Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig just revealed that the band’s new material was influenced by a surprising artist!

It’s been over four years since Vampire Weekend released Modern Vampires of the City, but rest assured that frontman Ezra Koenig has been hard at work creating the band’s forthcoming record.

Though Koenig has been careful not to let too many details about the album slip, the producer recently revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that he found unlikely inspiration for the band’s new material in none other than country superstar Kacey Musgraves.

Koenig, who attended one o the Grammy Award winner’s concerts back in September of 2016, says he was immediately struck by the way Musgraves crafts her music.

The country star is known for her simplistic yet impactful storytelling, as apparent on hits such as “Follow Your Arrow,” “Merry Go Round,” and “Biscuits.”

It’s that straight forward storytelling in her music that really got Koenig thinking.

“The music was really clear and her voice was really clear,” said Koenig according to Pitchfork. “I’m the type of person who has spent hours pouring over the avant-garde poetic lyrics of certain songwriters, and there was something that felt so good [about how] from the first verse, you knew who was singing, who they were singing to, what kind of situation they were in.”

Koenig continued on to say that after the show, he thought back on Vampire Weekend’s own music and realized that there aren’t too many “where you could listen to the first verse and immediately answer the question of who’s singing and who they are singing to.”

It’s this particular notion that Koenig says inspired him to switch up his songwriting approach for the band’s new record.

Though Modern Vampires specifically contains some wonderful imagery in the lyrics, there’s no denying that it’s an album that offers itself up to lyrical analysis more than one with a straightforward message.

With that in mind, it’ll be interesting to see how Koenig’s songwriting has changed now that he’s seemingly going for a more straightforward approach when it comes to penning new Vampire Weekend songs.

Currently, there’s no projected release date for the new record, but Koening recently revealed back in September that the new Vampire Weekend album is about 80 percent done.

Here’s hoping we’ll see it drop sometime in 2018!