Here’s your first taste of Death Cab for Cutie minus Chris Walla. The founding band member amicably parted ways with DCFC over the summer, and so this brand new single offers up the alt-rock band in a new light. No doubt, “Black Sun” still sounds like classic DCFC; frontman and lead singer Ben Gibbard remains the soulful face of the band. Fans will have to wait for nuanced differences to surface once their eighth studio album comes out; Rick Costey (a Muse, Franz Ferdinand, and Kimbra collaborator) replaced Walla as lead producer on it. Kintsugi, the followup to 2011’s Codes and Keys, drops March 31. Bassist Nick Harmer described the inspiration behind the album’s unique title to Rolling Stone: “It’s a Japanese style of art where they take fractured, broken ceramics and put them back together with very obvious, real gold. It’s making the repair of an object a visual part of its history. That resonated with us as a philosophy, and it connected to a lot of what we were going through, both professionally and personally.”

As a longtime Death Cab fan, it’s certainly sad to see Walla go after being a part of the band for 17 years, but it gives DCFC an opportunity to move forward in new directions and I’m glad that Gibbard and co. are taking it in stride. “This is an opportunity for the band to become something it could only become by losing a founding member,” Gibbard says. “It’s our goal to make records that rank amongst the best work we’ve ever done.”