While doing research, I learned that some journalists who spoke with Jordan Dreyer around the release of No One Was Driving the Car in 2025 received nearly 50-page analyses of the album’s lyrics to help them prepare for the interview. It’s no surprise – just listening to any La Dispute record makes it clear that this vocalist’s works are essentially multi-layered, highly expansive novels. The same seems to apply to the interviews themselves.
Even though I caught Jordan backstage at Warsaw’s Proxima just before a sold-out March show, the result is probably the longest, most interesting, and at the same time the most pleasant conversation I’ve conducted for Undertone. About change, TikTok popularity, technology, the complex process of creating La Dispute’s music. About life. Give it a read.
[MOŻESZ TO TEŻ PRZECZYTAĆ PO POLSKU]
You’ve released a new album after 6 years, right? And last time you were in Poland was right after the previous one, right?
Oh my goodness, you’re gonna test my memory. Yeah, it would have been 6 or 7 years ago. We played a festival [OPEN’ER FESTIVAL 2019], so the last time we played a headlining show was quite a bit further away.
This show today sold out pretty fast, I guess. Were you surprised?
Definitely. Yeah, part of what has been fun about this tour is that the 5 of us are pretty scattered about, and people have obligations at home. So as we’ve gotten a little bit older, we have less time to do tours. And the ones that we do, we try to keep relatively short, so people aren’t away from their kids for too long. So it’s gotten harder to go to as many places in Europe as we once did when we were first touring and we didn’t really have anything else to give a shit about. So we’d do a month and a half in Europe and we come to a lot of different places every time. And as we’ve gotten a bit older and had more obstacles, we’ve sort of narrowed down where we go a little bit, so we end up spending a lot of time in the same handful of countries.
And this whole tour has been a kind of a return to a lot of places that we hadn’t been in over a decade. We played in Vienna for the first time in like 12 years. We played in Cardiff for the first time in like 12 years. We played in Budapest and in Prague for the first time in 13, 14 years. So a lot of places that we just haven’t been able to get back to. Not because we weren’t interested in going back, it just is a little bit difficult. And playing in Warsaw is one of those where we just haven’t. The festival we played 7 years ago was a lot of fun, but you always feel a little bit bad coming back in that capacity.
You stood out in this lineup.
Yeah, definitely. And there were people who came and watched us, but you feel bad that those people might have had to come pay for an entire day’s worth of bands that they might not be as interested in seeing or whatever to see us play, because we hadn’t been back in a long time. So I remember talking to some people after the show and saying from stage too, that we’re gonna be back and we’ll be playing a show for us, a headlining show. So this is exciting. It’s good to be back. Didn’t expect it to sell out, to get to your question, but yeah, we’re really happy.
Except of course babies and obligations, what have changed during these 6 years?
Oh my goodness, I think that little has changed in why we love to do it and why we make an effort to still keep it a part of our lives. First and foremost, we just get a lot out of creating music together. And the community that it keeps us a part of has a lot of value for all of us, so there’s something for that too. I think that having the 3 and a half years of the early COVID and the quarantine and what that did to the industry and how that kept us from even being in the same place together, reinforced why it’s important to us. I think it sort of took having it taken away for us to understand how essential it is and how much we get out of it, how fulfilled we feel doing it. So I think coming back after that, we sort of had like a renewed purpose as a band, and I think it took some of the stress of trying to keep the ship afloat financially disappear, because we just wanted to make a record again. And we felt, I think, after the forced break better equipped to invest ourselves all the way into doing it.
So I think that we just like came back from that better at what we do and more easygoing about it in a way where it just like everything else kind of went away, knowing that it is impermanent and you can lose the option because of circumstances beyond your control. And that’s the big thing. And I think ever since we came back and started touring after COVID and we’ve just been in a better place, I think, collectively, communicating better and we’re better at what we do because we figured out how to have fun doing it again.
And you’ve got some TikTok popularity. Did you notice any change in your audience?
