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.

Lost in the Dream’s release date was four days into the tour. Pitchfork gave it an 8.8, garnering the band’s second Best New Music distinction. In 2014, a BNM was still quite a propulsive thing, able to change a band’s trajectory completely. With two under their belt in three years’ time, the guys in the War on Drugs reasonably expected to have a solid tour. But once we got to Chicago, only nine days in, it was clear that the record had broken through to a whole new audience. Second shows were added in most major cities, selling out moments after the announcement. There was suddenly a clean-cut, North-Face-jacketed finance guy for every two beflanneled rock dudes in the crowd. While waiting in line for the second San Francisco show on a White Laces off day, I chatted with a friendly tech bro who’d only heard of the band the day before and paid way too much for a scalped ticket. These changes in audience sometimes brought hecklers, like the dude in Denver who yelled “Play some Springsteen!” between songs, but those were few and far between. Lost in the Dream had tapped into something universal. The conversation shifted from “This band makes cool, innovative music” to “This band really speaks to me.”

The ballooning audiences had a kind of calming effect on the War on Drugs. They didn’t have to worry about ticket sales; if the shows didn’t sell out days before, it was all but guaranteed day of. The people showed up primed and ready, losing their minds when the “Under the Pressure” hi-hat sample dropped or the ambient swell of “In Reverse” began. If the rapid jump in numbers was initially jarring, the War on Drugs embraced it, playing better and better every night.

Each city had its own incredible highlights. There was the crushingly psychedelic take on “Ocean Between the Waves” that nearly ripped the roof off Seattle’s Neptune Theater. After a run of huge rooms, the tour hit Mojo’s in Columbia, Missouri, a tiny, now-defunct college bar. It was the manager’s last night and the party vibe was so inescapable that members of both bands ended up taking off their shoes on the cramped stage. I met a street ventriloquist outside of the Grog Shop in Cleveland, then walked back inside to see the War on Drugs turn “Come to the City” into a yawning black hole of sound. In San Francisco, I texted Dave Hartley, “This song always breaks my heart” during “In Reverse,” forgetting he was onstage at the time. At our final show together at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., the War on Drugs pranked us during our last song, hiring a man dressed as a gorilla to walk onstage playing the saxophone. It was one of the most grueling and rewarding experiences of my life.

Through those nearly two months on the road, despite seeing the band play these songs over and over again, I listened to Lost in the Dream on repeat. Six weeks in a van will warp your sense of reality; even if we didn’t talk about it in person, hearing Adam sing “I’m a bit run down here at the moment” while driving through New Mexico ghost towns or into a Utah sunset felt incredibly comforting. When I got back home to Chicago, I’d put the album on whenever I felt lonely or anxious. It was like looking into a mirror and finally understanding what you saw. I suspect the naked vulnerability—the unambiguous bewilderment about how to process existence—is what made this record really stick. People of all walks of life could drop the needle and immediately feel seen.

But the record gave me so much more than just a place to put my fears or process my depression. Lost in the Dream took me around the country for the first time. It strengthened existing friendships and gave me lifelong new ones—Landis and I share a practice space in Richmond and have continued to make music and play shows together; Jeff Zeigler has become one of my closest friends and collaborators. I write this just days before traveling to Philly to finish our second duo album together. Lost in the Dream is one of those records that will be with me forever.

A decade after its release, the album still feels singular in the War on Drugs’ discography. They’ve since released two stellar albums, A Deeper Understanding and I Don’t Live Here Anymore, both of which keep the vibe-forward compositional style while embracing more hook-friendly songwriting. Lost in the Dream remains a touchstone for bands aiming to blur their songs’ edges. You can hear its influence in records by Trace Mountains, Hiss Golden Messenger, Good Looks and even Kacey Musgraves. In an interview with The Guardian in 2014, Granduciel, skeptical of his band’s clear trajectory, sheepishly says, “My kind of music is probably not going to shoot to the top, but I’m fine with that.” A year-and-a-half later, the War on Drugs headlined Radio City Music Hall. In 2022, they played Madison Square Garden. Since Lost in the Dream, they’ve become an institution, the Last Great American Rock Band.

In 2020, when the future of live music was thrown into question, The War on Drugs released LIVE DRUGS, their first live record. It featured board recordings from 2014 through 2019 on tours supporting Lost in the Dream and A Deeper Understanding. The penultimate track is a version of “Under The Pressure” sourced from the band’s appearance at the 2018 All Points East festival in Victoria Park, London. The song had become the band’s definitive offering, not only representing the sonics of Lost in the Dream, but the jam people would show the uninitiated to help them see the light.

This version is absolutely magical; Granduciel and LaMarca craft a massive ambient swell from synth drones and guitar loops before Granduciel hits the sample. The crowd loses it when those delay-smeared hi-hats appear and, from there, the song takes off. The band is firing on all cylinders. Dave Hartley’s bass sounds more muscular than ever, Robbie Bennett’s piano clear as a bell, Charlie Hall’s drumming guided by lasers. Granduciel sings the words without the underlying anxiety, sounding calm, grounded and lightyears away from the mental space he was in when writing the song. In the section where the drums drop out, he repeats the main guitar motif as Jon Natchez’s sax swirls and swirls. Once Hall brings the drums back in, the crowd joins Granduciel in singing the guitar figure. He punctuates “Trying not to crack under the pressure!” with a trademark “Woo!,” and it’s easy to imagine him throwing his head back, fingers working the fretboard, completely lost in the moment. A second later, he quietly says “Bring it home,” and launches into that arpeggiated riff he worked out all the way back in 2014. It’s an absolute triumph.

Dash Lewis is a writer and musician based in Richmond, VA with bylines at Pitchfork, SPIN, Bandcamp and more. When not noodling with synthesizers, he’s in search of a great sandwich. Find him online @gardenerjams.