Written by I’ll never get used to Waymos, those driverless taxis rapidly taking over tech hubs like San Francisco and Austin. They’re impossible to miss on the road, each conspicuously outfitted with spinning cameras where a sunroof would be, like the world’s most expensive dunce cap. It’s not exactly that I feel safer among my fellow men; the company says that their fleet is “better than humans at avoiding crashes that result in injuries.” Still, I break into a cold sweat every time I pull up to a red light, turn to the lane next to me, and find that no one is driving the car.
A similar unease pervades the new record from La Dispute. Their first full-length album since 2019’s Panorama, No One Was Driving the Car takes its title from a report about a Tesla crash that killed both its passengers in 2021. The vehicle burst into flames as soon as it hit a tree; it took more than 30,000 gallons of water to extinguish its battery. For lyricist and vocalist Jordan Dreyer, exploding autonomous cars are one of many (headless) horsemen of the apocalypse. Across 14 songs split into five “acts” (the first four of which the band released as individual EPs), No One Was Driving the Car surveys societal decay—overdoses on the street, parasitic pyramid schemes, post-industrial blight—and wonders if anyone is at the wheel.
Since the band’s inception in Grand Rapids, Mich., over two decades ago, Dreyer’s tortured howls have come to personify anguished disinhibition, a death rattle for the unbearably lonely. In the last few years, La Dispute’s 2008 song “Such Small Hands” has found a second life as a viral hit on TikTok. Dreyer’s lovelorn caterwaul— “I think I saw you in my sleep, darling!” —is the ideal soundtrack for a nervous breakdown. There are still romantic failures on this record, but they’ve matured into the thorny existential questions that weigh on a long-term commitment: “Are you still having fun? Are you feeling fulfilled?” Dreyer asks on “Self-Portrait Backwards.” But No One Was Driving the Car is also explicitly political, as the band aims its ire at the greed, corruption, and other faceless evils that shape our world.
In La Dispute’s hometown, “innovation” has always come with a caveat: once-reliable blue collar jobs vanishing on a corporate executive’s whim, an epidemic born from painkillers marketed as “non-addictive,” multilevel marketing companies like Grand Rapids’ very own Amway invoking Calvinist doctrine in the name of scamming vulnerable people. The album’s centerpiece, the nearly nine-minute “Environmental Catastrophe Film,” traces Grand Rapids’ faded past as a furniture manufacturing hub through the lens of a sturdy wooden chair that has outlived the industrial boom from whence it came. “Time goes and we change/Not what we made/But what can be,” Dreyer sings. Time is fluid here, warped by familial spats and dead friends and the persistent beauty of Lake Michigan despite it all.
In fittingly luddite fashion, No One Was Driving the Car is largely built from analog instruments, losing the electronic interludes from Panorama and their latest Here, Hear EP. The band—Dreyer, along with drummer Brad Vander Lugt, guitarists Chad Morgan-Sterenberg and Corey Stroffolino, and bassist Adam Vass—produced the record entirely themselves in New South Wales, Australia, surrounded by a national forest; field recordings of their tropical environs snake their way into the album’s final mix. More than its thematic shifts, the album’s composition is a distinct, ambitious, and captivating step up for La Dispute: The discordant riffs on “I Shaved My Head” set the tone for the record, with a bluesy bassline that suggests nothing good’s ahead. The gentle strumming on “Self-Portait Backwards” and “Saturation Diver” underscores the desperation in Dreyer’s lyrics, fingerpicked melodies a foil to the blunt instrument of his voice. There’s hints of early Sabbath, Slint, Orchid—a lineage of alienation that La Dispute carries on in the face of modern horrors.
The band, most of whom were raised in the Christian Reform Church (the subject of fellow Grand Rapidian Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, which Dreyer cites as a major inspiration for this record), reveals its moral code through religious allegories. There’s the woman “narcanned back to life” on Easter Sunday in “Autofiction Detail.” Another, glimpsed through a window, appears as an “archangel” standing over her victim on “Man With Hands And Ankles Bound.” “Landlord Calls the Sheriff In” follows a woman sucked into a pyramid scheme, only to be hit with the extremely Protestant “try a little harder now” when her sales aren’t quite meeting the mark. Still, these barons get their due: “No yachts will drift off when the rapture comes,” Dreyer barks, not the first nor last reference to prophetic resurrection on the record. No One Was Driving the Car is an inspired departure from interpersonal drama in favor of incisive critique, a confident step forward into an uncertain world.
In 2019, Waymo’s parent company, Google, made a big announcement: They were planning on investing millions of dollars in “the world’s first factory 100 percent dedicated to the mass production of autonomous vehicles” in Michigan, a former auto industry powerhouse. They promised it would create hundreds of jobs, welcome news after General Motors announced the closure of its Detroit factory earlier that year. But those jobs never materialized: The plant quietly ceased operations in early 2025, employing just 60 people at its peak. La Dispute are a band for precisely moments like these, when you’ve followed empty promises to their inevitable conclusions; when the worst sinners get off scot-free; when the rapture comes and you’re still stuck in traffic, surrounded by ghosts behind the wheel.
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