La Dispute - No One Was Driving the Car (Indie Exclusive, 2LP Green Smoke Vinyl)

It's been six years since La Dispute released their last album, Panorama. Since then, the Michigan post-hardcore band-made up of Jordan Dreyer on vocals, Brad Vander Lugt on drums, Chad Morgan-Sterenberg and Corey Stroffolino on guitar, and Adam Vass on bass-dealt with the stagnance of the pandemic, celebrated the ten-year anniversaries of Wildlife and Rooms Of The House, and began working on No One Was Driving The Car. The fifth studio LP is the first entirely produced by the group, and it came together in Grand Rapids and Detroit, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines: "I think the change in environment was really helpful to breathing new life into the process each time we came back to it," Dreyer says.

Partly inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, No One Was Driving The Car reckons 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 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. In fourteen dynamic tracks, the band grapples with the existential topic and the human need to find comfort and a sense of security in an existence where we're often thrust into chaos without permission.

1 I Shaved My Head
2 Man with Hands and Ankles Bound
3 Autofiction Detail
4 Environmental Catastrophe Film
5 Self-Portrait Backwards
6 The Field
7 Sibling Fistfight at Mom's Fiftieth / the Un-Sound
8 Landlord Calls the Sheriff in
9 Steve
10 Top-Sellers Banquet
11 Saturation Diver
12 I Dreamt of a Room with All My Friends I Could Not Get in
13 No One Was Driving the Car
14 End Times Sermon