La Dispute drop three tracks from their first new album in six years

La Dispute have just announced the long-awaited follow-up to 2019’s 4/5-rated Panorama.

The band will be dropping their first new LP in six years, entitled No One Was Driving The Car, on September 5 via Epitaph – the name of which comes from a news article read by vocalist Jordan Dreyer, and its overall subject matter dealing with “malaise in the shadow of the looming apocalypse”, according to a press release.

They’re previewing what’s to come by releasing the first ‘act’ of the album, consisting of the opening trio of songs: I Shaved My Head, Man With Hands And Ankles Bound and Autofiction Detail.

Says Jordan: “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.”

Stream it below:

Check out the full tracklist for No One Was Driving The Car:

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

Catch La Dispute at 2000trees in July.

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