Is La Dispute good?

This is the longest thing I've written since high school

I hit the Daze Tour in Pittsburgh on April 2nd. It was a great time. I got to meet Eli Enis irl and explore Preserving Underground, a super cool DIY venue with tons of awesome stuff that I’ll probably talk about some other time. On the way home, I was burnt on heavy music and looking for something lighter. I decided to go down a post-hardcore rabbit hole.

From like 2007-2011, I was gradually pulled towards subculture, following the trail of M&M’s that led from hearing CFNY play Attack in Black and Alexisonfire on drive time radio to interviewing Matt from Foxmoulder at a house venue called Skramden Yards. My awakening coincided with a singular era in underground music history. Lots was happening, and with the advent of Web 2.0 social media, it mingled together in a confusing but charming way.

I floated around the milieu, eventually landing on the new “wave” of post-hardcore that took a decidedly more DIY and literate bent than the Devil Wears Pradas and Dance Gavin Dances who’d somehow inherited the genre from good bands of the 90’s and early 2000’s. My favourite “wave” band was La Dispute, a painfully earnest and polarizing group from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Calling early La Dispute formative to my involvement in subculture is a massive understatement. Yet like much of the music I loved at the time, I don’t revisit it. There might be some shame tied up in that. The band did everything with an air of pretence, which is easy to make fun of when it doesn’t land or age well. We’ve all seen the meme of a guy on an e-bike yelling at his soon to be ex-lover captioned “this is what La Dispute sounds like”.

It isn’t wrong, either. La Dispute, at its worst, is sappy, overwrought and bordering on disingenuous. That much I remembered. Still, they were massively popular and played shows with bands who aged well. So, I set out to determine if La Dispute were, in fact, worth revisiting.

Funny enough, when I got home from Pittsburgh and imported the latest stems to edit Violent Treatment (the podcast Eli does with Hugo Reyes) I discovered the boys dedicated their entire new episode to “the wave”. They raise a lot of valid questions that I’ll expand on a bit.

Back to the hills of Western Pennsylvania. I should have started my La Dispute listening journey chronologically, but I didn’t feel like diving into a 2006 CD-only EP after two straight days of nothing but Balmora and Speed Plans. I started with my personal entry point, the 2008 album Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair.

The record opens with “Such Small Hands”. For anyone passingly familiar with La Dispute, this is the song you’ve heard. Discovering the band through this is like being introduced to Soundgarden via “Spoonman”. It’s an iconic track, and not entirely divorced from their overall sound. At the same time, nobody would show you this if they were trying to put you on.

It’s kind of corny. Opening a debut album like this is a real statement. You’re either in or you’re out. When I first heard this in 2010, I was all the way in, though I can’t blame anyone who wrote the band off from it.

In fact, on this listen, the first 2.5 tracks on Somewhere affirmed my hypothesis that La Dispute was indeed wack dogshit we rightfully left in 2011. I felt the songs were overly heartfelt, but in this fake, warrior poet kind of way that I certainly don’t have time for in 2025. Then the bridge of track three hit and it became hard to deny that if nothing else, the band had riffs.

In fact, buddy blowing his vocal cords out over some stompy noodling goes kind of hard. Missing Link aficionados might not find much on this record, but a couple parts should induce stink-face in the average hardcore fan. These songs are dangerously long, but the payoff is often worth it to some degree.

The lyrics are hit or miss, as one would expect from a 24-year-old bookworm going through a breakup. Some ideas land, but a few moments of execution feel too forced. At least there’s narrative and thematic consistency beyond the typical “fuck you, backstabber” hardcore tropes. Storytelling is something vocalist Jordan Dreyer delves deep into over the course of the band, and aside from a few excursions into absolute histrionics, this record is a good first crack at it.

Overall, Somewhere is an excellent snapshot of the period — overly serious art school kids who, despite their best efforts, keep things engaging with enough good music to offset the cringe. Why they thought it would be a good idea to inject relatively effective hardcore riffing with hand-claps, maracas and country western noodling is beyond me, but I totally get how a 19-year-old with zero motion would consider this creative brilliance. Show it to me even two years later and I don’t know if I’m on board, but it’s excellent gateway music for freshmen journalism students and other bookish teenagers.

