When Jordan Dreyer pitched his idea for the new La Dispute record to his bandmates, he knew it was it was his most ambitious and cinematic to date. "I thought everyone was gonna have an aneurysm," he recalls and smiles.

His pitch: a 19-track narrative unfolding over five acts, set in their hometown of Grand Rapids. Inspired by 'First Reformed', the psychological thriller from fellow Grand Rapids native Paul Schrader, the album would explore stories steeped in unease and a looming societal collapse.

He already had the title: 'No One Was Driving The Car', pulled from a news story of a fatal crash involving a self-driving car. "I've known the title of every record well before we started working on them," he says. "That's the first thing that clicks."

Instead of resistance, his bandmates were all in. After years away and pandemic downtime, every member was eager to dive in, bringing their own ideas to the blueprint Jordan had laid out.

"I think it was just really a really good reset for us, unexpectedly," Jordan reflects, looking back at the enforced break the pandemic offered.

"When I pitched the concept for the record and we started writing, I think we all felt a momentum, an ease, we haven't had in a long time. It just felt fun again to follow impulse and to have the ability to be together and write."

That creative momentum only deepened as they returned with back-to-back tours celebrating their 2011 album 'Wildlife' worldwide, followed by a more intimate run for 10 years of 'Rooms of the House'. Revisiting those albums was a reminder of how the band had matured and how, by their own admission, they had overthought their last album, 'Panorama.'

"Anniversary tours helped us remember the ways we've approached things previously," Jordan remarks. The realisation was that chasing constant reinvention was limiting them from being as urgent, reactive as they were when they were a younger band.

He adds, "We felt that level of unimpeded excitement and enthusiasm," as he reflects on how those shows translated to their approach in the studio. Rediscovering a lack of doubt and a recklessness, they entered the studio with the aim of making an album that would be all-encompassing of La Dispute.

There was no time for that enthusiasm to dissipate as they followed each run of shows with studio time tagged on to the trips to England, Australia and the Philippines and back home in Michigan, too. "We were off to isolate from the comforts of home. We were really just hyper-fixated on writing.

"I think that was a big part of keeping up momentum. That gave us space to process and decompress and think about what we'd done and then come back together and spend ten days in the Philippines just holed up in a rehearsal studio and eating together and going home to our hotel at night and sleeping and then getting back to it for ten hours the next day," Jordan explains.

Inside the studio, every member pushed their limits, but Jordan's vocal performances, in particular, were stretched to new extremes. "My primary focus remains saying what I feel I need to say in an interesting way, and usually it's going through a track the first time when I'm like, 'All right, let's just do some full passes and see how I feel about it', and then go, 'Oh fuck! This is a lot of words'. And I'm really going for it too.

He laughs and adds, "There's not a lot of holding back. I love tracking. I love recording vocals. I think part of the fun is the stress on my body and having the ability to override it because I'm so focussed on capturing what I want to capture, and it pushes you to another level.'

"It was very physically taxing at times this record to just go, 'No, let's do another take. Let's do another take', even when I'm just fucking spent and take five minutes to sit and drink water and then just try to yell as loud as I possibly can and it's worth it when you get to that one where you're like, 'Oh shit! That was it. That's gonna be on the record'.

They kept the creative process intentionally insular, working as a tight-knit unit without external interference; just the five of them, working from a foundation of deep trust. "We know each other better than anybody else. It's a family. These are the people that I've spent more time around in my life than anyone."

"There's no consideration but the value you place on the opinion of somebody who you admire as a musician and as a person and who you understand knows you extraordinarily well," he considers.

Alas, 'No One Was Driving The Car' is not 19 tracks, it's 14, but it is anything but pared-down. It's sprawling, layered and remains fully committed to its narrative vision. "There was a lot of structural stuff that ended up not making the record," Jordan explains.

"The record happens in five acts and there are some little intermediary pieces, some sound clips and things that on the record that eventually were meant to be larger pieces."

"We have samples on this record in a way that we've never done, and we had designs on using some of those between tracks as opposed to enclosed in tracks. We wanted to do a little bit of both, but having two to three-minute soundscapy things to bring you from one act to the next to signify some change in the structure of the record.

