STEREOGUM: INSIDE THE WAR ON DRUGS' NEW ALBUM AND THEIR NEXT STUDIO OPUS

"In the process of making LIVE DRUGS, they spliced together the best of various performances to try and solidify an interaction of those scattered, impressionistic scenes. For listeners, it might echo a live show experience currently lost to the past. For Granduciel, it might be a mechanical way to cobble together loose ends of personal history the same way his music has often done for musical history. 'I wanted to go through the wormhole a little bit,' he explains. 'Taking six versions of ‘Under The Pressure’ and getting it down to one.' Earlier this week, the Drugs also announced a podcast would accompany the live album, with the band digging into the stories of how these live interpretations came to be over time.

Beyond the out-of-time nature of piecing together an album from years of performances, there’s a disorienting quality to LIVE DRUGS arriving when it does, at the tail end of a year in which concert experiences were stolen from us. While that was once a major aspect of Granduciel’s life, his existence under quarantine didn’t necessarily change drastically from how he was living in LA before the pandemic. Back then, it was still waking up, tweaking new music in the studio when time allowed, and raising his infant son, who proved a burgeoning musician himself when he’d crawl into Granduciel’s space to toy with effect pedal knobs or plunk along at a Wurlitzer with his father. Well before the mandated isolation we’ve all experienced this year, Granduciel was indulging his homebody tendencies, trading a social life in LA for the beginning to the laborious journey towards the next War On Drugs album."

Read the entire interview HERE.