Kind of, yeah. On this tour especially. We did the first part of this record tour in the US in September and we noticed it somewhat. When we were a younger band, we would get pretty varied audience of people that were, I would say mostly close to us in age, but we get younger people and we get some older people in the back, you know. And then it kind of leveled out. I think for a few years it was just like people within 5 years in either direction of our ages and people who had seen us before, who were loyal to us. And like that is exactly where you want to be, I think, as a band like us. It’s just like connecting with the people who’ve connected with you over the years.
And this tour, we’ve noticed more and more every night how more people who are now 15, 16, who weren’t around when we first put our first record out, are coming to our shows and showing up early. We don’t have an intentional presence on TikTok or anything like that, but it just sort of happens naturally, and I think it’s interesting to see how the means of communicating has changed the way that people are introduced to music they might not have been otherwise. In the same way that it was, you know, an older brother’s friend who burned a CD for us when we were growing up. That’s how we like found bands or went to the record store and just talked to the clerk. And now people are finding our band through TikTok, and they’re finding songs that were written a very long time ago that aren’t even really representative of what our band sounds like anymore.
That was actually my next question, because these songs that are popular on TikTok, I think, are taken out of context. How did you first react to that?
I mean, it depends. A lot of what people find on the internet and TikTok is two songs. It’s King Park, which has been a pretty foundational song in our catalog for a lot of people, and it’s played a big role in our lives too and Such Small Hands, which I think pretty collectively we’ve tried to distance ourselves from over the years, because it’s never felt indicative of who we are as artists. And you sort of include it as an introduction to a record when you’re 21 years old and you never expect it to be the thing that people connect to the most. And there can be misgivings about that because this is the association that people are immediately making with our band, and it’s not necessarily how we view ourselves as artists. But what’s been pretty interesting on this tour is a lot of the new songs are songs that the 15 to 18-year-olds in the front row are singing along with. So it’s like they’re finding us through Such Small Hands, but they’re not stopping there and they’re engaging with more recent stuff that I think is more complicated and I think it’s really been pretty cool to see those songs connect with people.
Yeah, I’ve noticed the same on Deftones concert. There were a few thousand of young people and they were screaming all the songs – not only the TikTok ones.
Yeah, it’s cool. We’ve been talking about Deftones earlier on this tour because I had a bunch of friends go see Deftones in Seattle and one of my close friends said it was the fucking coolest thing, because there were so many young girls, young queer people, young people with their parents who just found Deftones, and it’s not just “My Own Summer”. They’re going through the backcatalog, and they’re not stopping there. They’re curious about what else there is and I think that’s really awesome.
You wrote the new album on a few tours around the world. Did these different places change or influence the sound of the songs?
I think when you’re breaking up the writing that way, everywhere has like a new level of excitement because you’re in a new place and you’re sort of like experiencing a different energy with the difference in temperature, the difference in culture, you know, a variety of different things. And I think that shows up on the record. When we did Panorama, we were all living in different places and we chose to fly back to our hometown and spend a couple months together every day. And I think it was necessary for us to make that record and I think that there were some obstacles and being home was one of them at times because you have people to see, you have family and what have you and trying to find a balance between the work you’re doing and the people you want to see and reconnect with was a bit challenging at times and maybe a little bit distracting. It ended up working out really well in the end, but it was tougher to get to the finish line.
And this record, I think, when you’re writing for 10 days in the Philippines and you’re in Manila, you don’t know anybody. And there are like different obstacles. You feel isolated by the language and by the differences in transportation and all these different things. So I think it really kind of forced us to zero in on the thing that we were doing and to make that our everyday. And even beyond that – the breaks you take are more exciting because it’s not just going to the place that you’ve always gone growing up. It’s like you’re exploring a new place and you’re excited about where you are. So I definitely think that each place kind of left a fingerprint on the record.
Cool. I’ve read an interview with you, where you were talking about splitting the album in 5 acts and releasing them separately. And you said you were afraid that releasing the first act would mislead people to think that this is a post-punk aggressive album. And I’ve got to admit, I was misled. I still love the whole album, but those first few songs hit me the most. How did that come up?
