As frontman Adam Granduciel notes from the stage, 10 years ago the War on Drugs were playing a tiny room at London’s Corsica Studios nightclub. Now here they are: Grammy winners packing out the O2, an ascent no one would have bet on, even when the critics started screaming about the Philadelphia band’s 2014 album Lost in the Dream. They are no one’s idea of charismatic or visually prepossessing performers, and they’re strangers to the dark art of projecting your personality to row ZZ. Nor do they distract with attention-grabbing production: there are two video screens that exclusively show what’s happening on stage, an understated light show, and that’s it.
Yet musically their ascent into what musicians called “the sheds” makes a weird kind of sense. Their songs recall a strain of 80s Big Rock, most obviously Bruce Springsteen – a similarity bolstered by the presence of a baritone sax – but also the lengthy extemporisations of Dire Straits’ live album Alchemy, the hip dad’s car stereo companion of choice circa 1984. At the other extreme, they evoke the taut rhythms and electronic exploration of Krautrock, their devotion to the sound of 70s West Germany enshrined in the title of Harmonia’s Dream.
