The War On Drugs’ biggest album thrives on its smallest details
Over the last three years, The War On Drugs became one of our biggest rock ’n’ roll bands—mostly while nobody was looking. On 2014’s Lost In The Dream, the group delivered a confident statement of intent that found it plumbing the depths of AOR radio for nostalgic sounds to weave together and drown in reverb. It was familiar but thrilling, a blend of time-tested fundamentals that came together as something more meaningful than a mere, delightful tickle of our collective musical memories. The album received universal acclaim, and soon the band was selling out shows on a two-year world tour, getting name-dropped by Apple executives, and signing with a major label.
Appropriately, that major-label debut, A Deeper Understanding, is the band’s biggest outing yet, by every conceivable application. The ambition behind its songs and the enormity of the band’s sound and scope has grown right alongside its profile. The alchemical combination The War On Drugs perfected with Lost In The Dream is still the template, but that last record sounds restrained and lean by comparison, even if their difference in runtime is just a few measly minutes. Understanding’s songs are so towering and dense they threaten to topple over into soupy monotony, but what’s most impressive about these 10 tracks is the way frontman Adam Granduciel and his bandmates prop them up with an endless supply of electrifying, ear-catching details. As big as the sum of its songs’ parts get, this is a band that never fails to remember there’s just as much awesome power in the little things.
It’s also a band that knows the value of a deftly deployed guitar solo. Here they’re uniformly fantastic, but better even than the licks themselves is the timing and meaningfulness with which they’re used. During the choruses of “Pain,” Granduciel sings about fighting to break from life’s repetition and our own lack of control over the things around us, whispering the final line of “I wanna find what can’t be found” before lashing out with the ear-splitting note that kicks off a defiant solo. The whole of “Strangest Thing,” a slow-burning album highlight, builds to Granduciel passionately declaring he wants to run; liberated at last, the band blasts into the song’s transcendent finale.