Conceptual band La Dispute has released their new album No One Was Driving the Car in full with the final act. Released in five parts, the album concludes with Act 5, consisting of the title track and End Times Sermon. The songs bring closure to an album heavily inspired by the psychological thriller First Reformed.
Jordan Dreyer, the band’s vocalist, explains: “the last act occurs in two songs, in the future somewhere, in the world left behind post-“rapture.” in the first song a car drives at night down a curving forest road with two people in the backseat: the narrator—arching his neck to glimpse in light reflected by street signs passed under whoever or whatever steers the car that carries them—and his partner, sleeping quietly against his shoulder. Comfort returns to him in that moment, a feeling of resolve inside sorrow and anxiety, and we transition from there elsewhere: to an empty sanctuary, to a sermon delivered for no one (without optimism or apology) on the end result compelled to existence by humanity’s reckless determination through history to seek and install the wrong forms of faith and control toward meaning amidst chaos. A semi-hopeful note closes the album before bird song carries us out. Those who suffered have been lifted from the chaos; left on earth, their planted gardens grow (the lyrics of this song borrow pretty heavily from “To Elsie” by William Carlos Williams, which i stumbled on referenced, pretty serendipitously, in a book recommended to me by Ned Russin, early in the record’s infancy).”
