La Dispute Ready to Reconnect With Fans Across Australia
Conceptual band La Dispute kick off their No One Was Driving the Car Australian headline tour, which will be hitting our shores in October. La Dispute will be promoting their latest album No One Was Driving The Car, released in September of 2025 via Epitaph Records. It’s been six years since La Dispute released their last album, Panorama. Since then, the Michigan post-hardcore band, made up of Jordan Dreyer on vocals, Brad Vander Lugt on drums, Chad Morgan-Sterenberg and Corey Stroffolino on guitar, and Adam Vass on bass, dealt with the stagnance of the pandemic, celebrated the ten-year anniversaries of Wildlife and Rooms Of The House, and began working on No One Was Driving The Car. The fifth studio LP is the first entirely produced by the group, and it came together in Grand Rapids and Detroit, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines.
Self produced and heavily inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, No One Was Driving The Car grapples with malaise in the shadow of the looming apocalypse, which has noticeably been worsened by the advancement of tech. The title comes from a quote from a police officer vocalist Jordan Dreyer read in a news article about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash, an absurd event which raises questions about the amount of control we have in our own lives. Jordan Dreyer talks to Rob Lyon about the upcoming tour.
Not long now until the Australian tour…
Yep, coming right up, sneaking up on me, honestly.
Are you pumped? It seems even bigger than last time…
Always excited. I mean, Australia’s been a big part of our lives individually and collectively as a band, so always eager to come back and see old friends, make some new ones. It plays an outsized role in our history for an American band. It’s the first place that we travelled to outside of the States, and I think we’ve probably come back more than any band that we know, so clearly we’re eager to get out of our country and be in yours for a bit. So yeah, we’re stoked.
It’s a great initiative that all the shows are all‑ages, except one. Encouraging that next group of fans coming through is awesome.
Yeah, it’s always been a bit challenging in Australia to make it happen, but we’ve got great people behind us, and it’s always been a point of emphasis everywhere we go to be as inclusive as possible, and in particular to people who are under eighteen. Those are the people who, judging from my experience at that age, get the most out of it, and who deserve the opportunity to be a part of it more than… I don’t know. I think it’s a great thing to make happen for everybody, and it’s an easy one to miss.
For fans who have just discovered La Dispute, what are they in for on this tour? How would you describe the live experience?
I think we are a band that really values the music as a tool, particularly one for internalising emotions and processing the complexity of existence. The majority of the people who come out to see us emit that the same amount that we do, if not more. So ideally it’s a cathartic environment and an engaged environment. Expect some honest, vulnerable emotions, an engaging live show, and an audience that is half responsible for that experience. I don’t expect anything different from this trip.
Have any Australian cities left a lasting impression on you?
I mean… there’s not one that hasn’t. Because we’ve come so often and made so many strong friendships, it’s difficult to separate the experience in the city from the people we know in those places. Brisbane’s kind of home base for us. We’ve got a bandmate who lives on the Sunny Coast, and I’d say the majority of our strong and lasting friendships are in Queensland. But the same’s true of Perth, Sydney, Melbourne. It’s really hard to pick one place. It’s kind of a cop‑out of an answer, but truthfully, I’m not exaggerating when I say Australia’s been home away from home for almost the entire duration of our band. We came in when we were pretty young, so… yeah, I think we feel nearly as at home and comfortable in Australia as we do in our actual home country.
Are you leaning more on the new album on this tour, or is it everything from the back catalogue?
There’s a little of something from every major release we’ve done. We are leaning a bit more into new music, but not exclusively. We’re always digging through the back catalogue for different expressions of our band’s history, and cycling through old songs that maybe we haven’t played in a long time sort of makes them feel new again. So definitely an emphasis on new music, but it’s pretty fifty-fifty between the new record and everything that preceded it.
Twelve months on from No One Was Driving the Car, has your relationship with the album changed? Do you think anything differently of it? Are you more proud of what you achieved with it?
I think we are consistently very proud of the record. Before the record came out, we were dealing with COVID shutdown and the uncertainty of the future of the industry as a whole, and I think that sort of made us cherish being able to do this still, more so than maybe we did after years of pretty consistently touring, and maybe feeling a little bit of burnout, and a little bit of imbalance between work and home and the inevitabilities of being a touring band for a long time.
