It’s been six years since La Dispute released their last album, Panorama. Since then, the Michigan post-hardcore band—made up of Jordan Dreyer on vocals, Brad Vander Lugt on drums, Chad Morgan-Sterenberg and Corey Stroffolino on guitar, and Adam Vass on bass—dealt with the stagnance of the pandemic, celebrated the ten-year anniversaries of Wildlife and Rooms Of The House, and began working on No One Was Driving The Car. The fifth studio LP is the first entirely produced by the group, and it came together in Grand Rapids and Detroit, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines: “I think the change in environment was really helpful to breathing new life into the process each time we came back to it,” Dreyer says. Partly inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, No One Was Driving The Car reckons 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 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. In fourteen dynamic tracks, the band grapples with the existential topic and the human need to find comfort and a sense of security in an existence where we’re often thrust into chaos without permission. Dreyer yells with a more primal sense and sings in a more refined way, and the guitars have a sharper edge than ever before. “As much as I don’t enjoy the creative process because it’s taxing and often not fun, I also think it’s the most fun that I ever have,” Dreyer contemplates. “It’s the revelations you make, the breakthroughs. It’s banging your head against a wall and suddenly something clicks in a way that feels almost divine, like it came from somewhere else.”
May we all live long enough to savor our revenge. Since the release of their debut album a decade ago, indie-rock quartet Adult Mom has wholeheartedly grappled with pain, frustration, and disillusionment, all while offering koans to hopeful resilience. On Natural Causes, their fourth album, they embrace a new emotional register: rage that burns so bright you can light your way by it. Stevie Knipe, the group's principal songwriter and lead vocalist, wrote the songs on Natural Causes from 2020 to 2023 during a period of both global tumult and personal upheaval. The album arrives in the wake of Knipe undergoing intensive treatment for cancer in their late twenties, an experience that brought them into direct confrontation with their own mortality. As they started writing songs from that vantage, they found they could stare down difficult memories of abuse and toxic relationships with a new ferocity. "Feeling like you’re a prisoner in your own body to medical professionals makes you very sad, but also very angry. There were nights where I would have full tantrums. I felt like a 13-year-old just from the pure anger of it," says Knipe. "You revert to this childlike state of, This is not fair! It unlocks those other moments in your life when you were like, This is not fair." Though Knipe has been out as queer and non-binary since Adult Mom's debut, their relationship to their identity, like many queer artists', has evolved and revealed itself in long waves. They came out as a lesbian after writing Adult Mom's lauded 2021 album Driver, and many of the songs on Natural Causes cut through the knots of compulsory heterosexuality and coerced gender normativity. Getting more deeply in touch with your own queerness can feel liberating and thrilling; it can also thaw out oceans of anger you never knew you had from all the times you had to stay alienated from yourself to survive. "Thematically, I got more comfortable with getting darker," says Knipe. "I knew there were things I wanted to explore that I didn’t get to on Driver, like the traumatic side of trying to unravel all this learned straightness. There were things happening interpersonally where I was like, OK, now I need to really tackle the tough parts of this process."