Prime Minister during the South Pacific Forum. In September Vampire participated in Exercise LONGEX 73 and visited New Zealand.

In 1974 Vampire participated in exercises in Australian waters before undergoing refit from September 1974 to May 1975. Late 1975 saw her proceed for another Far East deployment during which she visited Singapore, Manila, Subic Bay, Hong Kong and Jakarta before returning to Australia in February 1976.

In June and July 1976 Vampire visited the west coast of America, calling at San Francisco and Seattle before returning home in August via Hawaii. The remainder of 1976 and early 1977 were occupied with maintenance, leave periods and local exercises.

In March 1977 Vampire undertake Royal Escort duty to the Royal Yacht Britannia during the visit of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. In April Vampire rendered assistance to the junk Wan Fu which was en route from Australia to America. A visit to Adelaide in June was followed by a docking in Sydney, plus leave and maintenance, before a visit to Singapore in November 1977 to participate in a combined United States Navy, Royal Australian Navy and Royal Navy exercise, COMPASS 77.

A visit to New Zealand was the only deployment during 1978, due to further refitting between May and August. Post refit trials and work-ups completed the year. Vampire commenced a South East Asian deployment in January 1979 and visited Singapore, Madras, Colombo, Belawan, Manila, Subic Bay, Hong Kong and Japan before returning to Sydney via Guam in June 1979. Participation in Exercise KANGAROO THREE completed the year and her arrival in Sydney on 6 December 1979 marked the end of Vampire's operational career.

In early 1980 Vampire undertook an Intermediate Docking in Sydney prior to assuming her new role as a training ship. For the remainder of 1980, and during 1981 and 1982, Vampire undertook a number of training cruises in company with HMAS Jervis Bay before undergoing refit at the New South Wales State Dockyard, Newcastle, from July to November 1982.

January 1983 began with another training cruise to New Zealand in company with HMAS Jervis Bay, before a quick trip to Singapore in company with units of Task Group 628.9 in March and April 1983. Another training cruise followed in May. October 1983 saw Vampire assisting Taronga Park Zoo by releasing two leopard seals into their natural environment before visits to Melbourne and Brisbane. The year was completed by another training cruise to the Whitsunday Passage and North Queensland ports.

A fire in Alpha boiler room gave Vampire a bad start to 1984. However, there were no casualties and damage was repaired within a week. A two month refit at the State Dockyard in Newcastle in May and June, during which Vampire celebrated her 25th birthday, was a prelude to a deployment to South East Asia. Between August and September Vampire visited Surabaya, Kuantan and Lumut before undergoing a ten day self-maintenance period in Singapore. Vampire resumed her training role after arriving back in Sydney in October. The remainder of the year was taken up with navigation training in the Torres Strait and Whitsunday Passage.

The first half of 1985 saw Vampire undertake training cruises to New Zealand and Queensland waters in company with HMAS Jervis Bay. This was followed by a three month Assisted Maintenance Period in Sydney before visits to Portland and Melbourne. Navigation training again ended the year.

The Royal Australian Navy's 75th Anniversary was a fitting year to mark the end of Vampire's career. In April 1986 a decision was made to decommission her, and after a final cruise to Cairns, Townsville, Suva, Apia and Auckland, Vampire made a ceremonial entry in to Sydney on 24 June 1986. The following weeks were spent preparing the ship for decommissioning. The last of the Australian Daring Class destroyers paid off on 13 August 1986 after a 27 year career during which she steamed 808,026 nautical miles.

On decommissioning Vampire was gifted to the Australian National Maritime Museum where she continues to be a popular tourist attraction for overseas visitors and former members of her ship's company.

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Australian National Maritime Museum