When it came time to make music again, we all felt a particular enthusiasm for it, sort of rediscovering the role it’s played in our lives and who we are after a period of forced inactivity. Everything that resulted on the new record continues to resonate with us, and I would say that the pride grows a little bit more every night playing the songs, and as people get more familiar with them, too. You have sort of a second wind for what they mean to you, seeing people sing along and engage with the songs you wrote together.
It’s too early in its process. We did a couple anniversary tours coming out of COVID, and it was easy to look back on a record that came out twelve years earlier and be like, oh, this means something very different to me now. Where No One pretty closely mirrors our experience still every day with taking in the world around us, and the uncertainty and upheaval we’re living through in contemporary life. I think it continues to be deeply relevant, and we continue to be more certain of the pride we felt in the studio tracking the songs.
You talked about burnout. Were you surprised with how quickly the songs came? Was it a challenge to get back into that creative space again?
I think we were surprised that it wasn’t a challenge, honestly. I think once you feel confident that the time is right to be creative again together, there’s maybe a little bit of self‑doubt creeping in, given the time off. You always come out of a thing you’re proud of and feel some degree of internal pressure to be able to recapture it. What really surprised us this time around is how natural it felt. It felt probably only rivalled by the very earliest era of our band’s history, when we were young and urgent and less saddled by outside influence, and lacking the established nature we have now as a band that can make you second‑guess the decisions you’re making. This time around, it felt more like that, more like, this is the thing we have to do, and it’s second nature, and to be in a room and see it all sort of fall out was surprising, but deeply encouraging.
Does that make it easier approaching what might be the next album?
Yeah, when we went into COVID on the back of a record that was ultimately very fulfilling and one we’re very proud of, but the process by which it came to life was a bit more difficult than records in the past, I think coming into making this record and feeling that enthusiasm off the bat, and seeing things line up naturally. When we got done with the record, I think for the first time in our band’s history, we started talking about what was next. You make music for so long, it feels like a long time, and you start to… I don’t know. I think we felt with this record that we had understood more than ever that being in this band together, at least for the time being, is essential to our character. It’s how we’ve processed things creatively and emotionally for our entire adult lives. We recalibrated in that break, and coming back to that position, to “this is who we are, and this is why we’ve always loved to do this, why this has always been such an essential part of our experience on the planet.” In that sense, yeah, you just have to exercise that muscle. It’s a realisation that it’s in your DNA.
Thinking ahead, is there any territory you haven’t explored that you really want to with new music down the line?
That’s a pretty important aspect of our band in general. We’ve always seen the next project as an opportunity to explore something different lyrically, sonically, instrumentally. We’ve always avoided rehashing the same thing too directly to avoid stagnation. When you’re aware of the role that it plays in who you are, you’re more interested in using it as a tool to evolve. There are always familiar themes, particularly on my end, where I’m talking about what I observe in the world and attempting to understand the human condition a bit better through art. There’s always going to be that character in the music and lyrics. But as far as what’s next, we’re always interested in broadening the conversation lyrically and challenging ourselves musically.
Are there any Australian bands that have caught your ear at the moment?
I love the band Blind Girls. They’re doing at least one of these shows, and they did our last Australian tour. I’m always sort of trying to shoehorn screamo bands like them into our support list, because I love those bands, and I love getting to see them every night before we play. Honestly, there’s so much great music in Australia, and we have the benefit of having somebody on the ground, we have a bandmate who lives in Australia, so we kind of default to Brad finding support bands, and he’s got excellent taste. Special Interest is doing this tour. There’s just a bunch of cool bands, and we have a bunch of cool bands playing these shows. It’s one of the things I’m most excited about, getting to not just see one great Australian band every night, but getting to sprinkle in some local bands and really flesh out the bill with bands we find inspiring and interesting. There’s no shortage of those bands in Australia, which is impressive considering it’s a little bit more difficult to tour the way you can in the U.S. as a band.
Yeah, I’m shouting out Blind Girls, because I love that band.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Catch LA Dispute on the following dates, tickets from Live Nation…
