“No one was driving the car…” — that’s not just the title of La Dispute‘s new record — it’s a warning, a confession, and a question all at once. The phrase, lifted from a police report following a real Tesla autopilot crash, mutates under Jordan Dreyer’s care into something apocalyptic. It’s a foreboding psalm about life in an age of automation, rootless progress, and spiritual dissociation. We’ve built machines to mimic our desires and habits, and now they move without us — or more alarmingly, through us. For a band that has always been attuned to the feeling of ever-present dread, No One Was Driving the Car is their most full-throated plunge into it.
And perhaps that’s what makes the existence of this record a bit of a sadistic miracle: this project didn’t need to exist. They didn’t need to twist the knife further. But Panorama — beautiful, internal, often restrained — apparently wasn’t loud enough in its disdain. Six years later, it stands as a divisive but respected chapter in their discography: lauded for its poetry, but often dismissed for its resignation. The vocals sat back in the mix. The themes felt processed, not confronted. You could imagine La Dispute quietly fading away, but instead that silence since has birthed something monstrous — and maybe essential. No One Was Driving the Car is the answer to that lull. The band has returned louder — not just in volume, but in presence.
In fact, No One Was Driving the Car is La Dispute’s most ambitious work to date — musically cinematic, lyrically overwhelming, and thematically colossal. It speaks from within the wreckage of an automated world, asking not just what happened, but who’s been steering — and who will steer from here on out. If Panorama felt like La Dispute retreating into themselves, this record sounds like them clawing their way back out. And their first act under light is one of impulse and anxiety. “I Shaved My Head in the Sink” doesn’t ease you in; it opens like a cracked ribcage. Drums thud like a waking heart. Dreyer narrates a private act of transformation that’s more burial than baptism: a beard shaved, a mirror fogged, years of dissociation swirling down the drain. “To try to change what I’d become,” he strains, “to die and start again.” There’s no hope in the change — just disfiguration and desperation from someone trying to rupture the timeline by force.
That rupture echoes throughout the record — not in response to Panorama, but to the world that’s unfolded since. The desperation isn’t always loud, but it’s always felt. It lurks in pyramid schemes, floodwaters; it hides in the imperfections of decaying furniture and the uncanny moments when a loved one studies you as if you’re a stranger in your own home. The self fractures across these songs like old porcelain — held together by memory, but always threatened by guilt and pessimism.
Nowhere are those cracks more exposed than on “Man With Hands and Ankles Bound”, the album’s most voyeuristic spiral, where our narrator-turned-director points his lens toward an apartment across the way and finds himself reflected in the pain of his subjects. The camera tightens its focus until roles begin to blur: voyeur, participant, victim, witness. It evokes A Clockwork Orange – not in the ultraviolence itself, but in the helplessness of knowing you must watch with eyes pried open, unable to intervene. Desire curdles into shame. Confession collapses into dissociation. Bodies bend and careen toward one another, voices tremble with paranoia, and the anxiety of it all causes the track to fold inward until everyone is out of frame.
Then, like an inescapable flood arrives “Environmental Catastrophe Film”. A 10-minute leviathan of grief, rage, and resigned wonder, it’s the album’s spiritual and thematic axis that sounds like Radiohead raised in the Michigan hardcore scene. It opens on a wooded memory and spirals outward into a history of religious trauma, economic decay, and ecological doom — the water is still tainted— as a boy holds a turtle over a creek that carries a history of horror he doesn’t yet know, but somehow feels. Factories are poisoning those who live around them, and sermons poison the soul. The blade turns, the lathe carves, and what remains becomes some sacred furniture. As intended, this song is La Dispute at their most cinematic and narratively sprawling. But even as the world around collapses, Dreyer zeroes in on the sacred: the way a chair holds the weight of a memory and can become the architecture of love. “Let me be the legs,” he demands. “Let me hold you up / Let me never break.”
And in that moment, No One Was Driving the Car stops being about destruction. It becomes a plea, an act of surrender, and a fragile vow to remain upright amidst the wreckage.
What makes this record work isn’t just its ambition — it’s how cohesive it is. Every image returns. Every metaphor resounds. Whether it’s hair on the sink, an unstable pew, a sculpted table leg, or a family fighting, everything feels purposeful. The arrangements are patient but precise: guitars flicker about like thoughts; rhythm sections churn with anxious inevitability, all while Dreyer narrates this collision course of sound with his strained voice. The band haven’t forgotten what they’re supposed to sound like, but like so many of us in a newly mechanized world, they’ve lost some sense of self.
No One Was Driving the Car isn’t about solving the world’s problems — La Dispute are past that point. It’s about recognizing we’re lost. A man who shaves his head to disappear. A boy who sees himself in a flailing turtle. A lover who can’t name what he needs until it’s too late. There’s no attempt at clarity or effort toward clairvoyance here, only witness and with it, the quiet suggestion that to feel this much — even now — is a miracle for a band that’s spent two decades trying to name the ache.
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