Grammys 2020: Indie heroes Vampire Weekend win Best Alternative Music Album for 'Father of the Bride'
Vampire Weekend has made a triumphant return to the spotlight this weekend! The New York-based musical collective just pulled off a momentous win by winning Best Alternative Music Album at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards. The Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album is typically presented to "vocal or instrumental alternative music albums containing at least 51% playing time of newly recorded music", although the Academy's definition for 'alternative' music is a bit dodgy, labeling it as a 'non-traditional' genre that exists "outside of the mainstream music consciousness."
While that may be true for some of these artistes, the award has a long and celebrated history of massively popular musical icons who have been presented with this honor in the not-too-distant past, including crowd-pullers like David Bowie, Radiohead, Beck, and the White Stripes. Some of these artists are arguably even more mainstream than their left-of-center label suggests. Other recent talents to have accepted the Best Alternative Album Grammy in the past include the quirky 'St. Vincent', and the powerhouse blues outfit 'Alabama Shakes'.
This year's nominees for Best Alternative Music Album at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards included a star cast of performers:
'UFOF' – Big Thief
'Assume Form' – James Blake
'I,I' – Bon Iver
'Father Of The Bride' – Vampire Weekend
'ANIMA' – Thom Yorke
In a triumphant return to the big time, the slick Vampire Weekend beat out the other talented and prolific nominees on the list to claim the Grammy award for the 'Best Alternative Music Album' at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Sunday night. This is Vampire Weekend's second Grammy award.
At the 56th Annual Grammy Awards, the indie darlings won the Grammy for the album 'Modern Vampires Of The City' way back in 2014. This is the first album they've released since that triumph, and they've certainly grown a lot since then. This is the first album of theirs that has ever featured guest vocals, and it is also their first album since multi-instrumentalist and producer Rostam Batmanglij's departed the band. To cap off the list of firsts, it was also their major-label debut, their first on Columbia Records!
Accepting the award, frontman Ezra Koenig was pretty speechless albeit grateful, just saying "Thank you. That's it, thank you." He took a quick moment to acknowledge the large crew behind him, made up of the band, guest collaborators and their entourage, before wrapping it up to go and celebrate with his bandmates.
