Vampire Weekend told Paste back in Septemtem, the name of the model on the cover of Contra is Kirsten.
But this is what they said to MTV today: “We know where the image came from, but we’re not being very specific about her. We don’t know her or anything,” Koenig said. “The picture is from 1983, but the last album cover was from 2006, and they kind of look like they both inhabit the same world. When we saw this image, we just found it very striking. And part of it is the look on her face. It’s not about the color of her hair, or the fact that she’s wearing a Polo shirt. What makes it interesting is her face.
“To me, there’s just something infinitely fascinating about a nice portrait of somebody, especially when she’s got this ambiguous look, and people can read a lot into it,” he continued. “So we were immediately struck by it, and we all had our own interpretations of what her look was, but we just kind of felt like it fit the album and the theme of it. It made sense to me that the first album had an inanimate object on it, and this one has a person’s face on it.”