Death Cab For Cutie's Transatlanticism Holds Up 20 Years Later, and Everybody Knows It

In the early 2000s, many indie bands ditched obscurity to appeal to mainstream audiences in a wave of pop-friendly rock music that made black button-up shirts and a fair amount of depression seem pretty cool. Bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes saw a significant increase in popularity, but perhaps the best album to emerge during this era was from a Seattle band that, at the time, had just barely dodged a break-up. The 2003 masterpiece Transatlanticism was the then-obscure Death Cab For Cutie's last foray as a true indie band. For kids like me who played it on repeat, it helped define our taste in music. And it still holds up 20 years later.

Transatlanticism is an album I wish I could hear for the first time again. And each time I do hear it, its feels just like falling in love again. When a 16-year-old me first pressed play on my iPod Nano all those years ago and heard the opening track “The New Year,” it was love at first listen. Guitars swell and drums pound as lyrics that would ordinarily sound pessimistic come off as somewhere between apathy and self-realization: “So this is the new year/And I have no resolutions/Or self-assigned penance/For problems with easy solutions.”

Elsewhere, on “The Sound of Settling,” there’s an air of excitement for the future: “Our youth is fleeting/Old age is just around the bend/And I can't wait to go gray.” And the album’s incredibly heartfelt title track examines the anguish of love stretched thin by distance: “I need you so much closer.”

The album might explore various moods and tones, but ultimately the songwriting is both more focused and more universally relatable than other Death Cab records.

Frontman and principal songwriter Ben Gibbard is painstakingly honest on this album. "Tiny Vessels" explores the flip side of heartbreak: "She is beautiful, but she don't mean a thing to me." Whether this type of honesty comes from a personal experience or not, the "love them and leave them" narrative isn't uncommon in relationships. And the entire storyline in the song freely admits to being "vile" and "cheap," something that did strike a lot of fans the wrong way — mainly female fans who held the soft-speaking tenor with dreamy, sweeping bangs up to some unachievable standard of romanticism.

But in more traditional Death Cab form is the acoustic, lovelorn ballad "A Lack of Color," on which Gibbard shares the private thought that "all the girls in every girly magazine can't make me feel any less alone." And leaning heavily on nostalgia, "We Looked Like Giants" recalls the days of backseat make-out sessions while two lovers "learned how our bodies worked."

Cinematic in its tone, this album undoubtedly became the soundtrack to my formative years. But besides my own fond memories of listening to it over and over, it's pretty much official that Death Cab For Cutie reached its zenith with Transatlanticism — and Gibbard agrees that it’s still the band’s best. He eloquently explores the nuances of heartbreak, lust and long-distance relationships (hence the word “transatlanticism,” coined by Gibbard as a term to describe the immense space, metaphorically or literally, between two drifting lovers). These were things I had next to zero experience with at 16 years old, but, damn, it felt good to listen to them.

It quickly became clear that this record was sonically superior to earlier Death Cab records, too, including their 1997 debut You Can Play These Songs on Chords which, like others with it, embodied a more DIY ethos, thanks in part to the band’s lack of urgency to get it finished. Their near-breakup came two years earlier while the band recorded its third release, The Photo Album. The album was rushed and eventually made them resent one another, at least briefly.

But Transatlanticism was purposefully slower in its creation, recorded steadily over seven months in former guitarist and producer for the band Chris Walla’s studio in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, and the release of the album began a major label bidding war over the band. The foursome would later leave the Seattle indie label Barsuk and sign with Atlantic Records, with which they’ve remained for their subsequent six albums. They also happily moved on from obscurity, embracing a wider audience through Grammy nominations and big-time festival billings.

The quartet was indie rock’s best-kept secret for six years. But it wasn’t just the album at hand that changed the band’s trajectory for good. We can thank Seth Cohen, in part, for that. To those who aren't familiar with teen dramas of the early aughts, here’s a quick backstory: Cohen was a fictionalized conglomerate of the emo-teen-dream-who-listens-to-obscure-bands aesthetic on Fox’s The O.C., and his “quirk” was his love for this seemingly unknown indie band. In the show, Cohen played early songs from the band to his crush, Summer Roberts (who famously described their music as “like one guitar and a whole lot of complaining,") for which, well, we can't fault her) and just generally referenced “Death Cab” a lot. The band eventually played themselves in an episode, and by then, the secret was out. Death Cab For Cutie was every alt-boy and -girl's favorite band.

A few months prior to Transatlanticism fame, when Gibbard questioned the future of Death Cab, he released another timeless record with producer and DJ Dntel. The two formed the electronic duo The Postal Service, and their only album to date, Give Up, also gave the frontman a leg up in popularity. This October, he'll play in Grand Prairie with both bands on a 20th anniversary tour showcasing each album played in its entirety.

While The Postal Service can comfortably accept the label of an electronic or electro-pop band, Death Cab For Cutie is an awkward fit in any one genre. Despite coming into popularity during the height of the emo revival of the early 2000s, and often being categorized as one, they’ve denied being an emo band for years, and rightly so. Their music is much too refined and nuanced to be included on lists of bands like Dashboard Confessional or My Chemical Romance. And they haven’t cranked out a lot of radio-pop-friendly hits, but they’re not rock ‘n' roll, either. They’re just Death Cab.

For others like me who have listened to this album for the who-knows-how-many-th times these 20 years later, we don’t really care what the band gets labeled. And most of us will also agree that even as pleasant as Death Cab’s post-Transatlanticism albums may be (don’t sleep on Narrow Stairs and Plans, specifically), Transatlanticism’s charm comes from its musical and emotional poise as much from its being the band’s final and finest moments as the truly independent and obscure band that we felt cool for knowing about.