La Dispute – Man with Hands and Ankles Bound

After a six-year hiatus, La Dispute has returned with “Man with Hands and Ankles Bound,” one of three tracks from the first act of their upcoming album “No One Was Driving The Car,” set for release September 5th via Epitaph.

This self-produced album draws inspiration from Paul Schrader’s 2017 psychological thriller “First Reformed” and explores themes of control, dissociation, and technological alienation. The album’s title itself comes from a police officer’s quote about a fatal Tesla self-driving car crash that vocalist Jordan Dreyer encountered in a news article.

“Man with Hands and Ankles Bound” forms the middle part of a three-song narrative arc that begins with “I Shaved My Head” and concludes with “Autofiction Detail.” Dreyer explains that these songs follow a character experiencing a night in crisis: “It begins with a man examining his own slow dissociation from himself… then shifts through a neighbor’s open window to a conversation about control and desire, framed via the image of a man seen through it: bound on the floor with a woman standing before him, presumably a sex worker.”

The track features La Dispute’s trademark intense post-hardcore sound with Dreyer’s poetic, exploring the protagonist’s psychological struggle to reconnect with desires “severed by time, self, and circumstance.”