La Dispute Share Three-Track Act IV From Upcoming Album 'No One Was Driving The Car'
Tuesday, 05 August 2025
Written by Jon Stickler
Photo: Martin
La Dispute have shared three new tracks.
Top-Sellers Banquet, Saturation Diver, and I Dreamt Of a Room With All My Friends make up Act IV of 'No One Was Driving The Car', their first album in six years, which is set for release on September 5 via Epitaph Records.
The album is heavily inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, and the opening track of Act IV, Top-Sellers Banquet, draws directly from the film's powerful levitation scene. Vocalist Jordan Dreyer explained:
“The next act was heavily inspired by a particular scene in First Reformed, where the film’s two primary characters connect through a ritual of remembrance and comfort, traveling beyond their plane of reality into some otherworldly beyond. The record’s spiritual/metaphysical event happens here, in the middle of a banquet held by the multi-level marketing company mentioned in the fourth song from the prior act in celebration of their fiscal year’s highest performers.
"After a welcome speech, and while the provided entertainment (ballet dancers accompanied by a small orchestra) begins between tables on the floor, a sudden flash of light occurs, an indescribable sound accompanying it, and light begins to fall through the hall’s high ceilings down, focused only on the non-employees in attendance (the dancers, the servers, the players, valets), at which point they begin to rise impossibly skyward, leaving the others invited attendees and higher ups behind.
"The narrator returns in the next song, discussing again the slow dissociation mentioned heavily in act one, through the image of a saturation diver tangled in his oxygen line. He realises he remains on earth after the “rapture” of the previous track passes, and reflects again on the journey taken to arrive there, alone and un-beamed up.
"We return home in the final entry of the penultimate block, in the midst of his unaddressed malaise and disintegration. The self-examination concludes in self-loathing and collapse—his partner preparing to leave, his desperate pleas unheeded, all of life and comfort broken in unfixable ways—by his own failure to address and correct. we’re left with, effectively, the narrator lamenting some combination of control he never had and control he failed to establish. He pleas for the chance to correct, to be given one more opportunity to not just push back against odds stacked against him (and all of us), but to most of all recognise and care for what, despite everything, has given him security and meaning."
Act IV also arrives with a video for Saturation Diver, which offers up a minimalist, storytelling approach with spoken word vocals. Head below to view the accompanying video, directed and edited by bassist Adam Vass during the band's recent run of European tour dates.
Previously, the Michigan five-piece revealed the five-song Act III from the record, featuring the track Sibling Fistfight at Mom's Fiftieth/The Un-sound and its accompanying video, directed, filmed and edited by Dreyer. That followed Act II, which included the near nine-minute song Environmental Catastrophe Film, and Act I, featuring I Shaved My Head, Man with Hands and Ankles Bound, and Autofiction Detail.
Each act comes paired with a companion documentary, with Chapter I, Chapter II, and Chapter III available to watch now. Chapter IV is on the way.
The band will tour North America in September. Head here for details. Tickets are on sale now.
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