Walk of fame

Throw a band in Williamsburg to build a recording studio. What do you get? Fingers crossed, a record. Throw a band in Harlem to do the same. Now what do you get? Evicted by Columbia—at least, if you’re The Walkmen, you do.

Four years and one album after saying goodbye to their studio—Marcata Recording—The Walkmen are set to release their sixth studio album, “Lisbon,” on Sept. 14.

Peter Bauer, the organist and bassist for the award-winning five-piece band (with a single in the top 20 of Pitchfork’s Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s, for one), spoke to Spectator about the record, its creative process, and the group’s past in Columbia’s backyard.

“When we started in New York, it was a true New York operation,” Bauer said. “Three of us lived in a house in Harlem. We all played and recorded there and we were very much centered in your guys’ area.”

But he said that this past was far behind The Walkmen—“New York isn’t as much a part of what we do now.”

With a new record that seeks refuge in simplicity and also takes its name from Portugal’s capital city, it’s possible that The Walkmen couldn’t be further from their New York yesterday. Nonetheless, they may just be stronger for that.

Eviction party
Columbian tales of eminent domain tend to be painted with a similar emotional color palette—idealism splashed against protectionism, aggression against helplessness, and steps forward against cries for steps back.

The Walkmen’s story, however, defies all familiar patterns.

The house that The Walkmen built opened in 2000—an analog studio in an abandoned Nash Rambler car factory at Broadway and 132nd Street in West Harlem. What would become Marcata had a spiral ramp that went down a quarter of the building, but that wasn’t going to deter the band from setting up shop.

When the project was complete, Maracta was not only a home for the young band and a place to record their first five albums, but also a fully functioning studio that hosted other notable bands, like the French Kicks.

Above all else, Bauer said that Harlem for The Walkmen was an “area that’s a cheap place to do something like making music” at a time when it would have been impossible to find the money to make a record.

“It’s definitely still a thing for bands to need to have money to focus on making a record,” he said. “This was a way we made that work.”

The Walkmen did more than just make do with the studio—it became a part of their direction. The band became known for working with Marcata’s space to create a vast, expansive sound on their tracks.

Then, in 2006, Columbia gained control of the Nash Building as a part of the Manhattanville expansion and Marcata closed, with The Walkmen recording one final Harry Nilsson cover album as a tribute to the studio.

The story may just be the happiest case of eminent domain Columbia’s ever seen.

“The place was a sinkhole of money,” Bauer said of Marcata. “The rent was climbing, and we were thinking, ‘Thank God. Let’s get the hell out of here.’”

Finding “Lisbon”
If anything, the band’s uprooting encouraged exploration, both literal and figurative. During the process of recording “Lisbon,” The Walkmen took two trips to Portugal.

“The place had a quality to it, and that was what we loved more than anything else,” Bauer said of playing a show and spending time with the band in Portugal’s largest city.

That quality, it seems, cultivated the band’s productivity—The Walkmen wrote 29 songs for the album, with the intention of releasing the ones that didn’t make the cut for the 11-track “Lisbon” as B-sides.

“We put everything together when we’re recording. It’s a full band process,” Bauer said. “And we wrote so many songs we couldn’t even figure out how to record all of them.”

In the first wave of studio time, the band recorded many horn-based tracks, the only one that survived the cut being its first single, “Stranded.” “We loved the sound of the horns, but the album found its energy when we started simplifying everything,” Bauer said.

“We played newer versions with a really good, formulated groove—nothing unnecessary,” he said. “The energy comes across when it’s more fun to play.”

Walking the walk
Listening to The Walkmen is not something that can be done casually.

Slow or fast tempo, the band’s music has a distinctively brooding quality to it, insistently tasking each listener to unravel it layer by layer. “We always want our music to have a strong mood,” Bauer said.

That mood is uniquely defined by the vintage tone of Bauer’s organ, Hamilton Leithauser’s drawn out vocals, and Matt Barrick’s powerhouse drumming.

These core elements coalesce particularly well on “Angela Surf City,” which takes off into a rush of drums and wailing highs, and on the unexpectedly jangly “Woe Is Me.”

Some of the album’s most successful moments occur when it takes a step back for a breath of air. The album’s final three tracks show a particularly comfortable face of The Walkmen, more careful than ever to give each piece of the ensemble its due space.

And finding such comfort, according to Bauer, was largely inspired by identifying and focusing on what they do well.

“We wanted an A+ for The Walkmen,” he said of the record, “not anyone else.”

“Lisbon” will be streaming in its entirety on NPR.org until the album’s release on September 14.