Photo by Martin

A region built and reliant on a mass furniture industry. The epicenter for the Christian Reformed Church. A breathless wilderness being polluted to death by each of these in some shape or form every single fucking day. Welcome to La Dispute’s Grand Rapids, MI on “Environmental Catastrophe Film”, the morbidly graphic centerpiece and second act of the experimental post-hardcore band’s forthcoming album, No One Was Driving the Car.

There’s a lot to digest here. Even by Jordan Dreyer’s oft over-saturated stream-of-conscious narrations that have a tendency to wrestle with the background of the band’s depressed Midwestern landscape, religion, existentialism, and death, this one — a nearly 9-minute slowburn that traverses the band’s varied discomfort and discord that eventually reaches a natural combustion point — sets a new standard on overwrought introspection. He covers in detail the life cycle of a boy to man across three time shifts. The point of view calls into question the place of everything in this world: nature, humanity’s reckless nature through its consumption of it, nature’s ability to wreck humanity if it were sentient, pondering if this same energy flows through the presumed grace of the family church’s god, and where this journey ultimately ends before beginning again.

If this were attempted by anyone else, it’d be a mere deep dive into chaos. Through La Dispute’s hands, it’s evidence of an intelligent design on destruction.

Shot and edited by: Jordan Dreyer

La Dispute’s No One Was Driving The Car will be released September 5th on Epitaph Records.