Touring with a rock band is hard — it means long drives, late nights, lots of impersonal hotel rooms and too much time away from home. But for Adam Granduciel, frontman for the band The War on Drugs, it can also be an opportunity for artistic stimulation.
“On tour I get a little more inspired because I get a little bit more run-down, a little bit more depressed,” Granduciel said. “I think it probably taps into something that’s a little more natural. I’ll be run-down but also totally inspired.”
The band is midway through an international tour in support of its critically acclaimed album Slave Ambient and will be playing at the Talking Head Club in Baltimore on Sunday.
The album, the band’s second, arrived after a long period of experimentation and rearranging in Granduciel’s home studio. Deeply interested in the technical aspects of recording, Granduciel took great pains to perfect each individual sound, reflected in the band’s deeply layered, ambient approach. It should sound familiar to fans of Kurt Vile, Granduciel’s friend and former bandmate.
“I really enjoy writing songs and working on them, but I also really enjoy working with my tape machine or coming up with and processing things like 15 to 20 times,” he said. “I like playing around with different sounds and recording things different ways or manipulating things different ways.”
This process of near-obsessive re-recording pushes the band toward more experimental sounds, giving its music a unique, wide-open feel. Toying around with ambient textures pushes what could be more straightforward music toward something different.
The album began with an 11-minute demo Granduciel recorded that served as an inspiration for the songs, such as “The Animator” and “Come to the City,” that form the core of Slave Ambient.
These songs shared a tone — looping, glistening synths under Granduciel’s wailing voice — that the band constructed the rest of the album around.
“I started building the songs off of that and processing that drone so that it was percussive and really thick, and I isolated that tone. It’s really awesome,” Granduciel said.
Between the name of the band and its oft-trippy sound, those unfamiliar with the group could, understandably, write its members off as a bunch of stoners. But there’s much more to the music than just druggy atmospherics — there’s a folksy, blue-collar undertone to many of the band’s songs that can be surprising to newcomers.
Still, Granduciel isn’t uncomfortable with the band’s reputation.
“I want to turn the name of the band — with, like, The Grateful Dead, where eventually it’s just The Dead — I want to just be The Drugs,” he said.
The War on Drugs will play at the Talking Head Club in Baltimore on Sunday. Doors open at 9 p.m. Tickets cost $10.
rgifford@umdbk.com
