Keep moving on: The War On Drugs, Lead Album,

The erstwhile Philly one-man band’s fifth album sees Adam Granduciel still following the dream. But how does it feel? asks Keith Cameron. Illustration by Janelle Barone.

“This glorious record suggests the heartland is wherever you choose.”

The War On Drugs ★★★★ I Don’t Live Here Anymore ATLANTIC. CD/DL/LP

AT SIX shows in a six-week period during the spring of 2012, The War On Drugs performed The Waterboys’ A Pagan Place. The song, a key prototype for what Mike Scott called “the big music”, was a folk hymnal propelled by sheer aspirational force into a kind of pacific call to arms. One year into the touring cycle for the second War On Drugs album, Slave Ambient, here was an indicator of where Adam Granduciel’s vision was headed: towards his own kind of big music.

Slave Ambient’s follow-up, Lost In The Dream, delivered on that premise: epic soundtracks for traversing interior landscapes, motorik-grooved road-rock for the EV generation. Reflecting on its success in 2014’s Album Of The Year lists, Granduciel explained to this writer the breakthrough came from seeking something “less esoteric. Any artist I grew up loving, be it The Velvet Underground, or Bob Dylan, or George Harrison, or Kraftwerk, had momentous songs. I wanted my album to have songs [that] transcend time or style or taste.”

Lost In The Dream’s impact rewarded Granduciel, a studio hermit whose perfectionism caused him a mental breakdown, with a major record deal from Atlantic. 2017’s A Deeper Understanding was denser, shinier, bigger in every way. Its first single, Thinking Of A Place, ran to 11 minutes; its tour cycle ended with TWOD playing arenas and winning the Grammy for Best Rock Album. A product of Philadelphia’s underground scene, Granduciel had come a long way since the days he and former bandmate Kurt Vile would jam for hours and study Bruce Springsteen. He now lived in Los Angeles, with his partner, actor Krysten Ritter; the couple would soon have a son, Bruce. But so immaculate was A Deeper

Understanding in design and realisation, its vast expanses felt oddly like a dead end. Could further mileage down that particular road possibly teach Granduciel more about what was gained, or lost, and at what price?

It’s a dilemma I Don’t Live Here Anymore acknowledges at the outset. In the grand tradition of American seekers, opening song Living Proof finds him standing “on the corner”, where “they’re building up my block”. He sounds bereaved: “Maybe I’ve been gone too long.” Instead of the multi-layered melodies and streamlined curves that have characterised Granduciel’s efforts at making one man sound like a band, the song presents an actual band, playing with immaculate restraint, initially just Granduciel on acoustic guitars and Robbie Bennett on piano, before the other players quietly arrive one by one until the six-piece ensemble kicks in on the pivotal lyric: “But I’m rising/And I’m damaged.” Granduciel starts an electric solo, which typically would be the signal to really cut loose, but 58 seconds later, it ebbs to a close.

Living Proof is an auspicious opening gambit (Springsteen has a song of the same name, about a lost soul who finds redemption upon becoming a father). And although no other song is so sparely arranged, it’s indicative of a fresh intent and clarity, as if Granduciel was now pre-choreographing his compositions as opposed to agonisingly compiling takes in the edit phase. That applies even to the lavish title track, a six-minute slab of transcendence that evokes those other harbingers of the big music Simple Minds, specifically their Jimmy Iovine/Robin Clark-enabled stadium soul anthems like All The Things She Said, with Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig from Lucius providing female vocal lustre here.

Such arch ’80s signifiers will always taint TWOD to some ears, yet they’re intrinsic to a person born in 1979 whose first album purchase was Phil Collins’ …But Seriously; the juddering melodrama of I Don’t Wanna Wait opens with the rhythmic blips of the Prophet 6, a recent upgrade on the 5, the synth that defined a decade. Part of TWOD’s appeal is how Granduciel decontaminates decadent textures via his rueful chord sequences and a crushing appetite for existential doubt, undercut by the occasional sprinkling of cheese. So while that title track has an opening riff reminiscent of Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes, and features the lyric, “When we went to see Bob Dylan/We danced to Desolation Row”, soon enough it’s pondering whether life is “dying in slow motion”, and concludes with the keynote sing-along: “We’re just walking through this darkness on our own.”

Even when the music’s sunny, Granduciel sensibly keeps an eye on the forecast and a weatherproof jacket on the backseat. Amid ascendant chords close to The Edge, Change finds him “driving on the west side again”, where rain inevitably “keeps pourin’ down”. Harmonia’s Dream is the equivalent of Under The Pressure on Lost

In The Dream, heartland Krautrockin’ nirvana. In his heightened euphoric state, Granduciel becomes a spectral manifestation of the sounds – “I’m gone like a light that can’t be seen” – as three Juno60 synth peals drip like sonnenschein into the psychic tank and we’re surging across the luminous plateau, alone but not lonely, James Elkington’s guitar soloing into a gilded eternity.

If his draughtsman’s eye for detail feels keener than ever, so too does Granduciel’s way with big heartstring tugs. Previously he might have shied from the transparent empathy – if not the Dylanadjacent melody – of Rings Around My Father’s Eyes, the second song to mention “father” after Old Skin, the album’s emotional fulcrum which rises from bare piano to urge “Let‘s suffer through the change”, then fires into full band country-soul lamentation like Side 4 of The River, all brimstone harmonica and Hammond.

It ends with a revival: Occasional Rain, an efflorescent chorale of arpeggiating guitars, where the notion of Johnny Marr leading The Heartbreakers puts Adam in whimsical mood. “I’m living down by an old par 3/You know I’ll be playing,” he winks, before the clouds mass and he confesses, perhaps to an old pal, perhaps just himself: “I got swept up in a world so strange.” Yet even as the heavens open, our weatherbeaten hero stands tall and trudges on through the rough – “Live the loneliness of your life/Keep on moving at your pace/Ain’t the sky just shades of grey” – as the notes tumble around him and into the fade.

Three years in the making, with over a dozen sessions spread across seven studios, from New York to LA, I Don’t Live Here

Anymore is the most grounded War On Drugs record and the best: a calm space amid a world in collapse. So maybe you can’t go home again – but this glorious record suggests the heartland is wherever you choose to make it. With the big music, there’s always more.