Artist

The Postal Service

Seattle, United States · Formed 2001

The Postal Service is a music group from Seattle, United States, active since 2001. Their discography on Gatefold includes 5 records.

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Photo of The Postal Service

5

Albums tracked

185

In collections

2001

Since

Biography

A cheap Roland Groovebox and an old Akai sampler in a cramped Silver Lake apartment. That was Jimmy Tamborello's setup. Ben Gibbard was up in Seattle, tracking vocals in his room and burning CDRs to mail down I-5. The Postal Service was literally built on the delay of the United States Postal Service. There was no big budget or fancy studio. Sub Pop thought they were putting out a quirky side project to keep Gibbard busy between Death Cab records. They had no idea this bedroom experiment would become the second-biggest release in the label's history after Nirvana's Bleach. Most electronic indie crossovers from 2003 aged like milk. This one did not because Tamborello's glitchy IDM beats had actual dirt on them. He was chopping up acoustic guitar strums and accordion breaths, while Gibbard wrote some of the sharpest, most cynical pop hooks of his career. It was a perfect accident of geography and hardware limits. They tried to capture lightning twice with a few reissue bonus tracks years later, but the magic was already gone. They knew it, too.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of The Postal Service

The pivots — what forced The Postal Service to reinvent.

  1. The Mail-Order Blueprint

    Gibbard and Tamborello first worked together on a track for Dntel's Life Is Full of Possibilities in 2001. That single song, '(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan,' clicked so fast they decided to make a full record. Distance forced them into a strict asynchronous writing process. Tamborello would program complex, glitch-heavy instrumental DAT tapes in Los Angeles and mail them to Seattle. Gibbard then edited the arrangements, added his signature melancholic melodies, and mailed the tapes back to Sub Pop.

  2. The Platinum Surprise

    When Give Up dropped in February 2003, nobody expected a gold record, let alone a platinum one. The band only did a short club tour with Jenny Lewis on backing vocals and Rilo Kiley's drum tech trying to keep the MIDI gear from crashing. The album took off on college radio and commercial alternative stations through sheer word of mouth. The success caught everyone off guard, eventually shifting the entire landscape of indie pop toward laptop production.

Influences

  • The Notwist — Gibbard and Tamborello have both cited the German indie-electronic outfit's 2002 masterpiece Neon Golden as a direct reference point for their sound. You can hear the influence in how they blend warm acoustic instruments with cold, micro-programmed digital clicks. The emotional weight of the record relies heavily on this specific contrast.
  • New Order — Gibbard has repeatedly noted Peter Hook's melodic basslines and Bernard Sumner's melancholic synth-pop vocal delivery as major touchstones. On 'We Will Become Silhouettes,' the driving synth rhythm and the juxtaposition of dark lyrics with upbeat dance tempos come straight from the New Order playbook.
  • Björk — Tamborello was heavily influenced by the micro-beats and domestic sample textures of Björk's 2001 album Vespertine. You hear this in the delicate, crackling static and organic, tiny percussive loops that anchor 'The District Sleeps Alone Tonight.' It is the sound of household objects turned into rhythm.
  • Dntel — This is Tamborello's own project, which served as the literal birthplace of the band. The song '(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan' proved that Gibbard's indie-rock voice could cut through dense, experimental IDM production. Without this specific collaboration, the Postal Service project would have never been conceived.
  • The Cure — Gibbard's writing style borrows the direct emotional vulnerability and synth-heavy pop structures of Robert Smith. The band even recorded a cover of 'Suddenly Last Summer' by the Motels, which drew heavily on the gloomy, chorus-pedal guitar textures of early Cure records.

Discography

Their records — most-collected first.

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