The band released tons of stuff between Somewhere and their 2011 follow-up, Wildlife, but I wasn’t trying to fiddle with Spotify every 12 minutes while traversing the hellscape between Erie and Buffalo, so I went right to their second album.

Wildlife is decidedly less hardcore, with ambitious chord progressions, a few jazz-inspired rhythms and no mosh riffs. I was trying to pin down its genre after hearing the heavy bass break at the end of track two. You know what I decided? This is real Midwest emo.

Let’s turn around on I-90 and head west for a few paragraphs. The term “Midwest emo” has been so thoroughly bastardized in my opinion to mean American Football and a bunch of pop punk bands from New Jersey who try to rip off the “Never Meant” riff. Why any band from Philadelphia (let alone California) would be given that title confounds me.

When I first attended shows Midwest emo was a living, breathing thing, not a “Tik Tok meme” as Wikipedia suggests it is in the 2020s. The twinkly sound was pretty codified and everyone knew where it came from, but when La Dispute was a DIY band there was much more going on in the Midwest than braying pussies playing math rock riffs on capo’d acoustic guitars.

LISTEN TO THIS SHIT IT’S BASICALLY PROTO-WILDLIFE

I didn’t hear it at the time, but in 2025 Wildlife sounds like a product of adolescence spent watching bands like Bear Vs Shark and The Reptilian play random college town basements. It’s more accessible and ironically, indebted to some of that classic East Coast screamo (especially deeper into the album) but hearing this record gives me the listless feeling of being cramped in a local practice space watching corn-fed cretins from out of town play derivative versions of records passed down from their older siblings.

I know I sound 100 years old, and even back then if you told someone you liked Midwest emo they’d probably assume you meant the twinkly stuff. Still, records like this are why I will never divorce the Midwest from “Midwest emo.” Because in 2010 if any members of Michigan’s travelling emo circus came to a condemned DIY “venue” near you, they were as likely to play something akin to Wildlife as anything else.

In my opinion this is top of the pops for that era and sound. Obviously it’s a bit more accessible than some of the cult favourites, but that’s kind of what makes it good. These songs were written to resonate emotionally, and at their best, they succeed. Dreyer’s gift/curse of supremely understandable vocals helped his poetic musings reach the Tumblr audience, catapulting La Dispute well past the confines of Michigan DIY. On the flip side, his voice leaves his words naked to the sands of time.

While other bands shrouded their melodrama in yelps, La Dispute shoved their vocalist to the front. His lyrics are central to not only understanding but enjoying the music, so wherever they go, the band follows. The end of “Safer in the Forest/Love Song for Poor Michigan” comes across preachy. Not in a sanctimonious way, but a “four score and seven years ago” way, which is so foreign to 2025 underground music that it feels more like Hamilton than hardcore. If the lyrics ever feel fake or forced, the song starts to fall apart.

I thought that’s how I’d feel about King Park on this listen. In isolation, the trademark refrain “can I still get into heaven if I kill myself” feels like peak Tumblr hysterics. What I always forget about this song, and by extension both La Dispute and the scene they came from, is that these dudes were talented writers. For all the corniness of literary-themed bands and waifish men gushing with sincerity onstage, lyrics were integral to this entire wave of post-hardcore. When they hit, they hit hard.

My younger self predictably resonated most with “King Park’s” climax — the kid’s come to Jesus moment where he earnestly begs forgiveness for a mortal sin. This time, what got me was the narrator floating back in time, trying to find a reason for the senseless violence and coming up short. The lyrics “for ruins wrapped in gold”, in the context of the album, highlight the bleakness of American poverty almost perfectly.

So perfectly bleak, in fact, that when “King Park” finished and the next song (about an old guy getting stabbed by his son) started, I had to turn the record off so the border guard didn’t think I was smuggling chopped onions into Canada.

I WAS AT THIS SHOW!

