8.3/10: La Dispute’s No One was Driving the Car 

Have you ever read Scary Stories in the Dark? That children’s book of short fiction and horrifying chicken-scratch illustrations? With dense, stream-of-consciousness spoken word, Midwest emo guitar stylings, a heavy droning bass and frontman Jordan Dreyer’s blood-curdling shrieks, Michigan’s La Dispute presents an auditory Scary Stories in the Dark for existential adults with their latest album, No One was Driving the Car. Only now, those scary stories, as we have, grown up; they are tactile scenes of a distinctly mature dread and universal sense of helplessness. Even the album title itself directly reflects these themes: No One was Driving the Car being a quote grabbed from a dystopian police report on a fatal Tesla car crash. 

 No One was Driving the Car, even more than a short story collection, reads like an anthology film. Dreyer’s heart-wrenching lyricism makes constant reference to camera action, as if the audience is viewing a series of psychotic episodes and characters at a 35mm thriller screening. On the record’s lead track “I Shaved my Head,” a simple bass drum accompanies Dreyer’s scratchy, intense vocals, ultimately building to a delectably bleak guitar riff, thus welcoming us into a world of dread. From there, we launch into “Heads and Ankles Bound,” an upbeat thrash song that likens the intensity of BDSM to the intensity of emotional vulnerability. I’ll let the chorus’s visceral and near-mythical nature speak for itself: 

“There’s a light on in the darkness 
To an unfurnished apartment 
And a mattress on the ground 
There’s a woman standing upright 
Like some archangel alighting 
In the nighttime and before her 
There’s a man with hands and ankles bound”

Following these standout tracks, La Dispute returns to its perfected formula, one that has earned the band a spotless reputation in the post-hardcore and emo worlds: long, winding stories set to dreary sonic backdrops. Lyrically, “Top-Sellers Banquet” is a feast of riches that turns into a bloodbath of complicity: guests start dropping dead around a dining table, others continuing to gorge themselves, choosing to ignore the others. In the current global political climate, it is hard to not break into full-body goosebumps as Dryer says: 

“In the room gone pitch black 
But for the glow of their phones 
In their hands 
And they wondered had the power gone out 
Why they couldn’t hear anything 
In the dark that surrounded them …

Until the film cuts 
Until it ends without credits 
And there’s nobody left to see”  

My favorite from the album, “Environmental Catastrophe Film,” likens self-destruction and neglect to the environmental and sociopolitical state of the world. Dead generations, dead languages and dead empires –– harsh truths of youth, the nuclear family, organized religion –– no matter how hard humans may try to prevent decay, there is “only one way the water flows… forward, forward, forward.”  It’s a terrifying and oddly enlightening listen, especially when accompanied by the band’s tasteful Midwest emo instrumental arrangements. 

A horror anthology series for the modern era, La Dispute’s latest album discusses the existential threat of modern industrialization and big tech by spotlighting helplessness, war, famine, death and complicated internalized feelings (the emo essentials). Even if the car crashes, La Dispute argues, we were never really at the wheel –– we were simply actors, characters on a page without control over our narrative, our history. 

Emo, hardcore, punk fans, as well as English/film majors, do not miss this one!  

For fans of… Title Fight, Frank Iero’s side projects, glass beach (plastic death, 2024)