La Dispute are back with their most personal album for years: “I have always had a tendency toward the morbid and dramatic”

Rich, wide-screen opus, ‘Panorama’ is out now.

On fading Michigan evenings, somewhere between the cities of Grand Rapids and Lowell, and with the rhythmic rumble of tyres upon desolate tarmac, La Dispute frontman Jordan Dreyer would find himself whiling away the time by talking to his partner. Conversation encompassed the benign, but predominantly it resided around those stories that often lay forgotten at the side of the rough road; in annually laid bouquets of remembrance, or just a passing news story.

It was in these true-life tales that Jordan found salvation after the collapse of his band's first attempt at recording a full-length effort in late 2017, to follow up 2014's ‘Rooms of the House'. When creation wasn't coming, the band scrapped all they'd tirelessly worked on over the space of two months, leaving them with only a couple of short weeks to re-light the La Dispute fire.

While this extreme scenario was never entirely on the cards, the resolve with which Jordan talks about that potential speaks more truth.

What they love doing is creating vast epic soundscapes that call as easily to post-hardcore experimentation as they do lyrical psychological trappings. ‘Rooms of the House' built itself around the cinematic concept of a relationship, capitalised Kubrick-esque signposts included, but it's back in 2011 with ‘Wildlife' that ‘Panorama' really harks back.

It introduced Jordan's ability to snapshot an emotional, or traumatic, moment and create a vast cityscape from those words, all the way "down to the local news coverage," but ‘Panorama' dives even deeper to the personal aspect. "In some ways, it's like the synthesis of the last three records that we did - that's only just occurring to me now!" he chuckles.

"A lot of the stories I learned along that drive were ones I heard from my partner who lives outside of Grand Rapids. It was interesting to hear her recount her personal history, and the history of a particular local, not a major metropolitan area where these things happen so frequently that it's lost in the noise.