Tickets 🎫 See It All Ticket for 1 Adult (16–59) 🎫 See It All Ticket for 1 Child (4–15) 🎫 See It All Ticket for 1 Concession (students, ISIC, pensioners, or seniors (60+))* 🎫 Family See It All Ticket for up to 2 Adults + 3 Children All tickets include : - Access to all permanent galleries and special exhibitions - Access to the top deck of HMAS Vampire, HMB Endeavour and Bark James Craig - Access to Steam Yacht Ena - Complimentary WiFi, Audio Guide and acess to various Tours * Must present an Australian full-time student card, ISIC, an Australian or New Zealand ID card for seniors, or an Australian retirement certificate Children ages 3 and under can enter free of charge Highlights 🌊 Explore Australia's deep connection to the oceans with action-packed exhibits 🚢 Board the HMAS Onslow, a real submarine, and the HMB Endeavour, a replica of James Cook's ship 😲 Experience the intensity of naval warfare with the Action Stations exhibit ⚓ Immerse yourself in naval life on the battle-tested HMAS Vampire navy destroyer General Info 📅 Date: various dates 🕒 Opening hours: daily from 9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. 📍 Location: Australian National Maritime Museum ❓ Please note: children must be taller than 90cm to board the vessels. Vessels are closed if the temperature is above 36°C ❗ For this event, all sales are final and tickets can’t be refunded, changed or modified. For more information, please refer to our T&Cs Description Dive deep into Australia's connection to the seas at the Maritime Museum, and immerse yourself in an ocean of interactive exhibits and aquatic attractions. Step aboard a submarine and discover the stealthy world of underwater warfare, before taking the fight to the surface as you clamber onto the HMAS Vampire navy destroyer. See beautiful art exhibitions, be blown away by the museum's 3D cinema, and enjoy a whole raft of other activities.

Getting there

2 Murray St, Sydney, 2000

Select date and session

No booking fees

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Australia's largest museum vessel, hmas vampire, is in safe hands with thales.

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On 18 January, the Australian National Maritime Museum's Daring class destroyer, HMAS Vampire, journeyed from her home port at Darling Harbour, Sydney to Garden Island Defence Precinct where the Thales team have been carrying out a range of maintenance and conservation activities.

The last of Australia’s big heavy ships, the decommissioned HMAS Vampire, is Australia’s largest museum vessel; serving in the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) from 1959 to 1986 where she undertook a range of missions including acting as a RAN escort for Her Majesty’s Yacht (HMY) Britannia during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee tour of Australia.

In 1997, HMAS Vampire was transferred to the Australian National Maritime Museum, where she has been since – delighting maritime enthusiasts of all ages with the ability to board the vessel and explore the ship in-depth.

Australian National Maritime Museum CEO Daryl Karp said ‘Vampire’s place in our museum is important, partly because of the hundreds of intersecting stories associated with the vessel, which brings to life our maritime heritage.

‘Many of our Museum volunteers share history with the Vampire, including several ex-servicemen who served aboard on the sister ship, Voyager, as well as boilermakers, electricians and others with an historic connection to shipbuilding on Cockatoo Island.’

In order to keep HMAS Vampire safe, ‘stoically’ seaworthy, and looking her best – just like other vessels, regular maintenance is required. However, unlike other vessels, she wasn’t able to simply sail there, rather Vampire was manoeuvred in a delicate operation and towed in state, attended by three tugboats and a pilot vessel with the passage being managed by the Museum’s Fleet Team, the NSW Port Authority and Thales Australia. 

While in the Captain Cook Dry Dock, HMAS Vampire has had general repairs to the hull and superstructure, an underwater paint system has been applied and the ship's superstructure and decks have been painted. All in all, it’s estimated that the Above Water Systems team at GI have rendered about 13,000 labour hours.  

It has been a pleasure working with the team from the Australian National Maritime Museum on this important piece of Australia’s and the Royal Australian Navy’s history" Max Kufner, VP Above Water Systems, Thales Australia.

If you’d like to read more about HMAS Vampire, head to the Australian National Maritime Museum’s press release, here .

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Vampire Weekend Did Not Make a ‘Doom and Gloom Record’

On its fifth album, suffused with thoughts of 20th-century New York City, indie-rock’s pop maximalists get noisier — but it’s a journey out of negativity into “something a little deeper.”

From left: Chris Tomson, Ezra Koenig and Chris Baio of Vampire Weekend. The band’s new album, “Only God Was Above Us,” is due April 5. Credit... Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times

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By Jon Pareles

• March 20, 2024

From the first seconds of Vampire Weekend’s new album, “Only God Was Above Us,” it’s clear that something has changed. “Ice Cream Piano” starts with hiss, buzz, feedback and a hovering, distorted guitar note — the opposite of the clean pop tones that have been the band’s hallmark. It’s the beginning of an album full of startling changes and wild sonic upheavals, all packed into 10 songs.

The new album, like all of Vampire Weekend’s work, is meticulous, self-conscious and awash in musical and verbal allusions — sometimes direct, sometimes cryptic. But it’s also a broad pendulum swing from its 2019 release, “Father of the Bride,” a leisurely, jam-band-influenced sprawl that ran nearly 58 minutes. “Only God Was Above Us,” the group’s fifth album, due April 5, is eight songs and 10 minutes shorter.

