Even in the band’s ramshackle early days, the War on Drugs’ music could change the dimensions of a room. They didn’t achieve this feat through sheer volume alone (though songs like “Show Me The Coast” or “It’s Your Destiny” could reach intimidating decibel levels) but through scope: enormous emotions peeking through the curtain of incandescent synths and droning guitar. They made hanging in a dingy rock club watching four wiry Philly dudes conjure a multicolored squall feel like standing on the edge of a cliff, the universe roaring in your ears that you’re smaller than you think. When the War on Drugs grew to a sextet to bring Lost in the Dream’s variegated haze to the stage, their sound pushed against the rafters of thousand-cap venues, fully realizing the kind of immensity music writers love to call “stadium-sized.”
LIVE DRUGS, the band’s first live album, collected soundboard recordings from 2014 to 2019, focusing on cuts from Lost in the Dream and A Deeper Understanding. Four years later, they’re back with LIVE DRUGS AGAIN, sourcing takes from their 2022 and 2023 runs. Like its predecessor, LIVE DRUGS AGAIN feels like a single show, one where you lucked into the perfect spot in front of the soundboard, awestruck by a band that exudes the ineffable combination of tour-tight and casual. LIVE DRUGS AGAIN is an expansion in many ways: The band added multi-instrumentalist Eliza Hardy Jones in 2022, and the set draws heavily from 2021’s shimmering prairiecore opus I Don’t Live Here Anymore. It’s even more painstakingly assembled—Granduciel stitched this version of “Under the Pressure,” for example, from six different performances. Here, the music doesn’t smear together into a beautiful mass like the sound of the War on Drugs of yore; instead, it builds into a towering, complex structure.
This new, seven-piece configuration of the War on Drugs plays with remarkable patience. There’s a newfound—or at least newly emphasized—attention to the interlocking rhythms that bolster the songs’ swooning Heartland core. Granduciel’s solos aren’t as jammy as in the past, trading the minutes-long shred sessions for a more measured take on hypnotic maximalism. The band assembles “Living Proof” brick by brick, starting with sixteenth-note guitar strums, then adding eighth-note hi-hats, syncopated bass drums, and that hooky keyboard line that hovers in a fog of reverb. It’s almost techno-like in construction, meticulously building tension and ending in a quietly cathartic payoff when the groove downshifts into its roots-rock coda. During some songs, you can pick out one element—the dusty Linn Drum backbone of “Burning,” Dave Hartley’s motorik bassline during “Slow Ghost”—and follow it like a single stream into a tremendous waterfall.
