Death Cab’s ‘new guy’ talks about joining and recording with one of his favorite bands

Multi-instrumentalist Dave Depper joined Death Cab for Cutie on tour in 2015 along with Zac Rae, replacing original member Chris Walla on tour and becoming official band members the following year. Yet with the band’s history now spanning 22 years, he’s still considered a freshman player in the influential indie-rock outfit.

“I did an interview recently and someone referred to me as ‘the new guy,’” Depper says, with a laugh, while on the tour bus three hours late for sound check in San Antonio (thanks to a flat tire). “I’ve been in this band for four years.”

Depper may be one of the group’s newer members, but he was already well-versed in its catalog when he got the gig.

“I definitely wasn’t going into it cold. I loved Death Cab. I bought (2003’s) ‘Transatlanticism’ the day it came out,” he says.

Death Cab for Cutie plays Ovens Auditorium Friday.

Recording his first album with Death Cab — 2018’s “Thank You for Today” — was both exciting and daunting for the longtime fan-turned-band member.

“It felt like I had the golden ticket to the Chocolate Factory, but also not wanting to be the guy that messed up Death Cab for Cutie,” he explains. “It was invigorating to take the insight I had as a fan of the band and use that in the studio.”

“Thank You for Today” touches on some different territory for the band. While now-42-year-old frontman Ben Gibbard ruminates on aging and changing, he also addresses the way gentrification and development amid a quickly growing population has squashed his beloved hometown’s art scene and affordability in songs like “Gold Rush.”

It’s a subject Charlotte’s all too familiar with, but city dwellers around the globe can relate.

“I live in Portland,” Depper says. “It’s rampant there. It seems to have struck a bit of a universal chord. Artistic communities feed developers with dollar signs in their eyes, but they’re capitalizing on what makes those communities great and with the same stroke pushing out the people who made it that way. I can’t think of any city I’ve visited where that’s not the case. Here and abroad.”

In hindsight, Depper is still happy with his first Death Cab album — the band’s ninth, and its first since 2015’s “Kintsugi” (made in the wake of Gibbard’s divorce).

“There wasn’t a single song where any band members was like ‘I’m not feeling it.’ All of us could stand behind the album in a unified way,” Depper says of “Thank You for Today,” which benefits from brevity at 10 songs. “And having played these songs live for six months, the songs really fit with the catalog in a strong way. It’s not like we did the thing where we were playing the whole album right out of the gate. But it’s also not like people are only cheering for the songs they know.”