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.
The most surprising inclusion on LIVE DRUGS AGAIN is “Come To The City,” a Drughead favorite from 2011’s Slave Ambient. On the album, Granduciel sounds as though he’s singing from the eye of a hurricane, a buzzing cloud of overlapping chords threatening to consume him whole. Live, the band plays like a slowly darkening sky, adding a new layer every few bars until it becomes a colossal, undulating mass. The ambient intro unfurls for a full minute before Robbie Bennett’s triangular piano figure emerges from the haze, and Granduciel sings like he knows what’s coming, the desperation of the studio version replaced with weary wisdom. After dipping into a couple of gorgeous guitar solos, each preceded by a signature Granduciel “Woo!”, the outro sends it skyward. Jones and Granduciel harmonize on the repeated phrase, “I could leave it all,” as the band adds another chord to its structure, giving the droning churn a tinge of hope. It’s a near-perfect distillation of the cosmic, psychedelic Americana that the War on Drugs has been honing for the past 15 years.
In press photos and liner notes, Granduciel is the face and catalyzing force of the War on Drugs. But what LIVE DRUGS AGAIN proves, more than LIVE DRUGS, and maybe more than any of their studio albums, is the band’s force as a symbiotic unit. During an extended opening vamp on “I Don’t Live Here Anymore,” Granduciel lovingly introduces the members (save Bennett, whom he refers to as an “international rock icon” at the end of “Come To The City”), singing their names or peppering in an esoteric inside joke. When the whole group finally launches into the stadium-sized anthem, it feels like it’s existed forever, pulled whole from the ether by an ensemble connected via telepathy and MIDI data. That energy exchange seeps out into the audience, each song becoming an act of communion. As Granduciel sings “You’re on your own” near the end of “Harmonia’s Dream,” the crowd begins to cheer, refuting his words, celebrating that they’re all in it together.
