Death Cab For Cutie Set To Release Special Edition Of ‘The Photo Album’

This past weekend marked the 20th anniversary of Death Cab For Cutie’s The Photo Album, which was released on October 9, 2001 via Barsuk Records. In celebration of the record’s anniversary, the band and Barsuk will release a special deluxe edition of DCfC’s third studio album. The Photo Album (Deluxe Edition) is a 35-track reissue featuring a newly remastered version of the original album, and includes the three bonus tracks released with its first CD pressing, which were later released in 2002 as The Stability EP. The extensive reissue includes covers of Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” and The Stone Roses’ “I Wanna Be Adored,” previously unreleased tracks, rarities and UK b-sides which have never been available on digital services and, finally, all of the band’s original demos for the album.  The deluxe edition will be available on all digital platforms on October 29th, and a limited edition LP+12” EP version of the album, also newly remastered for vinyl, will be released in the spring of 2022. The gatefold vinyl will include the original album on one disc and The Stability EP on the second disc. The Stability EP has only been issued on vinyl once, as part of the long out-of-print limited edition 2013 Death Cab for Cutie: The Barsuk Yearsbox set released by Artist in Residence. The vinyl reissue will be on clear 180-gram vinyl and limited to 5,000 copies worldwide.

Alongside the announcement, Death Cab For Cutie share one of the previously unreleased demos for the record. Ben Gibbard describes “Coney Island (Band Demo)” as “a Neil Young-stomp kind of thing,” but producer and then-band member Chris Walla turned it into something very different. “It’s very indicative of the process we were employing at that point, which was to deconstruct something and build it completely back up,” Gibbard says. “In that particular case, it made the song a lot more interesting and gave it a nice flavor and a loneliness that sits well on the album.”