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Destroyer’s latest album, LABYRINTHITIS, brims withmystic and intoxicating terrain, the threads of Dan Bejar’s
notes woven through by a trove of allusions at once eerily
familiar and intimately perplexing. The record circuitously
draws ever inward, each turn offering giddy surprise, anxious
esoterica, and thumping emotionality at equal odds. “Do
you remember the mythic beast?” Bejar asks at the outset
of “Tintoretto, It’s for You,” the album’s first single, casting
torchlight over the labyrinth’s corridors. “Tintoretto, it’s
for you/ The ceiling’s on fire and the contract is binding.”
Delivered in a Marlene Dietrich smolder, Bejar’s lyrical
menace seeps like smoke through the brazen march’s
woozy synths and dizzied guitar. “There’s some character
here that feels new to me, a low drawl, an evening gown
draped over a piano,” Bejar says of the song. Throughout,
LABYRINTHITIS insists that everything’s not all right, but
that even isolation and dissolution can be a source of joy—
stepping into the sunlight at the other end of the maze in
your ear, Bejar strolling alongside like a wild-maned, leisure-
suited minotaur.
More than an arcane puzzle for the listener, LABYRINTHITIS
warps and winds through unfamiliar territory for Bejar as
well. Written largely in 2020 and recorded the following
spring, the album most often finds Bejar and frequent
collaborator John Collins seeking the mythic artifacts buried
somewhere under the dance floor, from the glitzy spiral of
“It Takes a Thief” to the Books-ian collage bliss of the title
track. Initial song ideas ventured forth from disco, Art of
Noise, and New Order, Bejar and Collins championing the
over-the-top madcappery. “John is in his 50s, and I’m almost
there, but we used to go to clubs,” Bejar laughs. “Our version
may have been punk clubs, but our touchstones for the album
were more true to disco.”
Bejar and Collins conducted their questing in the height
of isolation, Collins on the remote Galiano Island and
Bejar in nearby Vancouver, sending ideas back and forth
when restrictions didn’t allow them to meet. “From the
vocal manipulation to the layered electronics, making this
record pushed us to a new place, and reaching that place
felt stressful,” Bejar recalls. “But I trust that that stress is a
good feeling.” That cuddly anxiety excels in tracks like “Eat
the Wine, Drink the Bread,” Joshua Wells’ percussion and
Collins’ drum programming pushing Bejar’s voice forward.
“The whole world’s a stage/ That I don’t know/ I am going
through,” he sighs, before reaching the frustrated religious
imagery of the title.
Lyrically, LABYRINTHITIS embraces a widescreen
maximalism, blocks of text dotted with subversions
and hedges. Building from the koans of Have We Met,
Bejar continues to carve his words precisely, toying with
expectations and staid symbols, while Collins’ production
reconstructs the pieces into a unified whole. “Even though
everyone recorded in their own isolated corners, this is the
most band record that we’ve done in the last few years,”
Bejar says. “Everything’s manipulated, but the band is really
present, and our plans wound up betrayed by what the tracks
wanted. I’ve written 300, 400 songs in my adult life—I don’t
know how to do anything else—but this album feels like a
breakthrough into new territory.”
Destroyer
LABYRINTHITIS
It’s in Your Heart Now
Suffer
June
All My Pretty Dresses
Tintoretto, It’s for You
Labyrinthitis
Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread
It Takes a Thief
The States
The Last Song
That unprepared synchronicity and mutual discovery shines
brightest on “June,” a six-and-a-half-minute track that features
a blend of funk bass, fluttering synth, and charred poetry
recitation. While Bejar initially envisioned LABYRINTHITIS
as a straight dance record (“just like Donna Summer’s greatest
hits”), the end of “June” explodes that simplicity into a million
shining pieces, finding joy in mutual discovery instead of
isolated certainty. Bejar and Collins’ initial jam expands
until the edges of the universe run through their fingertips,
the band members peeling off in cathartic helixes. While the
album’s songs may have been patched together like a mosaic
of enigmatic ideas, the band rolls the entire Destroyer universe
together—abstruse celestial waves unified despite the players’
physical time apart.
LABYRINTHITIS closes on “The Last Song,” Bejar singing
and strumming all alone, a gentle yet no more settled exodus
out of the fractured dance party. “I try and sneak in sweet
moments where I can,” Bejar laughs. After spending the record
in the depths of the labyrinth, Destroyer step into the open
air, overwhelmed by the burst of light surrounding them. “An
explosion is worth a hundred million words/ But that is maybe
too many words to say,” Bejar repeats, the roiling electronics
replaced with a single ringing guitar echoing into the night.
As LABYRINTHITIS closes, the reorienting vertigo lingers,
its implacable aura and bewitching lyrics wriggling ever deeper
into the mind.
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