La Dispute are back with first album in six years, ‘No One Was Driving The Car’

American post-hardcore outfit La Dispute have announced that their fifth album - and first since 2019’s ‘Panorama’ - will hit shelves on 5th September via Epitaph.

Entitled ‘No One Was Driving The Car’, the self-produced new LP is heavily influenced by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, and centres around similar themes of tech-induced dread and pre-apocalypse fear. (Its title, for instance, is lifted from a news article that vocalist Jordan Dreyer read about a fatal self-driving car crash).

Alongside news of the album, La Dispute have offered up not one, but three new songs (‘I Shaved My Head’, ‘Man with Hands and Ankles Bound’ and ‘Autofiction Detail’), which comprise the first of ‘No One Was Driving The Car’’s five ‘acts’.

Explaining more about this initial conceptual instalment, Dreyer has said: “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 neighbour’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.”

Watch the official video for ‘I Shaved My Head’ here:

‘No One Was Driving The Car’ tracklist:
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
13. No One Was Driving the Car
14. End Times Sermon

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Tags: News, La Dispute