Death Cab for Cutie returns to the road Wednesday in continued support of the band’s latest album, Asphalt Meadows. The group has been touring a whole lot since Asphalt Meadows dropped last September and has found the reception to the new material to be very positive.

As guitarist Dave Depper tells ABC Audio, there hasn’t been a lot of “the classic, like, seeing people getting up and going to get a beer or looking kinda distracted kind of thing” on the Asphalt Meadows run.

“With this album cycle, these songs just have been really received right alongside all the older material,” Depper shares. “Fans seem really engaged with them, kinda from the get-go people were singing along with them. It was really amazing to see.”

“In past tours, we’ve started out very ambitiously playing, like, seven or eight songs from the new record and they gradually taper off as the tour goes on,” he continues. “But with this one, we’re still playing seven or eight new songs a night, people seem very excited about them … we’re very proud of that.”

As for why people are connecting so strongly with Asphalt Meadows, which features the singles “Here to Forever” and “Pepper,” Depper smiles, “We just made a good record, I guess.”

“We were … confident and sonically adventurous, and [frontman] Ben [Gibbard] wrote some amazing lyrics,” Depper says. “There was just a real cohesive process from start to finish with this one.”

Depper, who’s been with Death Cab since 2015, adds that his affection for Asphalt Meadows isn’t “to dog anything we’ve done before.”

“I’m very proud of everything that we’ve done, and people certainly have favorites from those records, too,” he says. “For whatever reason, this album had an extra sparkle to it that we detected and the fans detected.”

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