The War On Drugs Talk New Album, ‘I Don’t Live Here Anymore’
The War On Drugs have spoken about their rise to fame and their new album, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, out 29 October on Atlantic Records.
Band leader Adam Granduciel spoke to NME about the band’s ever-growing success: “I feel like it takes a second to process everything that gets bigger. We’ll be on tour in Europe playing rock boxes, clubs or theatres and we’ll be like, ‘This is amazing’. Then we’ll have one or two of these massive arena shows. We have our comfortable areas but we’re growing into those big places… We’re trying to find ways to play the music in huge spaces but still be as loose as possible and do the records justice… Even from the first record, people always said, ‘I feel like I can hear these songs in stadiums’. I was like, ‘They’re just home-recorded songs!’ But somewhere along the line it became our reality.”
Granduciel went on to speak about the experience of recording I Don’t Live Here Anymore in upstate New York: “Once you were up there you were in the middle of nowhere. You couldn’t walk anywhere; there was a snowstorm; we weren’t near a grocery store so we had some provisions. We just slept in the house, woke up, worked for 12 hours and went home, made some spaghetti or soup and did it all over again… “We came out of those five days with a bunch of different songs and great ideas. It was the most productive time we’ve ever had.”
He also discussed the impact that fatherhood had on the writing of the album: “When my son was born, it was definitely a break. I’m so used to writing that I felt like I needed to find those moments. When he was really young, I’d go down to my studio at night for like 30 minutes and put something down just to do something. As he got older, working on the record while watching him explore music was a joy.”