Bring It Home: The War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream 10 Years Later

The album collapses before it even starts. Smeared by digital delay, the programmed hi-hats that begin Lost in the Dream dance around themselves, each pointing accusatorially at its nearest neighbor for fucking up the tempo. They quickly regain their footing, steady but swaying like double-vision against the billowing fog of guitar and keys. The hi-hats finally dress center, paving the way for a motorik beat, and that clean, elegant, five-note piano line rings out, gluing everything together.

Three minutes in, the bottom drops out, and the swirling mass of tones and textures strains uneasily against the mechanical guidance. Tension builds as repeated phrases stack on each other—a spiraling saxophone, an eighth-note guitar riff, a syncopated synth sequence with spiky resonance—then a struck tom, and everything snaps back into place. The song stretches even further skyward. That iconic piano figure sounds much sharper than before, as insistent as an intrusive thought. After Adam Granduciel shouts that he’s “trying not to crack under the pressure,” the groove exhausts itself again and even the hi-hats fall away. The thick layers of instrumentation sublimate, wafting languidly into the atmosphere.

The first time I heard it, I understood that “Under the Pressure” was timeless. The driving krautrock rhythm, the denim jacket Americana, the shoegaze scope and the pained, plaintive lyrics yelped out from beneath it all—this was a fucking song. I ran it back at least twice before letting the rest of the record play. It perfectly set the tone of the album: For the 52 minutes and eight seconds that followed, you were about to hear gorgeously appointed confusion and heartache, scraping anxiety set to unbreakable drum beats, all slathered in shimmering noise.

The War on Drugs’ modest breakout record, 2011’s Slave Ambient, took the band from a local, idiosyncratic indie concern to full-on road dog status. They filled mid-sized venues around the country, conjuring enormous swells of sound that seemed to change the dimensions of the room. If you lived in a major touring market, you could depend on seeing the War on Drugs one to three times a year, often with a different lineup but never without an awe-inspiring sense of scale. The band toured the record ad nauseam, zig-zagging around North America, popping up on late-night television and crossing the pond several times without much of a lull in between. After a grueling few years supporting Slave Ambient, Granduciel found himself back in Philly with nothing but time on his hands. He completely fell apart.

He started demoing Lost in the Dream in 2012, but in 2013, the record really took shape. Granduciel was undergoing a slew of concurrent existential crises: Who am I without music? Do I have anything to say? What will my legacy be? Why am I here on Earth, in Philadelphia, on tape? Beset by sleepless nights and frequent panic attacks, Granduciel answered these nagging questions by pouring himself entirely into writing, recording, and mixing. Lost in the Dream was a chance to prove himself worthy of his bubbling critical buzz as much as it was a chance to confirm that he was on the right path.

It paid off. The album marks a turning point in the War on Drugs’ sound, acknowledging the shambolic roots rock of Wagonwheel Blues and the glowing hum of Slave Ambient while carving out a new, distinct songwriting lane. There are hints of Springsteen, Spiritualized, Bob Dylan, Talk Talk and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. The characters in Granduciel’s songs are runaways, traveling men and stranded kids, all of whom live on the dark side of the street or in the pouring rain. Scan through the lyrics of any song on the record and you’ll see “darkness” and “pain” make numerous appearances. Crumbling drum machines shuffle under kits bathed in room sound, synthesizers wheeze like dying breaths, guitars Rorshach out into the distance. Never has the sound of someone’s complete disintegration sounded so richly detailed.

Critics who’d gotten an early listen knew that Granduciel had something special on his hands. In the month before release, nearly every major culture publication (some of which are mere archives a decade later) had a piece detailing the intricacies of Lost in the Dream’s soundscape. Ryan Leas profiled the band for Stereogum, sitting in on their final rehearsals as a quartet in a frigid Philadelphia practice space. The core members of the band—Granduciel, bassist Dave Hartley, keyboardist Robbie Bennet and drummer Charlie Hall—were eager to bring the songs into the world, excited for the challenge of recreating Lost in the Dream’s dense, belabored studio recordings on stage.

In early February 2014, I was grinning in a coffee shop in Rogers Park, Chicago. I’d been on the phone with Landis Wine, frontman of Richmond, Virginia-based band White Laces—which had just been confirmed as the opener for the entirety of the Lost in the Dream national tour. Jeff Zeigler, who produced White Laces’ Trance and engineered Lost in the Dream, played the Richmond band’s record for Granduciel. He was taken with it, so much so that he asked White Laces to play the tour. Now, Wine was calling to see if I’d join the band on keys and electronics for the nationwide jaunt. We’d been friends for half-a-decade, playing tons of shows together with various bands and solo projects when I’d lived in North Carolina. Given my penchant for atmospheric, droney sounds in projects like Curtains and Gardener, he thought I’d be a good fit to help bring Trance to the stage. I was already a big fan of the War on Drugs, as they frequently came through Asheville during my time there; I’d even worked a few of the Slave Ambient sessions as an intern at Echo Mountain Recording. Naturally, I said yes.

Watching the War on Drugs play every night was inspiring, to say the least. The other three members of White Laces had played together for years, so adding a member who didn’t live in town threw a wrench into their workflow. Our initial performances were shaky—I was so nervous for our first gig in Kingston, New York, that I forgot the keyboard and laptop and ended up looking like a local friend who begged the band to get onstage. I had our SP-555, so I made myself seem useful by adding delay to the drones that underpinned White Laces’ songs. On Lost in the Dream’s release day, we played a sold-out show at Union Transfer in Philly and, though I remembered all of my gear, I sang with an unintentional nervous vibrato the entire set. The War on Drugs were pros at this point, and I found myself increasingly attending their load-in and soundchecks to glean what I could about how to properly do my new job. This was a trial by fire: throw a small band headfirst into a professional setting and see what they become.

The tour had an excited energy from the get-go, but felt divided into very distinct legs. Though the first few shows sold out, including a two-night stand at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, the audiences hadn’t had a chance to fully digest the record. Setlists were reconfigured often, giving the band—now a sextet with the addition of multi-instrumentalists Jon Natchez and Anthony LaMarca—a chance to workshop more difficult cuts like “Disappearing” until they felt comfortable. It seemed like the calculus was to tinker as much as possible before the crowd developed expectations about what to hear and how it would be presented. They stretched into these songs, finding new corners to inhabit, new layers to the sound.

Take, for example, the rendition of “Under the Pressure” from the second Bowery Ballroom show (which you can listen to here, thanks to the stalwart documentation of NYCTaper). It’s somehow both looser and more rigid than the recorded version, stripping away some of the soft-focus expansiveness and bringing the white-knuckle anxiety to the fore. During the ambient middle section, Natchez’s sax moves restlessly around the beat while distorted guitar tones tremble at the front of the mix. It lasts longer than it feels like it should, and the tension becomes excruciating. Beneath the gathering din, Granduciel teases the main motif before testing out an arpeggiated riff that would later become a permanent fixture in live takes of the song. Once Hall’s drums come back in, Granduciel rips into a solo and stays there for almost three more minutes. The rest of the band churns around him. There’s a crackling, almost desperate vibe to the song, as if shredding is the only way to salvation. When it ends, the crowd hollers with a distinct “holy shit” energy.