War On Drugs

Deep down, it was almost too simple. Take the stubborn pulse of heartland rock and make it line up with the nearly identical beat that has underpinned alternative music for half a century: the hypnotic repetition of kraut-rock, a cult reference for every indie generation from post-punk onward.
Wilco and Arcade Fire, above all, had already sensed it, each from their own side of the fence: the former came out of Americana and used that pulsation as an excuse to open up to noise and experimental drift; the latter, instead, harnessed that steady, Springsteen-esque beat as fuel for their collective crescendos, a mainstrindie fetish ever since the early 2000s. And yet both camps remained essentially loyal to their starting point.

Around the mid-2010s, The War on Drugs pulled off a small miracle: finding a way to stay inside both worlds at once, without either one winning out, while simultaneously shaping something new that transcended them altogether. A new form of psychedelia, built from an architecture of sound and feeling rather than the unleashing of raw instinct, capable of being both the key and the destination of the creative journey.
It had been a similar move, after all, that opened the doors to success for Dire Straits decades earlier. In that case, what sounded fresh was the combination of roots rock with the expansive, virtuosic forms audiences had learned to recognize through progressive rock. Forty years on, everything has changed: the approach to technique, the room for new sonic solutions, even the hope that an ambitious rock formula might win over vast audiences – and go down in history as a classic.
But today, as then, it's from the interplay of reinvention and fidelity that sounds are born which can cross genres without losing their sense of home. “Lost In The Dream”, the third album by the Philadelphia band led by thirty-five-year-old Adam Granduciel, proves the point.

Swamps, gallops, epiphanies

Just the opening of “Under The Pressure” is enough to tell you where you've landed. A minimal, crystalline piano props up the harmony note by note, both melodic foundation and percussive pulse, while around it a swamp of close-set echoes thickens – at once a trap and a release. The chords are few, fifth and fourth circling a tonic that almost never arrives (an old trick learned from Fleetwood Mac's “Rumours“), and over that suspension the lines float, thickening and thinning out. When the baritone sax enters, just a few notes, almost a riff, acting as scaffolding, the betrayal of Springsteen-esque iconography is already complete: rather than Clarence Clemons's emphatic wails, here the horn sounds more like a guitar – or maybe a bassoon. Nine minutes that lay out the whole album's agenda: build in layers, play with density and rarefaction, let the song expand until the words (“dream”, “illusion”, “under the pressure is where we are”) become part of that same dreamlike fabric.

“Red Eyes” flips the perspective. Heartland from the very first hit: the galloping drumming hammers forward relentlessly, a steady snare crack closing every two beats. The trailing synths, a clear eighties inheritance, wrap around without ever smothering, casting an atmosphere that's epic and melancholy at once, luminous and pearly, colossal and inward-looking. The harmony, once again, is bare-bones simple: three chords, plus a pivot to the relative minor that opens the riff onto an epic – but never dramatic – shadow. An old trick of seasoned rock hands, to be sure, one that Granduciel – knowingly or not – handles with clockmaker's precision. The move first surfaces halfway through the verse, almost understated, softened by a voice doing everything it can to let it pass unnoticed; then it returns at the heart of the chorus, finally doubled by the vocal in all its grandeur. Like a landscape suddenly revealed as the clouds part.
As if to counterbalance so much grandeur, coming out of the chorus the mix seems to dive underwater: the instruments vanish and only the drums remain up front – then a slow rebuilding, again centered on the deep, essential sound of the sax, until the next explosion.

This is where the album's personality lies, because harmonically there's nothing new to discover: everything rests on elementary progressions, the same ones underpinning every heartland song. The creative work lies elsewhere, in the layering of timbres and the careful handling of density; in the almost architectural management of space that opens up as the songs stretch out. And in the voice, naturally: that detached, almost listless drawl, letting the ends of verses drop into a near-spoken, confidential murmur, only to drag certain notes upward at the start of lines, nasal, urgent, as if trying to escape. It's the vocal mask of Bob Dylan, filtered through the clear, wry timbre of Tom Petty. And it's the clearest sign of an imagination that holds together the fathers of Americana (capital A) and the guardian spirits of art-rock from the other side of the Atlantic – the long, contemplative breaths of the most meditative Pink Floyd, the emotion-dense void of late Talk Talk, as well as the lessons of dream-pop and shoegaze: the voice as just one more instrument among instruments, a wall of sound that caresses rather than overwhelms. The result is a sound that envelops like morning mist, one in which the songs' outlines dissolve without ever disappearing, ready to snap back into focus with the first rays of light.

