La Dispute Announce New Album

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La Dispute will release No One Was Driving the Car on September 5th.

Conceptual band La Dispute returned last month to announce No One Was Driving the Car, their first new album in six years. Today, they’ve unveiled its second act: “Environmental Catastrophe Film,” an eight-minute composition that’s meticulous in detail and devastating in its climax. It’s a meditative slow-burn, building with quiet restraint before erupting into the kind of emotional wreckage only La Dispute can conjure. Jordan Dreyer talks about the album’s second act:

"the second act—more or less the thematic center of the record—is a single song split into three parts. it begins with a boy beside a creek-bed in a wooded area near home, holding a snapping turtle above the flowing water, before tracing its winding path to the river around which the city was first built, and through a brief history of the city itself—its settlement, the creation of the christian reformed church, and the furniture industry that dominated its early economic growth. from there we return to the boy beside the creek. he sees his own lack of control in the flailing creature he holds, then again at church, listening to a sermon delivered on the calvinist doctrines of predestination, man’s innate and total depravity, and the irresistible grace of his family’s god. at the end of it, he returns for the first time in adulthood to that same church, at the funeral of an old friend dead by suicide, from which the conversation shifts back to the creek as metaphor for life and time, and to what we ultimately maintain the least control over in life: that we can change neither the fact it moves nor the direction it ceaselessly does. in the final section, the city’s history of the furniture manufacturing returns as additional metaphor, presenting us as un-hewn wood, locked within the lathe of time and against its blade turned, to carve away with each rotation fragments of self en route to new forms—perhaps useful, perhaps beautiful, perhaps not. and as the layers shaved away fall to ground, they are swept up at day’s end and thrown inside the furnace: to burn and be breathed in as smoke, felt as heat, and to return one day as rain from the atmosphere in which they’ve dissipated. what’s left on the lathe is given purpose—placed as slats in chair backs or as table legs—and from this image the focus narrows again: to life with another—where, ultimately, the narrator finds his own comfort against the tumult—via the furniture moved and used by them from one shared home to another, and the person with whom he’s shared them."

The new track follows Act One of the album, a three-song suite made up of “I Shaved My Head,” “Man with Hands and Ankles Bound,” and “Autofiction Detail”—each a tense, poetic vignette, steeped in the band’s signature blend of spoken-word intimacy and post-hardcore catharsis.

Listen to “Environmental Catastrophe Film” HERE
Listen to Act 1 HERE 
Watch The video for “I Shaved My Head” HERE

Out September 5th via Epitaph No One Was Driving the Car was self produced and heavily inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed and 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. 

The rest of the album will continue to follow within acts until its conclusion in September.

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