Set to headline Longitude this Saturday, Vampire Weekend grace the cover of the new issue of Hot Press (on shelves tomorrow). In the cover story, frontman Ezra Koenig gives his thoughts on the Obama administration.

His band were part of an elite list of artists including Jay-Z and Arcade Fire that Obama was hoping would help him on the campaign trail to secure his second term. Vampire Weekend declined.

“We probably did get asked to do a couple of things," Koenig says, "But we just weren’t playing shows at the time. That’s when we were working on the record really hard. So we were just saying ‘no’ to every offer that came up.”

Five years in, Guantanamo Bay is still open, Syrian rebels are being armed and it has been revealed that the National Security Agency have been spying on the American people under Obama’s watch. Did Koenig expect more from the Obama years?

“There have certainly been some strange surprises in the Obama administration. I don’t remember exactly how I felt in 2008, but now? I don’t really expect anything from the President of the US. There are just so many power structures already in place that sometimes it almost feels like a con. It almost feels like it’s pointless for me to blame a president because the whole system is set up so that people will blame a president. Miss out on the fact that the individual decisions of the president are so small in comparison to these much bigger trends and structures. There are a million exceptions to that rule but that’s how I feel."

Koenig also opened up about his complicated relationship with New York, dealing with the end of his '20s, and the making of their fantastic third album Modern Vampires Of The City.

Read it all in the pages of Hot Press, out Thursday July 18.