Interview: The War On Drugs

The new War On Drugs album might only have been three years in the making but it feels like longer, perhaps because the band’s former sparring partner Kurt Vile has posted a couple of records in the meantime. And, in fact, for those three years Drugs mainman Adam Granduciel has been grinding away continuously, waging something of a war to bring Slave Ambient kicking and screaming into the light.

“I was learning to build songs up from sounds, creating a backbone from tones and samples and going from there,” he says. “It’s difficult, because you don’t get that instant gratification of starting a song and then finishing it two or three days later. It can get pretty dark [working that way], but actually by the end it became this beautiful process.”

For a record that could easily have come burdened with the fusty smack of studio pedantry and ambition that got lost somewhere along the way (some of the material is now up to half a decade old), Slave Ambient is one magical trip. Full of beautiful, big-sky longing, it builds intuitively on the Dylan-in-space vibes of their lauded debut from what seems a lifetime ago, Wagonwheel Blues.

That record was cut with Kurt Vile as a de facto full-time member of the band, but even though the pair have ostensibly gone their separate ways in terms of recorded output, there’s still an exhilarating, restless freedom at both artists’ core that’s reflected in tracks like the tender, weary ‘I Was There’ and the solipsistic, scorched-earth krautrock of ‘Your Love Is Calling My Name’.

The War on Drugs – “Come to the City” (Official Music Video) from Urban Outfitters on Vimeo.

“I think when Wagonwheel… came out and we were touring a lot, that’s where Kurt understood that he needed to devote his time to the music he’d been working on for five, six years,” says Granduciel. “But I was never surprised — I just knew he wasn’t gonna tour extensively. I think it took the weight off him a little to know I was cool with that. And I think it surprised him when I didn’t stop playing with him.”

With his friend largely out of the picture, Granduciel was left to put flesh on his sound-skeletons at home alone in Philly, before studio sessions in Dallas yielded frustrating results. Further work on the songs Granduciel had stashed away failed to produce the “grand” sound he was after for the second album proper, so a bunch of tracks (several of which wound up on Slave… in different form) were rounded up for an EP, ‘Future Weather’, whose release gave him the “ability to just breathe for a minute and figure out the scope of the record”. There was, of course, a second advantage to be had from all this.

“There was definitely some pressure [from the label], because even after Dallas, which was December 2009, I was like, ‘Yeah I’ll get the record to you by January 2010.’ Then suddenly it was April. So it was good for them, because they knew I was being painstakingly obsessive. But after that I think they were like, ‘Okay, you gotta buckle down and finish this,’ ’cos they knew it was there. They knew I was close!”

For all the pain and ecstasy of freedom The War On Drugs’ music seems to revel in, it’s good to know Granduciel still knows the value of a deadline.

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Read our review of Slave Ambient here

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