La Dispute have announced their first album in six years. No One Was Driving the Car, the follow-up to Panorama, is set for release on September 5 via Epitaph. The self-produced record was heavily inspired by Paul Schrader’s 2017 film First Reformed and draws its title from a police officer’s quote vocalist Jordan Dreyer read in a news article about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash. Today, the band has released the first of the five acts that make up the album, featuring the songs ‘I Shaved My Head’, ‘Man with Hands and Ankles Bound’, and ‘Autofiction Detail’. ‘I Shaved My Head’ also comes with a Steven Paseshnik-directed video, which you can check out below.
According to Dreyer, the album’s first act details a single night in crisis inspired by Schrader’s “man in the room” trope. Dreyer expounded:
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.
No One Was Driving the Car Cover Artwork:
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
