Almost Famous: Vampire Weekend

Last year, Ezra Koenig was teaching English to eighth graders in Brooklyn, New York, public school. This year, he quit that job to teach English to indie-rock fans across the country. Koenig, 23, is the lead singer and guitarist of Vampire Weekend, whose best song is "Oxford Comma," a spry sing-along about the finer points of punctuation. The band — four recent Columbia graduates who have grown from blog-dork faves to indie rock's rookies of the year on the strength of their jubilant, Afropop-inspired single — broadcast from a cosmopolitan universe. They wear boat shoes, their lyrics exlore a geography that starts at the quad and ends in Cape Cod, and, in casual conversation, they eagerly discuss the legacy of British colonialism. So it's a bit strange when keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij, 24, announces, "This band isn't really about being, you know, academic."

Vampire Weekend — filled out by drummer Christopher Tomson, 23, and bassist Chris Baio, 23 — formed in 2006 and, thankfully, their music feels more like a party than a seminar. Koenig peppers his Ivy League shout-outs with references to Lil Jon and reggaeton, and, on their fourthcoming debut album, the band set bright melodies to percolating rhythms, harnessing the Congolese dance genre "soukous" to a Western-pop sensibility ("We actually started off wanting to sound like the Kinks," Koenig says). This summer, they piled into a van for their first nationwide tour, blasting a Tom Petty mix CD and finding their crowds — which used to number in the low double-digits — swelling into the hundreds. The tour was a success, except for for dark spot. "Somewhere between San Francisco and here," Koenig says, "Chris lost our Hacky Sack."