To commemorate the tenth anniversary of The War On Drugs' Lost In The Dream, we've put together a special long-form episode of The Super High Quality Podcast to tell the behind-the-scenes story of how the record was made. Between sessions in Hoboken and North Carolina, Adam Granduciel worked regularly with engineer Jeff Zeigler in Philly adding "paint" to a collection of songs that would be widely hailed as the band's first masterpiece on its release in March 2014. As the band st...

To commemorate the 10th Anniversary of The War On Drugs' 2014 album, Lost In The Dream, we've put together a special episode of the SHQ Podcast to tell the behind the scenes story of what it took to make the album. The full episode will be available on March 25th.

After a handful of North American festival dates in August, The War On Drugs headed out for their final run of shows in September and October 2022. As the band continued to refine their performances, the tour moved east to west, north to south across the US and Canada, and finally back to Austin TX where the tour had started in early January. An extraordinary and unbelievably rewarding year of touring finally concluded with a final show on Mt Tamalpais just north of San Francisco...

After returning to the US in late April 2022, The War On Drugs took a short break berore heading back out on an intense 7-week tour that took the band to Mexico, across the US, and back to Europe. After a massive show with The Strokes in Mexico City, the band returned to the US for a tour that concluded at Bonnaroo in June. They made a quick turnaround, and headed back to Europe for a show opening for The Rolling Stones in London, as well as run of mostly festival dates across Eur...

Following their 6-week run of shows across the US in January and February, The War On Drugs headed to Finland in mid-March 2022 to begin 6 weeks of shows across Europe. As one of the first international bands to tour overseas as pandemic-restrictions lifted, the band performed their epic full-production shows to enthusiastic audiences in 11 countries between March and April. The band recorded more Covid cases, but each time a band member went down, as had happened on their US to...

In January 2022, The War On Drugs kicked off a world tour in support of their latest album, I Don’t Live Here Anymore. At a time when there weren’t a lot of bands on the road as pandemic restrictions eased, TWOD packed multiple road cases with PPE and Covid tests, and headed to Austin TX to begin a six week tour of the US. After the 4th show, singer/guitarist Adam Granduciel tested positive for Covid, shows were cancelled, and the band and crew found themselves quarantined in Nort...

The War On Drugs have just announced a series of sold-out “Drugcember” benefit shows to take place on December 19, 20, and 21st at Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia. Proceeds from the shows will benefit The Fund for the School District of Philadelphia, a nonprofit that coordinates investment into the Philadelphia public schools. Adam and Dominic talk about the upcoming Drugcember shows, the band’s deep connection to Johnny Brenda’s, and their plans for a new season of the podcast to...

After 18 months apart, The War On Drugs were finally able to reconvene in person in the summer of 2021 ahead of their first scheduled live performances of the songs from their new album I Don’t Live Here Anymore. How does a band articulate the uniquely abstract collage of a studio album crafted partially in isolation during the pandemic? How will it feel to finally play music together in the same room? Who will play the cowbell l at the end of “I Don’t Wanna Wait”? We...

No one has been as instrumental in crafting the sound of The War On Drugs’ last two albums as Shawn Everett, the multi-Grammy-winner who has formed a remarkable studio partnership with band leader Adam Granduciel. Perfectly suited to handle all manner of explorations, detours, and deadline elasticity, Shawn and the band talk about their collective dedication to the process of making records, and the many ways their process informs the decisions and revisions it took to craft the final v...

Over the course of recording I Don’t Live Here Anymore, The War On Drugs continued their obsessive exploration of the recording process in sessions at some of NY and LA’s most prestigious studios. One standout session was the three weeks the band and an extended circle of collaborators and friends, spent at Hollywood’s Electro Vox in the spring of 2019. A favorite of the band because it provides access to an outrageous palette of gear that playfully challenged the group’s experime...

Over 5 days in March 2018, during a short break in the band’s heavy touring schedule, Adam Granduciel took bassist Dave Hartley and multi-instrumentalist Anthony LaMarca to an Upstate New York studio. Decamping to Outlier Studios with Philadelphia friend and engineer Nick Krill, the four quickly realized that the session was becoming more productive than a typical demo session. With the added focus provided by the remote setting (immortalized on the cover of the new album I Don’t ...

Four years since their last studio album, The War On Drugs have just released I Don’t Live Here Anymore, the follow-up to their Grammy-winning best rock album A Deeper Understanding. Season 2 of the Super High Quality Podcast is a four-part audio documentary that tells the story of the players, studios, engineers, songcraft, and happy accidents that define the 10 songs on the band’s new album. Told through casual conversations with band members and their collaborators, and featur...

With studio sessions put on hold and their new studio album postponed, The War On Drugs decided instead to release LIVE DRUGS. In Part 4 of The Super High Quality Podcast the band members share their individual experiences under lockdown and the ways the experience informed the decision to punctuate this point in The War On Drugs’ history with the release of a live album. From sanitizer-insanity to anticipation for a return to live performance with “David Lee Roth kicks”, the ban...

Perhaps no song in The War On Drugs’ catalog embodies the “sound” of the band as much as “Under The Pressure”. Part 3 of The Super High Quality Podcast, digs deep inside this ambient journey. From the improvised sonic stew that developed into an alternative song intro, to the iconic sample drop, through to the tension and release created by the mid-song breakdown, and culminating in the indelible image of the illuminated audience when the song kicks back in for the driving two-ch...

Connecting with a classic Warren Zevon album after relocating to Los Angeles where the band was recording 2017’s Grammy-winning A Deeper Understanding, Adam Granduciel presented Zevon’s classic “Accidentally Like A Martyr” as a song the band might try to cover. In Part 2 of The Super High Quality Podcast, The band discusses in painful detail, a less than auspicious debut performance for a private LA audience which happened to include the song’s original producer, Jackson Browne.&n...

“Eyes To The Wind” was a standout track on The War On Drugs’ 2014 album Lost In The Dream and quickly became a crowd favorite during its live shows. In Part 1 of our Super High Quality Podcast, the band tries to dissect exactly how the arrangement was reinvented when leader Adam Granduciel pushed the band to find their way through a somewhat spontaneous new acoustic version onstage in Copenhagen in 2017. Possibly the result of questionable venue catering, and certainly inspired by...

In a year without concerts, The War On Drugs are set to release LIVE DRUGS on their own Super High Quality Records. In this podcast, guitar tech and band confidant, Dominic East, listens as the band talks casually about how they arrived at the performances and the decision to release their new live album.