The poison and the antidote

The rays of light, for Adam Granduciel, were slow in coming. Born Granofsky in Dover, Massachusetts, the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, he picked up his stage name back in high school: a French teacher had translated, as a joke, that “ofsky” into “du ciel”, and Granduciel – great of the sky – stuck. In college he studied painting and photography, a detail that's anything but decorative for someone who would go on to build albums like canvases, layer upon layer. The band's name, meanwhile, was born in Oakland together with a friend, over a few bottles of red wine and a couple of typewriters: compared to the alternatives, War on Drugs had a decisive edge – it didn't promise any particular sound, and under that name you could record just about anything.
In Philadelphia, where he landed in the mid-2000s, Granduciel met his perfect partner in crime: Kurt Vile. Two loners of the same stripe, hunched over their respective digital eight-tracks, obsessed with the same Dylan bootlegs they'd spend hours picking apart. The partnership shaped the band's earliest steps – Vile plays on “Wagonwheel Blues”, Granduciel returns the favor in the Violators – and left behind a shared approach to guitar that would keep resurfacing: no fixed parts, total freedom within the structures, and a pedalboard treated as a bag of tricks to pull timbres from, more than phrasing.

Then came “Slave Ambient”, the album that brought a small measure of consecration, and with it the flip side of the coin: nearly two years of nonstop touring. Back in Philadelphia, Granduciel found his life emptied out. The relationship over, friends reduced to fleeting hellos, and a string of aimless, boozy nights. Hanging over him was a feeling he would later describe without mincing words: “I found myself completely isolated, emotionally and physically, from myself and from my community”. The unease kept building, spilling over into panic attacks, paranoia, and the physical symptoms of depression. It was in this state that most of “Lost In The Dream” took shape, and the recording sessions became the only antidote: “It was almost therapeutic”, he would recall, “it took the poison out of my head”.

It would be a mistake, though, to read the album as a clinical diary. The proof is in “Suffering”, the track with the most explicit title: Granduciel had recorded it alone, at home, one night in 2012 when, by his own account, he still didn't feel bad at all. He was living fast, without dwelling on much, and the word had simply surfaced during a rough take. In that moment the song had already revealed itself, name and character intact, even before it truly existed. The painstaking work of overdubbing would come later, chasing what had shown itself, unbidden, that night. Lived experience does make its way into the record, in other words, but filtered through craft: the sound comes first, and only then does the wound settle inside it.
You can hear it clearly in “Burning”, one of the album's most radiant moments – and, at the same time, one of its most subtly melancholy. The theme is nostalgia for a love that once burned bright, and the wish to reignite it: tearjerker ballad material, on paper. But the writing glows, almost dances, and it's the production that puts a crack in that light: through a mixing trick, the voice manages to sound crisp and buried at once, present and impossibly far away – like someone speaking of a happiness he remembers perfectly and can no longer touch. Around it, a stack of effects-laden guitars and an organ that inevitably recalls the Doors conjure a ghostly glow, somewhere between Spacemen 3 and Echo & The Bunnymen. The result is that the regret is never spelled out: it all lives in the distance between the glow of the instruments and the voice that can't quite reach it.

Colors like these – regret, hushed stillness, that veil dulling every glow – can't be improvised: they demand an elaborate palette, one Granduciel has built over the years by drawing on a wide range of listening. On the Americana side, classics sit alongside more marginal figures: Dylan, Springsteen, of course, and Neil Young. Obviously Tom Petty – with a soft spot for his records straddling the late Eighties and Nineties, “Wildflowers” above all – and for the crystalline jingle-jangle of his guitarist, Mike Campbell, which resurfaces here in the album's most shimmering arpeggios. But then also Mike Bloomfield, admired not for virtuosity but for the punch of his earliest recordings – a handful of notes loaded with feeling, often captured on the first take. Jeff Tweedy and his Wilco, admired for their approach and the consistency of their path, but also Daniel Lanois: yes, for his work with U2, but above all for having reshaped Dylan on “Oh Mercy” and “Time Out Of Mind”, immersing his voice in nocturnal, reverb-drenched landscapes (a precedent that finds a direct parallel, in years very close to “Lost In The Dream”, in Destroyer's “Kaputt“ as well). There's one detail worth noting, though: the atmospheres of those records weren't born onstage or in rehearsal rooms, but behind a mixing desk, amid reverb, overdubs and sound treatments. To fuse the American tradition with the ambient laboratory required a recording studio, more than a band.

