No One Was Driving The Car, So Take Solace in Powerlessness
Graphic by Téa Sklar
I identify as an eclectic music listener. I’m also quite pretentious. I’m well aware, my preferred streaming platforms are Bandcamp and Tidal, for fucks sake.
My main playlist often jumps from jaunty synthpop to unrepentingly nihilistic black metal, or from neotraditional country to hardcore punk. This somehow doesn’t faze me anymore.
Despite this discrepancy, my favorite albums actually share some common characteristics. I tend toward music that’s sonically diverse, emotionally earnest, thematically complex, and lyrically poignant. It also helps if it’s bangs ridiculously hard.
If any act embodies those descriptors the most, it would have to be the post-hardcore band La Dispute.
Their 2008 debut, Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair, established everything they would be recognized and cherished for: free-flowing song structures, phenomenal bass grooves, punishing guitar textures, and Jordan Dreyer’s harrowing vocals. However, that debut still feels like a product of the late-aughts post-hardcore/screamo scene. The limited, somewhat typical sonic palette is not a dealbreaker, more just a product of their early inexperience.
Those gripes, however, do not carry over to 2011’s Wildlife, one of the greatest records of the entire decade. While the album’s most iconic moments are its absolute heaviest (the three-track run of “King Park”, “Edward Benz, 27 Times”, and “I See Everything” is a goddamn emotional gut-punch), it also showcased La Dispute experimenting with greater atmosphere and brighter instrumentation, elements later expanded on with their incredibly underrated 2019 release Panorama.
Despite adoring this band’s previous output, La Dispute’s newest work No One Was Driving the Car might somehow be their best to date.
This project strikes a phenomenal balance between appeasing both the hardcore audience who wanted a return to their heavier days and the art-school hipsters who appreciated the more methodical, spacious production (hi, that’s me).
For those wishing La Dispute returned to more immediate heaviness, then act one is your holy grail, with the excellent “I Shaved My Head”, “Autofiction Detail”, and especially “Man With Hands and Ankles Bound”.
However the true standouts are “Environmental Catastrophe Film” and “Top-Sellers Banquet”: two eight-minute multi-part behemoths of tracks which both manage to create a cinematic scale without feeling overwrought or dragging. In my opinion, this makes front-to-back listens even more engaging without compromising the power of individual tracks, as each listen reveals new depths to the songwriting and emotional nuance.
Like most La Dispute albums, the lyrical content is what truly carries this project to absolute transcendence. Thematically, “No One Was Driving the Car” is a culmination of ideas found across La Dispute’s catalog. This album critiques the band’s own tendencies of creating narrators who aren’t active participants in their own stories by showing the danger of letting life pass by without making any choices yourself.
This framing is essential for the album’s central theme: the inevitability of time and the extent to which we can control how it's spent. Across the album’s runlength, you get snapshots of a life spent dormant, restless and unfulfilled.
Unfortunately, La Dispute are acutely aware that we cannot always control our own destinies. The album’s narrator is paralyzed into inaction by the weight of past traumas, which are recounted across “Steve”, “The Fields”, and “Environmental Catastrophe Film”: helping compound the anxiety-riddled climaxes of “I Dreamt of a Room with All My Friends I Could Not Get In” and “Top-Sellers Banquet.”
If you think the album is too much to process emotionally in just one sitting, you’d probably be right. There’s a reason why this album is broken into five distinct movements. Even with this fractured structure, each track builds on itself with flickers of memory, allowing the more detached observations to gain grounded emotional heft. The album perfectly captures an intimate scale with internal and intrapersonal conflicts while also addressing the systemic factors that only compound your own struggles.
No One Was Driving the Car might not be the most perfect album of 2025, but it is the most ME album of 2025 – written for me, about me, with music made for me and built to hurt me. It carries realizations and emotional beats I will cherish for my entire life, and is an absolute triumph of music as a medium, hour by hour by hour.