La Dispute: “The unintended consequence of things getting this bad is that we remember the importance of community and protecting each other”

La Dispute aren’t a band you merely listen to. Their songs and albums are so all-consuming that it’s impossible to not be fully immersed into and absorbed by them. Their world becomes yours and yours becomes theirs with frontman Jordan Dreyer’s lyrics blurring the line between fiction and autobiography. That’s something he’s done since the post-hardcore band formed in Grand Rapids, Michigan just over two decades ago. 2008’s debut album, Somewhere At The Bottom Of The River Between Vega And Altair, was a brutal break-up record, but one loosely inspired by The Cowherd And The Weaver Girl, an ancient Chinese folk tale. 2011’s Wildlife played with the idea of narrative, taking the form of a unpublished short stories by a fictional author. 2014’s Rooms Of The House explored the aftermath of a relationship through, well, the rooms of the house the couple had lived in. And 2019’s Panorama examined grief through the idea that certain places can bring memories (and trauma) back to life.

The staggering attention to detail and abyssal depth of their records means that engaging with them can be akin to that scene-turned-meme of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia standing in front of an evidence board. Except No One Was Driving The Car isn’t funny. Nor is it trying to be. Instead, like the four albums that preceded it, it dissects and explores the human experience with precise and perceptive analysis through a series of meticulously crafted, emotionally-driven songs. Narratives gleamed from Jordan’s observations about the world around him.

“In the time following a project,” begins Jordan at his home in Seattle, “I tend to continue collecting information and observations, stories and works of art, and fragments of conversation – anything that I experience directly or indirectly that lodges itself in my brain. Eventually, in collecting so many things I can begin to see a through-line – some characteristic in each that relates to how I'm processing the environment in which I live. I had the title for this record pretty early on, and it remained in my brain somewhere, floating around, and didn't let go.”


One of those observations was a police quote he saw in a newspaper article about a driverless Tesla crashing in a cul-de-sac and killing its two passengers. That quote became the title. The album then took on a life of its own. You could, perhaps, say that it was its own driverless car. It just didn’t crash.

La Dispute – these days completed by Brad Vander Lugt, Chad Sterenberg, Adam Vass and Corey Stroffolino – are a band who have always had a fascination with disasters, so it’s little surprise that this particular story became lodged in Jordan’s brain. What was a surprise, however, was Ned Russin from Title Fight/Glitterer recommending a book that referenced American modernist poet William Carlos Williams, which led Jordan to the 1923 poem To Elsie. Its last six words? No one to drive the car.


“When things arrive in a way that feels so serendipitous and synchronised, it's hard to not feel that you're tapping into some otherworldly realm,” he says. “The easy explanation, to my mind, is just being witness to the world. I think there's a reason that people publish works of art on similar topics at certain times, because you're reflecting a universe that we all exist within, in a time period that we exist within.”


Technological advancements and current affairs aside, it’s clear that there’s also a great deal of universality to human emotion. Though individual experiences and circumstances are unique, love or loss or death, for example, nevertheless elicit the same feelings in people as they always have. So even though To Elsie was written over 100 years ago, Jordan’s discovery of it was almost fateful.


“It felt kismet, in a way,” he continues, “that I chanced upon something from a much earlier era referenced in a contemporary novel that doesn’t just speak to the themes you're exploring, but directly uses similar language. It's pretty fucking wild. As a person who tends to feel overconfident in his ability to rationalise the things I'm feeling, I sometimes have to make an effort to allow the mystery of the process to be the mystery of the process, and not overthink how things come together.”

So Jordan didn’t overthink. Instead, he let creativity flow as naturally as possible. And yet it’s still a complex combination of its myriad influences, both personal and artistic, from the Williams poem to Paul Schrader’s 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, to the time Jordan and his partner spent doing mutual aid work in Seattle “serving meals and handing out survival supplies in the most affected neighbourhood in the city by the housing crisis and by the healthcare systems”. The album itself is divided into five acts that detail the narrator’s life, much of which was inspired by traditional movie structures, First Reformed in particular. The band doing 10-year anniversary tours for both Wildlife (in 2022, a year delayed because of the pandemic) and Rooms Of The House (in 2024) also played a role in the composition of No One Was Driving The Car, as La Dispute’s past infiltrated its present.

“Coming out of the pandemic to tour those two records really opened every door,” Jordan says. “Not only the one that led forward, but the one that led back to an era in which we felt things a certain way. I think a big part of how proud we feel about this record is it feels like a culmination of everything we've done. There's a little bit of every record on it.”

That harrowing confluence of past, present and future – all of them disaster-struck and doom-laden – is at the centre of this album, as well as the current external forces that have made everything today so unstable. Because, when it all comes down to it, No One Is Driving The Car is really just Jordan trying to “make sense of a volatile world”. That’s why that poem – parts of which he interpolated into the album’s final song, End Times Sermon – became so important.

“A big part of why that poem stuck with me, and continues to, is that it speaks to so much of what I feel looking out at our world in the 2020s, but it comes from a much earlier era,” explains the singer. “This is very much a record for now, but it was important for me to acknowledge the volatility of life and the way that we are affected by a growing concern for profit over people by those who pull the levers of power – the external forces beyond our control.”

To that extent, No One Was Driving The Car isn’t just a warning about human complacency and wilful subservience to technology as detailed by the news report about the car crash. It’s also a metaphor for the world at the moment, and how capitalism has sent humanity spinning out of control.

“We're not a political band in the same respect as, say, Propagandhi,” he concedes, “but this is probably the most we've put our thumb on the scale in that regard. And that comes from a sense of urgency. Seeing the failed promise of capitalism firsthand every day in a country that is so visibly married to its financial identity and not the people in it, it's hard not to reflect on that. It’s everywhere.”

The effects of that were even more visible to Jordan. Probably the most subtle but significant influence on these songs was his partner recounting to him her days working at a trauma hospital. It was less overt than the movie or the poem, but it contributed significantly to visceral emotions flowing through the veins of these songs.

“That was really illuminating for me,” he says, “as somebody who is pretty fucking far left, and who has also spent the majority of his professional creative career talking about traumas inflicted on people from the world indiscriminately and at random. The majority of us have a level of remove from the violence of life. But a big part of this record was hearing about her day and being witness to the failures of the system that we're seeing fail in real time. It's not to say, 'This is how you should feel about something' – but how do you look around at the world in your purview and not feel engaged or angry?”

Despite this, Jordan doesn’t think things are completely hopeless. Not yet, anyway.

“Maybe the unintended consequence of things getting as bad as they are is that we remember how important community and protecting each other are,” he continues. “I think a lot of people are coming to understand that now, myself included, and taking actual measurable steps to be a force for good and to push back against fucking fascist bullshit. I ultimately still believe that people are, by and large, good, and that there are more good people than there are bad. And even if we don't hold the levers of power, we have power in numbers and community.”

Whether fate, coincidence or something else, Jordan’s discovery of To Elsie certainly raises questions about the cyclical nature of life, as well as our ability to control it. Is there somebody driving the car, after all? It's unclear what the most comforting answer would be. Besides, we'll probably never know.

No One Was Driving The Car is out now via Epitaph

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