LA Dispute have announced a new album, to be released September 5.
Self produced and heavily inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, No One Was Driving The Car grapples with malaise in the shadow of the looming apocalypse, which has noticeably been worsened by the advancement of tech. The title comes from a quote from a police officer vocalist Jordan Dreyer read in a news article about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash, an absurd event which raises questions about the amount of control we have in our own lives.
Today the band released the first act of the album, consisting of three songs: I Shaved My Head, Man with Hands and Ankles Bound and Autoficion Detail. I Shaved My Head arrives with a video and can be seen here. The first act details a single night in crisis, inspired by Schrader’s “man in the room” trope. Dreyer explains:
“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.”
