Review Summary: Even time itself grows old, and we do too.
It's a rare and beautiful thing when a band that captures a part of your soul at an early age grows up alongside you.
I remember turning nineteen with an enormous chip on my shoulder. It was a year into post-graduation and I was full of piss and vinegar - and convinced that I knew how my life was going to turn out. Before I knew it, global financial markets had collapsed, and the job markets were barren. Bars and clubs were a wasteland of twenty and thirty-somethings that were still just trying to sort their lives out. Young love was real, gripping and vividly intense like nothing I had ever experienced. And just as quickly as it came, it left with little remorse. Heartbreak at that age is devastating. It eats at your stomach like a vicious parasite, and every blocked profile and missed call reinforces the bitter belief that you will never be okay again. Many bands over the years have tried to draw from this type of pain, but there is one in particular that resonated with me like none other.
La Dispute was like an antidote to the poison. Their approach was unconventional, to say the least - but I won't say that they didn't take the blueprint from
mewithoutYou before them. Lead vocalist Jordan Dreyer had an uncanny ability to channel the desperate anguish of young heartache and summarize exactly how so many of us felt in those days. The riffs were catchy with a distinct edge, and the songs broke the constant verse-chorus-verse-chorus mold that was everywhere in the 2000s. And sure, looking back on them now, some of the lyrics come off as overly dramatic. But that's with fifteen years of hindsight in my back pocket - as a young man, 2008's
Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair resonated with me so deeply that it forever changed my tastes in music. It was over-the-top and grandiose, without being so theatrical that it alienated the majority of traditional fans of post-hardcore.
The group's hype had three years to grow between the debut and the sophomore effort - 2011's
Wildlife. Switching gears away from hardcore influences and towards the indie scene, it was a notable shift from anything in their catalogue to that point. Most listeners from this period will distinctly remember “King Park” as the song that put the band on the map – it’s a masterstroke in songwriting with one distinct line towards the end that hits like a truck. Dreyer took the raw, emotional outbursts and honed them into fully-formed ideas that dove headfirst into topics like childhood cancer and death, pushing new boundaries of connection to the audience. In the years that followed, the band decided to go in a more stripped-down, polished direction; 2014’s
Rooms of the House drew some criticism from long-time fans that were hoping for
Wildlife Part 2. The members were maturing, and with that came a reluctance to return to the emotionally volatile nature of the previous two releases. Most felt that 2019’s
Panorama was a step in the right direction for the band in going back to their roots in terms of the songwriting chops; however, Dreyer’s vocals were notably buried in the mix, and there wasn’t quite the tenacity level that made them a household name in the underground scene. It was missing
something.
It's now been seventeen years since their debut album - to put that in perspective, it is now old enough to drive and one year away from being able to vote. The world has changed immeasurably in that time. We live in an age of open corruption, insatiable greed and an ever-widening chasm of inequality. As the core lyricist, Dreyer has grown from a twenty-one-year-old emotional sparkplug into a thirty-eight-year-old grown man. Like most Millennials, he has seen some **** in the last two decades. And based on the lyrical content of 2025’s
No One Was Driving the Car, he has managed to tap into exactly how we are feeling in the present year – worn out, sick and tired of constant crises. Gone is the raw volatility mixed with aspiring romantic poet, and in his place is an angry and cynical melancholic that would likely look back at his younger self with a scowl and a “Kid, you had no idea.” The band have returned to the gripping intensity of their younger selves and embraced their original hardcore influences, but with the type of scathing critique of modern living that generally accompanies facing the fact that your youth has run its course. There is very little optimism to be found throughout these fourteen tracks, and over an hour of runtime is likely to leave you drained by the end…but perhaps that’s the point. Themes of neuroticism, mortality, trauma and an overwhelming sense of dread hang ominously overtop of eerie samples of speeches and interviews, forming connective tissue between individual songs.
The high point on this release is undoubtedly the modern answer to “King Park” in “Environmental Catastrophe Film” – like on
Wildlife, they decide to punch you in the gut part-way through the tracklist rather than using it as a closer. Heavily influenced by post-rock in composition, it’s 8:41 of buildup that reflects heavily on the burden of growing older, watching everything and everyone you love around you slowly fading away. Like its predecessor, the song changes abruptly in pacing and approach in multiple areas, culminating with a ferocious climax where Dreyer bellows “Because our lives grow only forward, and we die!” at the top of his lungs. He is constantly at the top of his game throughout the album, but here is a perfect example of why he is such a well-known frontman – this track would be nowhere near as impactful without his vocal performance. And although Dreyer gets the lion's share of praise here - and has for the band's entire existence - the rest of the members deserve credit for stepping up the urgency in the music.
With such a brilliant return to glory, this should be a renaissance period for the band that brings in a new era of ravenous fans, many of which weren’t around nearly two decades ago. It exists as the sum of the parts that came before it. Surprisingly, this is the greatest performance of Dreyer’s career – the result of years of painstakingly refining a polarizing approach that drew a hard line in the sand. Make no mistake: if you dislike
La Dispute, you are not likely to enjoy this any more than their other releases. But for anyone who associates their first two albums with a time where they loved with reckless abandon,
No One Was Driving the Car should strike a chord that provides some level of nostalgic comfort, at a time where few things in our lives are comfortable.