The album trends downhill from there anyways. Overall, a 57-minute screamo missive about Midwestern economic collapse and dying children is hard to swallow in one go. That was my criticism even in 2011 when I listened to Wildlife daily. I don’t know what I’d cut. Every song contains pertinent portions of the album’s story, but realistically it should be 10-15 minutes shorter. The last two tracks feel like punishment. Not because they’re bad, just because they’re not that good.

Overall, though, I’d encourage anyone who liked this at the time to circle back. It mostly holds up and serves as an excellent snapshot of what that era was all about. Would I recommend it in earnest to my under-25 hardcore friends? Not likely, although some of them are budding into little skramos, and my fingers are crossed hoping they’ll discover it.

The band lost me in 2014 with their next major release, Rooms of the House. This is the era where the entire non-heavy hardcore scene decided they wanted to either write “shoegaze” or rip off Interpol, and I practically dropped out in frustration.

Keep in mind, my intro to hardcore ran concurrently with the rise of “hey ho (stomp clap)” music. Embracing punk’s earnest anger was my direct reaction to the post-post-ironic hipster horseshit that devolved into cellphone commercial jingles for coked-out fake hippies. My favourite bands ripping off and canonizing Pitchfork-approved music disgusted me.

2013 was a rough year. Prominent frontpeople started gushing about The National in interviews. Kyle from Pianos Become the Teeth started singing (although tbh this song kinda goes). Daylight stopped sounding like Hot Water Music and dropped what I considered at the time to be the most boring album in human history. Tiger’s Jaw “broke up” so bro could become a SoundCloud rapper. Shit was cooked.

I held out hope that Rooms of the House would make up for all that nonsense. While I didn’t hate the record, it trended in an unwanted direction and I never spent much time with it.

On this listen (a few days after my Pittsburgh trip) I felt the more adventurous parts were the best ones. “Woman (in mirror)” might be a top five La Dispute song, and it’s easier to enjoy than some of their more iconic tracks at my age. “Objects in Space” is a compelling story that tackles heartbreak with a type of humour the band’s early work is notoriously bereft of. Dreyer struggles to find his range over some of the record’s melodic flourishes, but the songwriting decisions and guitar work are compelling in those moments, even if they are just biting The National.

The more traditional songs, by comparison, are kind of directionless. I remember seeing in a Wildlife-era interview that Dreyer struggled to maintain narrative consistency on Somewhere, so the band wrote music around his lyrics for the follow-up (it’s usually done the other way around). I also remember the band proudly self-producing the record, which left noticeable blemishes even to my tone-deaf 20-year-old ear.

Regardless, those unorthodox approaches worked on Wildlife. I’m willing to bet they ran it back for Rooms, which might be the record’s undoing. Most of the songs are hookless and meandering. The stories told within the lyrics might be a saving grace, but layers of distortion and overdrive make it hard to follow along, and few of these riffs command the type of repeated listening required to immerse yourself in a concept album.

I also think Rooms gets better as it goes. I understand narrative and themes are important, though I would argue music takes precedence, and the album’s first four tracks contain three of its least interesting songs. If anything, this wasn’t “too indie” for 23-year-old Vince, it just stumbled out the gate and I decided I’d rather listen to Nails or Danny Brown. Maybe I’ll start one of those annoying music Twitter trends where I demand people listen to the track-list backwards because honestly, you get a more compelling record.

So, my relationship with La Dispute and ostensibly that entire wave of music ended sometime in 2014. Few bands were making records like Wildlife, and the alternative was shit like Expire and Rotting Out, which I did not understand at the time, or Front Bottoms and Modern Baseball, who I will likely never understand. I was frustrated with hardcore’s direction, not clueing into the fact that I’d caught the tail end of something that started almost a decade earlier.

During this time, I went to maybe 2-3 shows a year and got deep into my own basement rap project (sidebar, I revisited that the other day and it’s shocking how much my cadence and delivery sound like Jordan Dreyer). When I returned hardcore shows, I was far more into boot-stomping and spin-kicking than anything screamo or 90’s punk indebted. The only thing from La Dispute’s era and scene still in my listening rotation was Title Fight. When Panorama dropped in 2019, I did not know what to make of it.

