La Dispute have taken an unconventional route to unveiling their new album No One Was Driving the Car. First the Michigan post-hardcore band released three songs, which they billed as the first act; then they shared the nine-minute track "Environmental Catastrophe Film," which made up the second act. Now they're back with five tunes that constitute the third act.
The third act contains “Self-Portrait Backwards,” “The Field,” “Sibling Fistfight At Mom’s Fiftieth / The Un-Sound,” “Landlord Calls The Sheriff In,” and "Steve." Here's what frontman Jordan Dreyer said:
the next act encompasses in more focused detail the narrator’s look backwards down the path, beginning at their shared home in the present day, where the dissociation introduced in act one as almost entirely a self-inclosed thing trickles outward and troubles the comfort outlined in the last section of the song preceding it. he examines his own life through imagined self-portraits, in various sequences of time (fractions of days first, then weeks, months, years), and through multiple specific events. from there, four critically influential events from his earlier life are detailed in four songs:
first, a story from his early teenage years, where he and his brother—up north hunting with their father in the area where he and his own brother (the boys’ uncle, who has long lived far away elsewhere), and their father (who died when they were young)—stumble upon what they believe to be an abandoned paramilitary compound. in the middle of the field beside it they come to a hole dug in the ground full of deer carcasses. the narrator becomes fixated on the bodies below, unable to break his gaze from them, while the brother continues on toward the compound, a metaphor both for their diverging paths and for the obsessions/explanations that motivated them to take which ones they did.
the second song happens a few years later, at their mother’s fiftieth birthday party, where several siblings—drunk and airing internal grievances—fight on the basement staircase while their mother contemplates what role her own actions as a parent played in their arrival at that moment and in the conflicted history that led up to it. in the second half of the song, the siblings are gathered at the parents’ house again, years after the fight, for a quarterly group birthday celebration for several of their own children.
the third song occurs years on from there, with a pitch made to the partner of the narrator—working through undergrad at the time—from purveyors of a multi-level marketing company central to the history of grand rapids, and in some ways inextricably entwined with the christian reformed church mentioned earlier on the record (somewhat importantly, the rapture is invoked at the very end of the song, in a section discussing extraordinary wealth).
the final song centers around the friend whose funeral appeared earlier in act two, and is presented as reflections of their shared experiences together in youth, chiefly a snowy night drifting in a car together across an empty church parking lot, and the crash that occurred when the car spun on ice to slide sidelong into a curb and embankment. the end of the song harkens back heavily to the second section of act two (the song “Environmental Catastrophe Film”) and represents a full-circle consideration of the control dictated to him via exposure to calvinist teachings in childhood.
“Sibling Fistfight At Mom’s Fiftieth / The Un-Sound” comes with a self-directed music video and serves as one of the record's highlights. It's a vivid, meditative snapshot of familial turmoil with a revelatory crescendo tinged with unexpected optimism: "It’s the effort we put in to see how difficult it is to just exist and to survive/ There’s beauty and there’s anguish tangled helplessly inside/ What a miracle it is we get to be alive." Check out the video below along with the rest of the new tracks.
No One Was Driving The Car is out 9/5 on Epitaph.
