Codes and Keys

Codes and Keys is the seventh studio album by Death Cab for Cutie, released on May 31, 2011. Ben Gibbard and Nick Harmer have both been quoted as saying that the album will be "a much less guitar-centric album than we've ever made before". The first single, "You Are a Tourist", was made available for online stream on March 28, 2011 on the band's official site and the album was available for streaming in its entirety on May 23, 2011 on NPR. The album debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, with 102,000 copies sold in its first week. It has sold 283,000 copies in the US as of March 2015. On November 30, 2011, the album received a nomination at the 54th Grammy Awards for Best Alternative Music Album. Recording and production Influenced by the album, Another Green World, by Brian Eno, Codes and Keys was recorded in eight different studios, using Logic Pro software. The band would record in each studio for no longer than two weeks, with vocalist and guitarist Benjamin Gibbard noting, "We're all moving into a period in our lives where family is very important. So living off in the woods for a month away from family isn't something we want to do. On this record I've written a couple songs in our downtime between studios and we start recording that brand new song on the first day of the next session, which is something we've never really had the opportunity to do before." During its recording, Gibbard stated: "It's not a guitar-based record. We've been into vintage keyboards and playing with that palette. We're not adding guitars because people will be expecting them. I'm so proud of this album that at this point I don't care if people don't like it." Guitarist and producer Chris Walla elaborated further, "We're thirteen or fourteen years, and seven or eight albums – depending how you count – into this, and it just seemed like a good time to not make a really guitar-centric, guitar-focused record." Walla later stated: "guitar is great; it's a really immediate, impulsive sort of instrument. But I think if we had strapped on guitars and gone into the studio with the intent of making a sort of live-ish sounding record, we definitely would've retreaded some of the territory that we were in for Narrow Stairs.