The War on Drugs

Lost in the Dream

Lost In The Dream doubles down on its predecessor’s adventurous side, and it’s War On Drugs’ most engrossing album thus far.

Previous album 'Slave Ambient' seemed to push The War on Drugs on to a new level: 'Lost In A Dream' takes them even higher. From the misty cover to the dreamy rhythms and hazy melodies, it’s an album that lives up to its title. 

Lost In The Dream is an instant salve to the shittiness of modern life, an album that would sound as though it could have been made anytime in the last five decades were it not so immaculately produced

They most certainly have created something special over the 15 months or so the album took to piece together.

Lost in the Dream pushes rock music forward—it isn’t the mirror of supposed better times that lesser bands make because they can’t or don’t want to locate their own voice.

Granduciel is clearly still drawn to his rock roots, but as the gap between him and those influences widens, it become suffused with anxiety and dread, the sort of existential ambivalence that Lost in the Dream masterfully conveys with its vast distorted spaces.

Richly melodic and possessing a classicist pop sensibility, this is rock music with soul.

‘Lost In The Dream’ embodies a big-hearted Americana, one that trades the knotted complexity of the quotidian for a wistful, widescreen beauty.

The decaying guitars and analogue synthesisers create a crepuscular melancholy. These are impassioned songs, but they steer clear of Bruce's bombast or lighters-aloft choruses.

Right to the final decayed note, Lost In The Dream is a triumph of emotive feel amid neurotic detail: immaculately conceived big music for little people.

The lyrics are buried and impressionistic, referencing disappearing, darkness and an inability to see. The album may have been borne in a fog, but the result finds Granduciel on the other side of the murk.

It retains their signature blend of folk-rock songcraft and miasmic guitar-drone textures, but in a more purposive manner.

Lost… maintains a kind of motorik languor throughout, turning 80s arena rock into something much more intriguing.

It’s a union between longtime engineer Jeff Zeigler and principal songwriter Adam Granduciel whose result is a ten track outing branded with the Philly native’s perfectionist watermark as the two seamlessly weave bar room piano, pedal steel, and seasoned vocals with enough drifting effects to fill whatever space comes between.

By the end, Lost In The Dream is similarly as sprawling and textured as its predecessor, harnessing the affirming, heartfelt sentiments without becoming corny or meek (mostly). 

The new War On Drugs album is a winning combination of psychedelic rock, krautrock, folk, and Americana--just like the band's last album, but better.

Singer Adam Granduciel piles his blue collar mystic lyricism atop a rush of eddying rhythms and tones that feature Robbie Bennett's keyboards more prominently than ever.

Longer on instrumental texture than songwriting, their third album recasts the blue-collar fantasias of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen as earthy ambient music, better to soak in than to scrutinize.