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.”
guccihighwaters’ third album for Epitaph, DEATH BY DESIRE is his boldest and most adventurous record to date—a result of the project’s mastermind Morgan Murphy taking the creative wheel and hitting the gas at 100 MPH, putting every element of his musical acumen into these 12 songs. After releasing joke’s on you in 2021—as well as the extensive touring that followed—Murphy felt creatively unsure of where to go next. ”I was in a standstill,” he explains. “I was putting out a lot of singles and doing sessions with producers and songwriters, and I wasn’t connecting with what I was making.” Instead of throwing in the towel, Murphy got to work on writing and self-producing the luxurious alternative pop sound that would become DEATH BY DESIRE. “I locked myself in the studio every day and really just focused on reinventing myself,” he recalls. “I was making something that was untouched by anyone else. I knew it was gonna be a hard task, but it was also the only way for me to feel like I accomplished something that I love.”