Capturing a moment

And I don’t mind you disappearing
‘Cause I know you can be found
Maybe livin’ on the dark side of the street
Damn
When we’re livin’ in the moment
And losin’ our grasp
Makin’ it last
With a grand parade in our past

For Granduciel, the studio was never just a place to pass through. His apprenticeship tells the story of a stubborn autodidact: years spent hunched over a small digital recorder, figuring out by trial and error what a compressor actually did (“at first I'd crank it all the way up and everything got louder and more saturated: I thought it sounded amazing”), then, once he landed his first contract, buying a twenty-four-channel desk and a one-inch tape recorder. And a methodical study of rock mythology: if they'd run a twelve-string through a Dbx compressor on “Born To Run”, it could be done again (and it was).
With “Lost In The Dream”, that trajectory reaches its fulfillment. By now the whole songwriting method lives inside the studio: guitar or piano fragments that only become songs once they're fixed in Pro Tools, setting off a cycle of overdubs, deletions, revisions. It's songwriting that owes more to an electronic producer than to a rocker, where the norm is fifteen guitar tracks distilled into one, and months spent listening to rough mixes before the solos reveal themselves and crystallize into hooks.

Even the most recognizable elements of the album’s sound grew out of an experiment. One day, in the studio with engineer Jeff Zeigler, Granduciel decided to run a piano riff through an MXR pitch transposer – an effect that splits the note, adding a copy tuned to a different interval – and then send the result into a Vox Time Machine stereo delay, which multiplies the signal into repetitions bouncing between the two channels. The piano frays, widens, sheds the contours of an acoustic instrument to become pure luminous trail: “And all of a sudden,” he would recall, “that somehow became the sound of the record.”
The vocal chain was locked down with the same empirical logic, and once found, it stayed untouched: an SSL desk, a Manley Vari-Mu tube compressor, a Neve 1073 preamp, and at the top of the chain an old Sony C-37A microphone, a classic of 1950s studios – the very model in which Granduciel, according to producer Shawn Everett, had once seen Dylan sing. A small technical fetish that reads, above all, as a poetic statement.

It would be reductive to mistake all this care for perfectionism for its own sake. It's the process that guarantees the result, and Granduciel says as much explicitly: “There's no sound in my head that I'm trying to capture; what drives me is the whole process, from the first demo to the mix.” It's an approach that carries its own risks: the original version of “An Ocean In Between The Waves,” nursed along for eight months and loved by every collaborator, was scrapped because “it no longer felt like mine,” and rebuilt from scratch in two and a half days. The track – now a fan favorite – keeps only the drums and a bit of guitar from that first life; everything else is the fruit of starting over. And it's, incidentally, the most Dire Straits-like moment on the record: liquid sound, drenched in reverb, with solos periodically surfacing to sketch coastlines and peaks like brushstrokes. The failed painter scraping the canvas clean and repainting, once again.

The final piece of the puzzle is the most paradoxical. With the mix nearly finished, the task of giving coherence to that mountain of tracks was handed to Nicolas Vernhes, who didn't even know the band. His mission, by his own admission, was to create the best possible illusion of a band playing together in a room, when in reality none of those songs had ever been performed live, and almost everything had been built on top of a drum machine. Lowering the programmed elements until they became subliminal, bringing the voice closer, letting bass and drums breathe: the organic warmth everyone feels in “Lost In The Dream” is, literally, a production effect. The new “studio psychedelia” coined by Granduciel and co. finds its fullest definition here: it doesn't free up instincts, it manufactures them – and makes them sound spontaneous.
“In Reverse,” which closes the record, is the synthesis of all this. A breakup song shot through with a luminous idea – the glorious parade of the past, enough on its own to light up a present of loss – opens with a long intro of waves and undertow, the album's most explicitly ambient moment, the one closest to Lanois' landscapes. Two verses float on that washed-out mood, then the rhythm kicks in and the chorus, though restrained, sounds immense by contrast: piano, echoing electric guitar, strummed acoustic, and the most Dylan-esque vocal on the whole album, with those falls at the end of each verse and those dragged-out notes the listener now reads as familiar. It might be the most polished track on the whole record, yet it was born at the last minute, recombining pieces during the arrangement phase: “I can't believe I put this together,” Granduciel would confess, almost surprised by his own creation.
It's the satisfied astonishment of someone who has understood that recording isn't just about capturing a sound, but about freezing a moment. The moment when a song is a field of possibility still intact, everything still ahead. On “Lost In The Dream” that moment was chased for months, lost, found again, rebuilt in the lab. And in the end, miraculously, it sounds as if it had always been there.

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26/07/2026