“With every album we have to push in two directions at once,” Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend’s singer and primary songwriter, said in a recent interview. “Sometimes that means we have to be poppier and weirder. Maybe with this record, it’s about both pushing into true maturity, in terms of worldview and attitude, but also pushing back further into playfulness. There’s a youthful amateurishness along with some of our most ambitious swings ever.”

Koenig, 39, described the new album’s sequence of songs as “a journey from questioning to acceptance, maybe to surrender. From a kind of negative worldview to something a little deeper.” Ultimately, he said, the LP is optimistic. “It’s not a doom and gloom record. And even if there’s songs where the narrator is trying to figure something out or feels confused, that’s not all. That’s part of the story — it’s not the thesis of the album that the world is dark and horrible.”

The album also exults in musical zingers, non sequiturs and startling off-grid eruptions. The songs often morph through multiple changes of tempo and texture, riffling unpredictably through indie-rock austerity, orchestral lushness, pop perkiness and hallucinatory electronic studio concoctions, like the cascade of wavery, overlapping piano lines in “Connect.” Where “Father of the Bride” had a folky openness, “Only God Was Above Us” is crammed with ideas that gleefully collide.

Ever analytical, Koenig mused that Vampire Weekend’s albums each reflected patron saints. He named Paul Simon for the band’s self-titled 2007 debut , Joe Strummer and Sublime for “Contra” from 2010, Leonard Cohen for “Modern Vampires of the City,” and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, along with Phish, for “Father of the Bride.” The new album, he said, may reflect a short-lived tour he didn’t get to see: the 1997 pairing of Rage Against the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan, which reached the cover of Rolling Stone .

“Distortion, heaviness, hardness,” Koenig said. “We were drawn toward those qualities on this record in a more direct way than ever before.”

Koenig spoke via video from his home in Los Angeles. Behind him — from the collection of his wife, the actress Rashida Jones — was a wall of photographs by the artist Taryn Simon from the project “Contraband” : bootleg DVD boxed sets that were confiscated by United States Customs, arrayed in Minimalistic formations. Like Vampire Weekend’s songs, they neatly frame disruptive material.

Vampire Weekend has always had two distinct aspects — its fastidious album work and its frisky live shows — and may soon have three. (More on that later.) The central one is the music the band constructs in the studio, which is minutely tweaked and painstakingly considered. Vampire Weekend’s songs uphold a long-established tradition of concise pop songwriting. But even as it delineates clear verses and choruses, the band pushes every other parameter.

“With some types of art, you probably have to put a lot of thought into how to create layers of meaning,” Koenig said. “Songs are, by their nature, relatively short. They have repetitive hooks. Then if you want to go maximalist and fill it with production details and arrangements, you can. And if you want the lyrics to push out into some weird place, you can.”

Yet the basics of pop songwriting keep the band’s experimentation grounded. “You can zig and zag from verse one to verse two to verse three, but you keep coming back to the same chorus,” he added. “But now it’s recontextualized by the second verse. I think all that stuff is built into the format. It’s this great populist art form where you can get really out there but the structure holds it together.”

Beginning with the 2013 album “Modern Vampires of the City,” Vampire Weekend’s studio output has increasingly been a collaboration between Koenig and the producer and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Rechtshaid, who has worked on hits with Madonna , Usher , Haim and others.

“I’ve been part of making things that sound expensive and beautiful,” Rechtshaid said in a video interview from his Los Angeles studio. “But on this record, when the songs were at a certain stage, we were just, like, ‘This sounds exciting to us.’ It wasn’t a gimmick. It wasn’t like, ‘Here’s the decision to make something that feels noisy or dirty or distorted.’ It’s that the songs were emoting properly.”

The band and Rechtshaid have been working on — and reworking — most of the new album’s songs since 2020. Two tracks, “Gen-X Cops” and “The Surfer,” originated much earlier. The untamed slide-guitar line of “Gen-X Cops” came from Brooklyn sessions in 2012, while “The Surfer” includes much-altered elements of a song Koenig had begun writing with Rostam Batmanglij , who left Vampire Weekend in 2016.

“Sometimes you get lucky and the music, the production, the lyrics and the performance all come together and it fits on the record you’re working on,” Koenig said. “And sometimes, you know there’s something special about it, but you have to put it aside and just let time do its thing.”

Although Vampire Weekend’s members have settled in Los Angeles, its new album is suffused with thoughts of 20th-century New York City. Those were the decades before Vampire Weekend got started at Columbia University in 2006. “Weird, half-baked memories and pictures and thoughts and family history,” Koenig said. “That’s the version of New York that’s floating through this record.”