"There were a couple of other points that were meant to be additional tracks that we decided pretty early on in the studio we'd save to the end if we had time and see how they went but that felt in the moment that they might require a bit more work than was worth investing with the limited amount of recording time. And, as the record went on, I think we all started to understand that those tracks weren't necessary and that we had already built the pieces that we needed to accomplish the final single piece."

Still, what remains is vast and exacting, unflinching in its scale yet sharp in its intention. Two tracks eclipse eight minutes while showcasing the band's willingness to go deeper, stretch further than ever before. As Jordan mentioned, the samples add an extra dimension, particularly in the final acts. "This record is very heavy on our home and, in an effort to build that world, we looked for source material even before audio.

"I did some digging for information on the history of our hometown so that I could include details that would flesh it out to the listener. We ended up all going to the library and, with the help of some very good archivists in our hometown library, found a lot of old audio cassettes that were effectively all oral history; just conversations with people who lived in previous decades about what their lives were like in Grand Rapids. From stories of people immigrating from the Netherlands to people in the 50s and 60s, and the really long sermon at the end of one of the tracks in the fourth act is actually one that Chad found in his parents' basement," Jordan explains.

The inclusion of these archival elements adds to the immersive and cinematic quality of the record. Though inspired by a film, the vision and approach to the whole album was to make it feel like a piece of cinema, just without the hardware. As a writer often known for his literary reference points, it was a detour in approach from Jordan.

"A very intentional decision from the outset was to try to make this record an act of film making as much as you can without a camera. It was intentional this time around to have this be our cinema record. And part of the function of having many transitional pieces in the track listing originally was to try to use these as ways to cue in to the world of film without an actual visual medium to accompany it."

While La Dispute has explored cinematic storytelling in songs like 'King Park', this album amplifies that narrative ambition through more deliberate filmmaking references. "It's particularly prevalent on this record because I think that life feels increasingly as though we're watching it through the lens of a camera," Jordan justifies.

Yet for all its cinematic framing, it remains Jordan's lens of a world that is becoming increasingly volatile and confusing. "It's difficult to exist in a world in which many forces beyond your control enact upon you against your will, and making sense of that experience is the most human thing. I think we all do it every day. We're all trying to figure out how to feel content and more or less in control of who we are and where we go, and that's the record itself, and I think that's the story, ultimately, I felt I needed to tell," he explains.

From the uncertainty of its opening to the resignation of the final act, the album needed its full weight and scale to tell that story fully. By the final act, there's a shift. Some green shoots of hope in amongst the foreboding shadows. It comes from accepting "the duality of existence", Jordan says. There is good. There is bad. With that awareness comes a fragile but necessary hope. "Find what allows you to push against the despair and remain hopeful despite the realities in which we live," he states.

Now, with the album finished and on the eve of its release, what remains is a profound sense of pride for the work itself and the people who made it. Jordan repeatedly puts on record how proud his of his bandmates for embracing the concept, challenging one another and executing the vision so brilliantly.

On a personal level, he adds, "I'm more proud of the writing on this record than I ever have been. I think that I really remembered that I am capable of doing it after some years where I felt pretty lost on a personal and creative level. It was a big confidence boost."

Alongside the pride also comes a complex grief, too. "There's a mourning period where you've invested much time and creative energy into doing this thing that when you finish and you listen back and you're excited and then it sets in that it's gone from you," he admits.

Considering the physical and emotional burden of pulling off an album like this one, he adds, "You're grieving in a sense because the process itself isn't necessarily fun."

He compares it to dying. Or a child going off to college. Neither of which, he notes, he's experienced yet. "I felt pretty down after finishing and realising it was done and then I don't really feel any sense of having processed that grief until it starts coming out and then you feel like you're hearing the songs again for the first time in a way you're able to step back and think of them as something you've accomplished and not something that you've let go."

That release, creatively, physically and emotionally, is now on the horizon and with it comes La Dispute's biggest album to date. 'No One Was Driving The Car' is their cinematic reckoning with a world feeling like it is rapidly veering off course. Yet, amid the disarray, the band delivers a bold, cohesive vision. It is La Dispute at their conceptual best. It's a masterclass in narrative construction, pulled off by Jordan Dreyer, who, despite everything, kept both hands firmly on the wheel.