Conceptual band La Dispute have announced their first album in six years ‘No One Was Driving the Car’ for a September 5th release via Epitaph. Self-produced and heavily inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller ‘First Reformed,’ ‘No One Was Driving the Car’ grapples with malaise in the shadow of the looming apocalypse, which has noticeably been worsened by the advancement of tech.
The title comes from a quote from a police officer vocalist Jordan Dreyer read in a news article about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash, an absurd event which raises questions about the amount of control we have in our own lives. Throughout the album, screens and cameras disrupt moments of transcendence. It happens alongside flashes of mundane suffering—frequent daydreams of drowning, flashbacks to eye-contact with dead animals, experiences of decaying relationships and secondhand suicides—while Dreyer yells with a more primal sense and sings in a more refined way, and the guitars have a sharper edge than ever before.
Today the band release the first of the five acts that comprise the album, consisting of three songs: ‘I Shaved My Head‘, ‘Man with Hands and Ankles Bound‘ and ‘Autofiction Detail’. The first act details a single night in crisis inspired by Schrader’s “man in the room” trope.
Dreyer explains: “It begins with a man examining his own slow dissociation from himself while shaving his head alone in a bathroom at night, then shifts through a neighbor’s open window to a conversation about control and desire, framed via the image of a man seen through it: bound on the floor with a woman standing before him, presumably a sex worker. when the woman exits the building (her companion still tied up), the narrator leaves his own, following less her than the idea represented by her inside his own struggle to reconnect to desires for life severed by time, self, and circumstance, or perhaps fleeing the implication he draws from the man left behind (his helplessness, maybe, or else his confidence to pursue something complicated where the narrator has so consistently failed). the third song follows him on that destination-less late night walk, among the street people and their disasters, ending where he had the whole night subconsciously always headed: the hospital where\ his partner works, at which point an internal reckoning occurs.
The rest of the album will follow within acts until its conclusion in September. La Dispute head to Europe for a run of UK and European dates this summer, starting July 10th at Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club, continuing on with festival performances at 2000 Trees, Rock Herk and Deichbrand Festival, as well as headlining dates in Hannover, Nürnberg, Karlsruhe, and a show supporting Enter Shikari in Suedbruecke.
‘No One Was Driving the Car’ tracklist:
01. I Shaved My Head
02. Man with Hands and Ankles Bound
03. Autofiction Detail
04. Environmental Catastrophe Film
05. Self-Portrait Backwards
06. The Field
07. Sibling Fistfight at Mom’s Fiftieth / The Un-sound
08. Landlord Calls the Sheriff In
09. Steve
10. Top-Sellers Banquet
11. Saturation Diver
12. I Dreamt of a Room with All My Friends
13. No One Was Driving the Car
14. End Times Sermon
European tour dates:
July 10th – Brudenell Social Club – Leeds, UK
July 11th – 2000 Trees Festival – Cheltenham, UK
July 12th – 2000 Trees Festival – Cheltenham, UK
July 14th – MusikZentrum – Hannover, DE
July 15th – Hirsch – Nürnberg, DE
July 16th – Substage – Karlsruhe, DE
July 18th – Open Stage Suedbruecke (w/ Enter Shikari) – Cologne, DE
July 19th – Rock Herk Festival – Herk-de-Stad, BE
July 20th – Deichbrand Festival – Cuxhaven, DE