Where Death Cab for Cutie learned to put the pain

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Ben Gibbard remembers late 2023 as a time of competing realities.Onstage, the frontman of Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service was thriving as his two bands toured together to mark the 20th anniversaries of Death Cab’s “Transatlanticism” and the Postal Service’s “Give Up.”Behind the scenes, Gibbard’s personal life was in shambles.“I was getting off phone calls — very difficult phone calls — 20 minutes before going on in an arena,” he says.The singer and his wife, photographer Rachel Demy, were in the middle of an agonizing breakup that would eventually lead to divorce.

Yet audiences in the thousands were turning up nightly to see Gibbard reanimate the peak-millennial classics that made him one of indie rock’s defining stars.“I’d just tell myself, You’re a professional — you’re gonna go out there and do it, and no one’s gonna know,” he recalls.“It was all waiting for me when I got offstage, of course.

But for two hours I was able to disconnect and be a performer, which was incredibly …” Gibbard, 49, trails off into a laugh.“I don’t know if it was healthy,” he says.“But it was helpful.”Two and a half years later, that split-screen experience — “this idea of how we compartmentalize our pain or our grief or our trauma,” as Gibbard puts it now — forms a through line of Death Cab’s ruminative new album, “I Built You a Tower.” Due Friday from Anti Records, where the group landed after leaving its longtime home of Atlantic amid a corporate shake-up, the LP sets thoughts of broken fences and never-ending storms against tuneful arrangements that can churn, shimmer or chime.“I pledge myself to your misery / I kneel at its throne,” Gibbard sings in his still-boyish tenor over the sleek new wave groove of “Trap Door,” “Respecting your proclivity / To languish on your own.” In the fuzzed-out “Envy the Bird...