Shayan Afzal

So, The War on Drugs. A name that, at first glance, suggests something jagged, aggressive, maybe even confrontational—a punk band, a basement scene, something brief and relentless. And yet, the music is none of those things. It moves in waves, long and hypnotic, a kind of shimmering, endless highway sprawl where the road is always wet from some unseen rain and the lights ahead stretch farther than they should. There’s no immediacy, no hook designed to grab you by the collar. Instead, the songs unfold, expand, repeat, change without ever quite announcing the change.

Hearing them for the first time wasn’t an event, exactly. There was no singular moment of impact, no revelation at the chorus, no precise second where something clicked into place. It was more like standing in the undertow, realizing only later that the shore is gone. A live video—some festival, some city, somewhere—and Adam Granduciel with a Telecaster, coaxing these long, burning leads out of an instrument that, in lesser hands, can be sharp, brittle, almost clinical. But here, it was something else entirely, something molten and alive, shifting between control and abandon. Not the bombast of a guitar hero, no theatrical flourishes, but a steady, insistent reach toward something just out of sight.

And then the voice. Not an imitation of Dylan, but something shaped by the same wind, the same dust. The phrasing, the drawn-out vowels, the way certain words seem to curl at the edges before dissolving completely. Springsteen lingers in the bones of these songs too—not just in the sound but in their architecture, the sense of momentum, the way they make vast, open spaces feel personal, interior.

The first song to register, to pull itself apart from the blur of the setlist, was I Don’t Live Here Anymore. It was already playing before I realized I was listening. Then Pain, a title that requires no explanation, and Thinking of a Place, which stretches past eleven minutes and still doesn’t feel long enough. The structure of these songs is deceptive. At first, they seem built on repetition, the same progressions cycling again and again, but then something shifts—the chords break open, a synth line drifts into focus, a single phrase takes on new weight.

For a long time, nothing had done this. Not just the sound, but the feeling—the sensation of inhabiting a song rather than merely listening to it. Music that doesn’t merely accompany a mood but creates one, reshapes it, gives it dimensions that weren’t there before. A long drive, a city at night, a sense of movement even while standing still. Some bands take weeks to settle in. This one already feels lived-in, worn at the edges, something that belongs not to memory but to the space just before it—those hours or days before an experience is named, before it hardens into a story.

It made me want to pick up my guitar again—not out of ambition, not to chase skill or speed, but to trace that feeling, however clumsily. To find my own way into the atmosphere they’ve carved out, where emotion doesn’t need to announce itself loudly to be heard. There’s a quiet urgency to their songs, a longing wrapped in reverb and delay, and it speaks in a language I didn’t know I already understood.

It’s not just that I like their music. It’s that I feel seen by it. Understood in some inarticulate, subconscious way. These songs sound like how my memories feel—dimly lit, strangely warm, always in motion. They remind me that music can still move me without asking for permission, that something as simple as a chord held too long or a lyric barely sung can still undo me.

And in a world that so often demands immediacy, clarity, certainty—The War on Drugs gives me permission to drift. To not know. To just listen.