Post-hardcore outfit La Dispute of Grand Rapids, Mich. have announced their fourth album Panorama and shared the project’s opening two tracks, “Rose Quartz” and “Fulton Street I.” The songs come with an animated video by Sarah Schmidt, who illustrates frontman Jordan Dreyer’s spoken meditation on the labor of grief with a surreal plot following a potentially paranormal deer.
Dreyer told NPR Music that the two-track piece, the first music written on the new record, was inspired by a drive he used to make with his partner from Grand Rapids to Lowell, Mich.:
“Rose Quartz” is a bright white light, then the low hum of tires on a country highway; “Fulton Street I” is two heads in the car turning quietly at passing landmarks, plywood monuments with plastic flowers and the stories that populate the stretch of road between two places. Together, they’re the first two tracks on a record born from long drives like that, between a new and an old home, that takes a wide-angled shot of a city and just outside of it. How events there linger on in the memory of all those involved, carrying the characters off in thoughts of grief and healing to other planes and other histories.
The album was co-produced by Philadelphia producer Will Yip (Tigers Jaw, Title Fight, Turnstile), who also re-amped the band’s guitars on last month’s 10th anniversary reissue of their debut album Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair. The new LP will be released on March 22 via Epitaph. You can pre-order various physical bundles of Panorama here.
Listen to “Rose Quartz” and “Fulton Street I” below.
