One time I took a boyfriend to a War on Drugs show, and when we left he told me all their songs sounded the same. He was right. Listen to any War on Drugs record and hear living vestiges of past songs. The new one, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, is no exception.
The War on Drugs have been working with the same limited sonic palette — keys and synths and reverberant guitars wrapped in a thick layer of psychedelic haze, galloping drums that bring late 70s Springsteen to mind, a Dylan-esque voice floating somewhere in the middle, everything tight and wound-up except in the tracks that come unglued gradually, usually somewhere near their end — since their first album, Wagonwheel Blues, tweaking it only slightly with each new release. They’ve honed a sound so particular that it feels both pressurized, like any slight outside disturbance could knock the wind out of it, and powerful, like it’s always building on itself and where it’s been.
On Anymore, almost every song sounds like the faded memory of another one. Here’s the pensive piano of 2014’s “In Reverse,” this time a bit clearer, a bit closer to the top of the mix in this year’s “Change.” Here are the manic guitars of “Nothing to Find,” from 2017’s A Deeper Understanding, this time let loose earlier and more carefully on Anymore’s second track, “Harmonia’s Dream.” The “eyes like they were rings” from “Lost in the Dream” have become “rings around my father’s eyes” in a song of the same name on the new record, which is so melodically similar to Understanding’s album closer, “You Don’t Have to Go,” that I found myself singing the latter over the former involuntarily, muscle memory kicking in to solve a puzzle I didn’t expect to find in front of me.
Their lyrical palette is similarly sparse, and similarly evocative of the past. It’s all roads and darkness, beginnings and escapes, searching and finding, hesitating, drifting, losing, fading away. The past is ground both fallow and fertile, composed in equal parts of things worth leaving behind and things worth carrying forward. Adam Granduciel and his band seem to be on a journey where everything — pain, longing, mistakes, missed opportunities — is excavated and exposed, where each turn, no matter how many of them there may be, is an opportunity for redemption.
“Honey, I’m a victim of my own desire,” Granduciel sings in Anymore’s fifth track, the aptly named “Victim,” but he’s not bemoaning his subjugation — he’s actively inviting it: “I surrender, baby.” A world emerges as he eases into hurt wherever it might hit him, powerlessness wherever it might keep him pinned down. As “Occasional Rain,” the surf-rock-inflected album closer, leads the record into its ascendant, soaring conclusion, Granduciel ponders a series of questions:
And now that my heart is empty
Where should I go?
You've always been a constant
My northern star, where do I go
Yeah, without you?
There’s no lament here, but rather real curiosity for an unknown and unknowable future. It’s not pure or polished or light — there are doubts, the scars of strife, the fear that it (whatever “it” is) might not work out. There is the weight of a past that’s at once indelible and irreplicable, a place he can never fully exit nor ever fully inhabit again. But it’s no burden. That weighty past is the bedrock from which he goes on: “sometimes forward is the only way back / to reach you in time.”
I’ve been listening to this record every day since it came out, elated by the enormity of a sound that’s taken a step sideways from Springsteen toward Gabriel, Dylan toward Collins, only ever getting bigger and braver. I keep finding myself in the middle of it, as if I were right next to Adam, singing from the heart of the haze, steeped in music just as joyous as it is laden with grief — and so utterly sure of its right to exist that it gives me the sense that, not despite of my past but because of it, I, too, might be redeemed.