You know, it was a sort of combination of things. It was actually Kirk, our manager, who suggested that we release it in sections. We’d written the record in acts and we’ve always sort of relied on a sort of structural concept for everything we’ve done, so it wasn’t super out of the ordinary, but it was a little more segmented sonically than records have been in the past. Generally we sort of intersperse differences throughout. He proposed because I think he was always interested in doing something a bit off the beaten path, something a little different. And I think that is smart considering the difference in how music is disseminated to people in the 21st century with streaming services and what have you. I think you can play around a little bit more with the way you roll albums out instead of the traditional format.
But I think the misgiving that I had was what you said. It’s just like you don’t want people to hear the first 3 tracks and assume that everything thereafter will sound that way. But I think ultimately what we love about our band maybe the most, I don’t know, but is that we cover a lot of ground sonically. And I think that you sort of have to trust your audience, whether it be people who have been with you for years or are coming to you for the first time, to find and understand your vision when the time comes. And I think we too often in 2026, 2025, whatever, dumb down what we do collectively, like artistically, to accommodate difference in attention span and all manner of things. And I think that really sells the experience short.
And ultimately the record is meant to be heard in 5 acts and we just sort of had to trust that people, even if they were thrown off by the second batch of songs after hearing the first, would come back to it eventually and understand the vision in totality when the whole thing was available to listen. And I think there were certainly some people, who didn’t love the way it was rolled out, and I think there are people who ignored it altogether and waited till the whole thing was out. But for the most part, the people who listened to it had an opportunity, because of how it was laid out, to digest every piece more intently and see the vision that way.
You’re pretty well known for your complex and well-made narratives over the albums. How did the process for this one look like?
Yeah, we have in the past really built from a theme and a concept. So the first couple records we did, I had a pretty clear idea, not of just what I wanted to cover thematically as a whole piece, but how I wanted it to move. I think my interest in art has been interestingly structured fiction for a very long time, so I’ve really sort of felt that was something I was equipped to do. And my bandmates have always been very attracted to big, complicated, grandiose music as well. So there’s an alignment and vision there and it’s really worked well for us because our songs are so hyper-literate and wordy. It’s a bit of a back and forth between myself and the 4 musicians in the band. It’s like: “this is my vision for the whole record and this is how I think it should move”. And then they build songs over that. Then it comes back to me in the end and I see, how my idea has changed by what they’ve produced.
And we did less of that on Panorama intentionally, as a way to challenge ourselves and we wanted to kind of make the record feel a little more meandering and dreamlike or like a tone poem. I think probably after having poured so much into that record, it felt like time to go back to something we’d done before as older, better musicians and more disciplined people. I spent a lot of time after Panorama just collecting information. It’s generally how the record process starts for us, is. These all certain news stories or pieces of art, be they film or music or poetry, whatever sticks in my brain and stays there for a period of time until it all starts to make sense why, I guess. And I think it’s generally like understanding through collecting all these different pieces where the similarities are to process what I’m feeling about how I’m experiencing the world.
It’s a long meandering answer, but I think that I spent so much time feeling the uncertainty of modern life – at home and in the world abroad – I think it all sort of like felt a little out of control and continues to feel more and more that way. And once I had all these stories collected, I could group them by how I felt they moved through that conversation and that’s ultimately kind of what the structure of the record is. We were thinking a lot about film as well. There are sort of nods to cinema in how the story is structured. So when it came to get to the studio, and maybe this is partly because we had limited time to make music together, it was just helpful to say like: “here are 14 songs that I have ideas for. Here’s how I think they move.” And then present those things to my bandmates and have them translate the things I wrote, the ideas I had, into a sonic platform, and then go back and write the actual words over top of it.
So it starts with you?
