It's been six years since La Dispute released their last album, Panorama. Since then, the Michigan post-hardcore band-made up of Jordan Dreyer on vocals, Brad Vander Lugt on drums, Chad Morgan-Sterenberg and Corey Stroffolino on guitar, and Adam Vass on bass-dealt with the stagnance of the pandemic, celebrated the ten-year anniversaries of Wildlife and Rooms Of The House, and began working on No One Was Driving The Car. The fifth studio LP is the first entirely produced by the group, and it came together in Grand Rapids and Detroit, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines: "I think the change in environment was really helpful to breathing new life into the process each time we came back to it," Dreyer says.
Anchored in the charmingly warm vocal presence that McNown partly honed by busking at the beach in Southern California just a few years ago, Night Diving (The Cost of Growing Up) takes the latter half of it's title from a gorgeously textured track that perfectly exemplifies his newly refined sound. With it's rootsy and ethereal instrumentation-luminous steel guitar, lush mandolin, soulful organ-"The Cost of Growing Up" arrives as a clear-eyed but melancholy meditation on the inevitability of pain.
