Sleepless, flame-out anxiety ivies the narrative of Adam Ganduciel – front-man of Philadelphia-hailing sonic-sculptors The War on Drugs. The obsessive architect has openly touched on how a sudden personal downfall – flanked by isolation and paranoia, inspired elemental crusher ‘Lost in the Dream’, but has also alluded to how he’s still figuring out what happened to him, and is continuing to happen. Slow and mountainous, the painted sky of ‘Strangest Thing’, the third cut from the band’s upcoming fourth effort ‘A Deeper Understanding’, aims to diffuse some of these tensions. Blooming in slow-motion, the groove-laden track wanders open-heart until finally struck by Heaven’s sprawl, as Granduciel questions whether he’s simply living between beauty and pain, only to offer word-less answers in the form of towering guitar-solos. ‘Strangest Thing’ gifts an extension of ‘Lost In The Dream’s instrumental fluidity – bridging night-drive ambience with flyover-state Americana, but where the band’s breakthrough leaned on self-deprecation and internal fog, ‘Strangest Thing’ sees Granduciel fading into the physical world – torn between his known landscape and the unexplored.
‘Strangest Thing’ is taken from the band’s upcoming album ‘A Deeper Understanding’ due out 25th August 2017 via Secretly Canada.
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Music Journalism student and lover of all things sensory and cosmic.