I guess I was expecting two-step riffs and fast parts, which that album decidedly does not have. The songs were so far from what I considered punk music that they genuinely confounded me. I maybe listened to Panorama once front to back and probably kept pushing through the Lockin’ Out catalog without a second thought.

Revisiting it six(!!!) years later, I think it could be their second-best record. It succeeds where Rooms doesn’t. Instead of trying to shoehorn indie rock riffs into melodic hardcore songs, it asks “what would La Dispute sound like eight years after Wildlife?”

If a time traveler showed this to me in 2011, I’d probably be happy with it. There’s far more restraint than on any previous full length, but it comes from a darker, more brooding place, not their coffee shop adjacent acoustic guitar songs that, in my opinion, have a relatively low hit-rate.

Panorama understands that if you want to write anything 90’s alt-indebted, you must master the loud/soft dynamic. Most later period “wave” stuff tried to pry indie rock into hardcore with a crowbar. The results often lacked both the dynamism of alt rock and the adrenaline of punk. This record proves Slint and Saetia aren’t that far apart, and you can blend their family trees together if you know what you’re doing.

It’s possible to sneak Sufjan Stevens-inspired bullshit into a screamo song if you switch the chords to a minor key and have your vocalist whisper-talk over them. Then, when you stomp on a pedal and start screaming, people won’t be able to tell if you’re biting Kurt Cobain or his Sub Pop label mates Sunny Day Real Estate. It also helps if your vocalist can hit the notes, something Panorama has that Rooms doesn’t.

La Dispute’s latest full length would have scratched everyone’s itch if it came out in 2014. Unfortunately, not a single band on earth could have written this record then (except maybe Touché Amore). In 2019, this was so far outside my world that I have no idea how it was received, or even who the target audience was. Do La Dispute fans still go to shows? Is there a contingent of young kids somewhere who consider the wave an important, canonical musical influence?

I have no idea. It’s not the hardcore scene. Listening to Vancouver, the aforementioned 2006 CDR, it’s shocking how we’ve memory holed so many things once considered important.

I feel like Vancouver may be sequenced in a loose chronological order based on when the band wrote each song. It starts with two or three tracks that sound like Norma Jean fans who recently stopped going to church and now can’t decide if they want to be Glassjaw or Breather Resist. The early MeWithoutYou influence becomes obvious at some point and the songs eventually land close to Somewhere.

I say this because all the bands I just mentioned were at some point canonized by either myself, my friends or my peers. Now I have no idea if anyone not around when that shit came out knows what it is, let alone listens to it.

That might be the story of La Dispute and their peers. They were the last of their kind in a musical lineage that fell into a chasm and disappeared. I’ve deduced, based on Internet “research” that people who consider Underoath to be classic extreme music might still be clocking for some of this stuff. If so, La Dispute’s legacy may unfortunately and ironically pin them closer to Dance Gavin Dance than anything in the hardcore scene.

That being said, the newest DIY screamo and metalcore bands are getting dangerously close to digging up La Dispute’s branch of the post-hardcore family tree. It’s conceivable for their early material to start getting name-checked by the youth in the next five years, and if that happens, it will be another five before they’re fully recognized as important.

As Balmora et al proved by reviving Tribunal Records-core 20 years after it was cool, almost everything eventually comes back around, especially if it has a nominally DIY ethic or aesthetic. La Dispute, beloved as they were, will certainly reach that cycle, although the cheesiness factor may slow things down like it did for Atreyu or whatever else these young bucks are out here moshing to nowadays.

So, is La Dispute good? Honestly, if you consider the necessary perspective and context, the answer is unequivocally yes. Their cardinal sin might be displaying too much ambition for the “deep fried meme” era of underground music. They put out a lot of stuff and not all of it is even listenable (I couldn’t stomach the Here, Hear releases), but they could easily fill a 40 minute set with songs I want to hear.

Which brings up another point: they were awesome live, something you can’t divorce from analyzing any band in any era of hardcore. It’s also the great equalizer. Certain sects of underground music will never enjoy La Dispute on record but might be able to stomach or even appreciate them at a show.

There you have it. La Dispute are definitely not for everyone (some of their catalog is definitely not for me) but I think they deserve to be remembered more fondly than they currently are.

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