La Dispute

In the organizer's words:

La Dispute on tour in Germany with new album from February 2026

"No One Was Driving The Car" tour

special guests: Vs. Self & Pijn

Presented by VISIONS, Ox-Fanzine, livegigs.de, FUZE, Away From Life, In München and Rausgegangen München

When La Dispute announce a new album, it's not just a musical event. It's a literary act, a cinematic chapter, a record of the soul. With "No One Was Driving the Car", their first album in six years, the band from Grand Rapids, Michigan continues on a path that they themselves pave with words that are as corrosive as they are comforting. Before its release on September 5th, the work will be released in stages, dramaturgically divided into five acts - most recently "Act IV", consisting of three new songs, including the impressive "Top-Sellers Banquet".

The story that runs through the album is not a linear narrative. It is more of an inner diary, a stream of memories that meanders through time, space and consciousness. A man looks back on his life, feeling his way through key moments of his youth, loss, family tensions, spiritual confusion. The language: radically intimate. The music: post-hardcore in dialog with baroque narrative art, sometimes whispering, sometimes bursting. The album title comes from an article about a fatal accident involving a self-driving car - an absurd, almost grotesque metaphor for the album's existential questions: Who or what is controlling our lives? Have we ever been in control, or have we long been living in an automatic mode, controlled by technology, trauma, theology? Jordan Dreyer, singer and lyricist, speaks of the influence of the movie "First Reformed", a dark meditation on faith, apocalypse and inner dissolution. Many of the images on the album - the cry for redemption, the moment of levitation, the fragile self in the mirror - visually and thematically draw on these sources.

But where all this is abstracted in the canned version, it materializes live. Because La Dispute are a band that doesn't just play songs on stage. They burn. Anyone who has ever experienced them knows that their concerts are not just gigs, but cathartic rituals that also strengthen the feeling of cohesion and community, showing that perhaps the world is not lost after all. These places still exist, where everyone is welcome and no one is left out. Their music thrives on exchange, on eye contact between stage and hall, on sweat that seeps through meaning. These are experiences that carry an entire audience along - screaming, crying, silenced. "I don't think we knew for a long time how much we missed that," says Dreyer, looking back on the pandemic-related break from the stage. "The first rehearsals together after returning felt like we had forgotten how deep the void was before." At a time when concerts often degenerate into staged content machines, an evening with La Dispute feels like an act of resistance: a shared pause. An exchange between those who listen and those who speak. Not from above, but right through it.

In spring 2026, La Dispute will return to Germany for eight shows. Anyone who wants to experience the feeling that music can be more than just sound - a conversation, a wound, a miracle, the creation of a community - should make a note of these dates.