The opening tracks ponder conflict and disillusionment. “Classical” finds bitter power struggles hidden in history, noting “how the cruel becomes classical in time.” In “Connect,” the singer wonders, “Is it strange I can’t connect?,” mingling the personal and the online. The album eventually concludes with “Hope,” the longest song in Vampire Weekend’s catalog, a stately, eight-minute litany of disasters and injustices — “The sentencing was overturned/The killer freed, the court adjourned” — with a guardedly reassuring refrain: “I hope you let it go.”

The album title comes from a New York Daily News headline shown in the album’s cover photograph , which was shot by Steven Siegel in 1988 at a subway graveyard, inside a subway car turned sideways — an image that looks surreal but needed no special effects. One song, “Mary Boone,” borrows the name of the SoHo gallery owner who was hugely influential in the 1980s.

Another, “Prep-School Gangsters,” is named after a 1996 story in New York magazine about privileged students dabbling in the drug trade. “The prep-school gangster — these are the people who run the vast majority of institutions,” Koenig said. “It’s very possible, especially in America, especially in New York, that every now and then the prep-school gangster’s grandfather was once the disadvantaged youth, and that the disadvantaged youth’s grandson will be the prep-school gangster. And here they are in this brief moment of time, meeting together.”

“The Surfer” begins with a reference to “Water Tunnel 3,” a project to bring water to New York City from a reservoir in Yonkers. It has been under construction since 1970 and is far from complete.

“There’s that eerie but beautiful feeling that underneath this, the most populous city in America, there is an almost century-long project happening, where people are burrowing through the Earth,” Koenig said. “And then, classic New York stuff that everybody wants to talk about, the bagels and the pizza — it’s so good because of the water. Where does the water come from? It comes from upstate New York, far away. How does it get into somebody’s tap on the Lower East Side?

“It’s always been a slight obsession of mine,” he continued. “I like that idea about the underground. I don’t mean culturally. I mean just literally what’s underground.”

Vampire Weekend will soon be resurfacing to tour — a job far removed from the band’s finely detailed studio work. Real-time performing used to be a fraught prospect for such a perfectionist group. “I would hear other musicians talk about, ‘Oh man, you know, touring is tough, but then once you get onstage, all your worries go away and you’re just connecting with the audience,’” Koenig recalled. “And I’d think, ‘What are these people talking about? That’s when the worries start.’”

For its 2019 tour, Vampire Weekend expanded its stage lineup to seven musicians and vocalists, opening up more possibilities in the songs and relieving some of the virtuosic pressures. “Now, when we get together to rehearse, there’s a youthful, playful vibe,” Koenig said. “We’re always coming up with ideas that make us laugh.” The full band has been practicing since November for a summer tour it will preview on April 8 — performing a midday concert in Austin in the path of the full solar eclipse and sharing a free livestream .

Along with recording and touring, Vampire Weekend may soon unveil a third facet. Chris Baio, the band’s bassist, and Chris Tomson, its drummer, did separate video interviews from the studio space they share in Los Angeles — a converted medical office where Vampire Weekend started meeting in summer 2020 for weekly, Covid-distanced jam sessions, playing in separate rooms and recording hundreds of hours of music.

“The world had stopped working and a lot of what we normally do was just not being done,” Tomson recalled. “There was something about just playing with no expectation — to just play with my two very close friends without an agenda.”

Baio said, “It’s very rare for people in a band of our size to be alone together. No engineer, no tour manager, nothing like that. It felt like being at the outset of the band again. And we did that for three years and change, whenever we were all in town.”

Those sessions may lead to the emergence of a new trio that happens to have the same members as Vampire Weekend, performing unreleased material.

“We kind of have an imaginary back story for that band,” Koenig added. “It was a band that came out around 1989, 1990, and they were a little bit too punky for the jam scene and a little bit too jammy for the punk scene. And there’s a little bit of the Minutemen in there. The truth is, this is very premature because that band is still hashing out its sound. I don’t want to say too much.”

Could the unnamed trio open shows on Vampire Weekend’s tour? “That has been discussed,” Koenig said dryly.

“We’re just trying to create a sound that we’ve never quite heard before,” he had noted earlier. “That’s what keeps us going.”

An earlier version of this article misstated Ezra Koenig’s age. He is 39, not 40.

How we handle corrections

Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. He studied music, played in rock, jazz and classical groups and was a college-radio disc jockey. He was previously an editor at Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. More about Jon Pareles

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