Fresh off their brief visit to the UK last month, La Dispute have shared the latest of act from their upcoming ‘No One Was Driving the Car’ record. Act IV consists of three songs. The first, ‘Top-Sellers Banquet’ , firmly draws upon the main influence of the album, the 2017 thriller ‘First Reformed’. With Jordan Dreyer’s barbed vocals, pensive guitars, and uneasy undertone, it’s questionably a prime example of La Dispute‘s storytelling ability.
Next, ‘Saturation Diver’ settles in doom-laden folk with soft percussion and brooding acoustics. Then there’s ‘I Dreamt of a Room with All My Friends I Could Not Get In’. Hypnotic guitars complement Dreyer’s distinctive, distressed spoken-sung voice. It sees Jordan capture the desperation of ‘No One Was Driving the Car’s central character.
All three tracks, along with a video for ‘Saturation Diver’, can be found below.
‘No One Was Driving the Car’ is set for release through Epitaph Records on September 5th. Pre-order the album here.
Read Jordan Dreyer’s Full Explanation of Act IV of ‘No One Was Driving the Car’
La Dispute vocalist Jordan Dreyer has continued his detailed walkthrough of each act of ‘No One Was Driving the Car’.
“The next act was heavily inspired by a particular scene in ‘First Reformed’, where the film’s two primary characters connect through a ritual of remembrance and comfort, travelling beyond their plane of reality into some otherworldly beyond. The record’s spiritual/metaphysical event happens here, in the middle of a banquet held by the multi-level marketing company mentioned in the fourth song from the prior act in celebration of their fiscal year’s highest performers. after a welcome speech, and while the provided entertainment (ballet dancers accompanied by a small orchestra) begins between tables on the floor, a sudden flash of light occurs, an indescribable sound accompanying it, and light begins to fall through the hall’s high ceilings down, focused only on the non-employees in attendance (the dancers, the servers, the players, valets), at which point they begin to rise impossibly skyward, leaving the others invited attendees and higher ups behind.
The narrator returns in the next song, discussing again the slow dissociation mentioned heavily in Act One, through the image of a saturation diver tangled in his oxygen line. he realises he remains on earth after the “rapture” of the previous track passes, and reflects again on the journey taken to arrive there, alone and un-beamed up.
We return home in the final entry of the penultimate block, in the midst of his unaddressed malaise and disintegration. The self-examination concludes in self-loathing and collapse—his partner preparing to leave, his desperate pleas unheeded, all of life and comfort broken in unfixable ways—by his own failure to address and correct. We’re left with, effectively, the narrator lamenting some combination of control he never had and control he failed to establish. He pleads for the chance to correct, to be given one more opportunity to not just push back against odds stacked against him (and all of us), but to most of all recognise and care for what, despite everything, has given him security and meaning.”
