La Dispute

Today, conceptual band La Dispute announce their No One Was Driving the Car Australian headline tour, which will be hitting our shores October 2026. La Dispute will be promoting their latest album No One Was Driving The Car, released in September of 2025 via Epitaph Records.

Australian headline tour, which will be hitting our shores October 2026. La Dispute will be promoting their latest album No One Was Driving The Car, released in September of 2025 via Epitaph Records.

This show is all ages / licensed all ages, harping back to the roots of La Dispute, as vocalist Jordan Dreyer explains;

"All of us were underage when we first started going to local shows at home in West Michigan, and still when attending them pushed us to start writing music together and playing our own. Without venues that were accessible to us, both as attendees and performers, the entire endeavour might’ve died on the vine, and we’d have lost out not only on an important creative outlet as young people, but a welcoming community too. Understanding that possibility, it’s been a priority always to keep our doors open to all comers where possible, so that anyone—including (or especially, really) younger people— have the same opportunities afforded to us at a crucial age."

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.

Self produced and heavily inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, No One Was Driving The Car grapples with malaise in the shadow of the looming apocalypse, which has noticeably been worsened by the advancement of tech. The title comes from a quote from a police officer vocalist Jordan Dreyer read in a news article about a lethal selfdriving Tesla crash, an absurd event which raises questions about the amount of control we have in our own lives.

Dryer expands “it felt apt as metaphor then (increasingly so since), not just for contemporary life generally, but for so many responses to it: how each of us thrust unwillingly and chaotically alive, to hurtle down some road toward death, look amidst uncertainty for faith someone or something outside ourselves helps steer the way.” Throughout the album, screens and cameras disrupt moments of transcendence. It happens alongside flashes of mundane suffering—frequent daydreams of drowning,

flashbacks to eye-contact with dead animals, experiences of decaying relationships and secondhand suicides—while Dreyer yells with a more primal sense and sings in a more refined way, and the guitars have a sharper edge than ever before.

Listen to No None Was Driving The Car.

Fashioning music that is free and independent of hierarchy, Special Features from Meanjin/Brisbane operates without a single focal point, rotating lead vocal duties and embracing an unapologetic barrage of noise. Their live performance is more a raucous group therapy session with heads pressed against amps, sweat on the walls, and voices forging release. Having quickly earned attention across Australia, sharing stages with acts like Bad Dreems and DZ Deathrays, Special Features are building a reputation for shows that feel as liberating as they are explosive. Their debut album is set for release in 2026.