La Dispute - Here, Hear IV (Colored Vinyl)

Sky Blue and Mint Green. Here, Hear is an ongoing creative series born in 2007 as a way to deepen understanding of themes and ideas present in proper album releases through added musical and lyrical context for listeners interested in small peeks behind the songwriting curtain.

Changing forms, approaches, and mediums periodically throughout it's history, the current iteration of the project exists as creative writing prompts introduced and followed by one individual member before being passed along to the others one by one for contribution in a sort of musical game of telephone. The end results are songs written and recorded layer by layer, member by member, all around a central suggestion or restriction, discussed at length on Patreon and via recorded podcast conversations dissecting the experience.

The most recent entry, titled "16," began with a prompt from bass player Adam Vass called "This Song Will Self-Destruct" where contributing members were challenged to "break" something periodically as the composition progressed. The final product is what you hear: five musicians who took five different approaches to self-destruction, for a host of different reasons, and a song that slowly degrades as it heads toward it's end, though it remains fully listenable despite the nature of the prompt.

In partnership with Here, Hear, the last few years have seen the introduction of a new writing exercise called MEANTIME, which flip La Dispute's standard music-first approach to songcraft in favor of entries constructed by individual instrumentalists around spoken vocal recordings. Born from a desire to remain creatively engaged while apart during COVID shutdown, MEANTIME songs are poems before songs, words written and recorded that come to life sonically only when passed from vocalist Jordan Dreyer to one of the band's musicians for structure, texture, and mood.