Yeah, it starts with an idea that I have. And for this one in the biggest way since we did Wildlife, which was pretty much mapped out track to track. I did the same thing for this and we made some adjustments. And that’s the beauty of it. It’s like: “I’ll pitch this all to my bandmates. I’ll draw it on a fucking…”. We bought a giant sheet of paper for the rehearsal studio and I mapped it out by structure and by dynamics. Some of that changed when we started to write the music. It starts with me, but it becomes this back and forth between all of us. I think that’s what makes our band.
I think the important theme of the new album is technology and our relationship with it. As the progress goes faster and faster, weren’t you afraid that the world will, you know, overtake your work on that album making some parts of it a bit out of date lyrically?
Yeah, I have struggled throughout our career as a band with speaking too directly to what’s happening in contemporary life. For that reason. And I think it’s a difficult balance to strike because, in the same token, the older I get, it feels more urgent to discuss the issues of today. So finding a way to do so, to find what’s universal about how we experience a world changing faster than ever is a challenge, but feels like a very necessary one. So I did think about that a lot, even from the title of the record. I think at the outset I thought, you know, I want to specifically talk about how the metaphor for our lack of control in life is Tesla crashing, but do I really want to speak too directly to Tesla? I don’t know.
So finding ways to hint at the experience of interacting with modern life and with rapid advancement in technology and our sort of collective concession to its existence in our lives was difficult, but I also, I think, was able to find parallels between that and other things that we place our faith in and have historically. And I think that there’s line to be drawn between how we believe in the benevolence of technology, that we sort of without criticism think what’s offered to us by these billion-dollar companies will improve the quality of our lives in the same way that people do with religion and with economic opportunity and selling multi-level marketing products and all this stuff. It’s just like, I think there are a lot of parallels between how we’ve married ourselves to our phones and how we’ve always found something to explain or to provide hope for where we’re headed.
An important element of all your albums is Michigan or more specifically – Grand Rapids. And you paint rather like a dark vision of that place. I mean drugs, MLMs and stuff. What’s the place like right now? Is it this dark?
No, no! I think in general I’ve always been attracted to dark things. Oddly, I find a lot of comfort in exploring the macabre and the violent and the dark. I think that it’s important to not run away from the things that make life difficult in the same way it’s important to not run away from the things that make life beautiful, joyful. These are all the component parts of being alive and they’re the component parts of every place. So I think that it’s never my intention to suggest Grand Rapids is a particularly unique place, because it’s not. I think it’s a place like anywhere else – full of people who are trying to be happy and make sense of their lives. And they’re subject to outside influences that make that difficult or random circumstances that make that difficult.
I think ultimately the reason that I talk about Grand Rapids so often, about Michigan so often, is because I love it and I have more of a connection to it than I can anywhere else because of the impact it’s had on my life, good and bad. So it’s an act of love ultimately that I talk so much about Michigan and Grand Rapids specifically. It’s a medium-sized city in Michigan that’s done pretty well for itself relative to the rest of that area of the country, which has been historically or in recent history, pretty damaged economically by the automotive industry’s collapse in America. And it’s really done a good job of positioning itself as a destination, which is a funny thing to say having grown up there, because it wasn’t that way when I was a kid. And there’s, you know, bad things about it, but there’s also the equal and opposite reaction. There’s a lot of really great people doing great things for the community and making music and art. It’s the place I know the most about, so it’s easy to talk about.
You usually start collecting material, as you said, pretty early. Did you already start collecting anything for the next album?
Yes, which is pretty unusual. It usually takes a pretty long time for us, I think, as a group to be ready to go back into it again, but I think that partly because we had such a good experience making this record, I think we all feel motivated in a way. In the past we might have felt worn out after a record. And maybe it’s because the world is the way it is right now and it feels a little bit more urgent to pay attention and to absorb what’s going on around all of us and to try to make sense out of it for ourselves through art. And then hopefully for someone else too eventually when something’s done. But I have started to look— I have ideas and I think that reasonably soon with some caveats I’m gonna start trying to put them into something cohesive enough to pitch to my bandmates and I think we’ll try to like jump back in a little quicker than we ever have. None of us want to wait 6 years again. We’re kind of itching to make something already.
All photos by Agata Hudomięt / Undertone