The War on Drugs
USA, 2005–now
Philadelphia band formed in 2005 by Adam Granduciel and Kurt Vile, who left after the first album. Granduciel builds FM-radio Americana on a motorik pulse — Dylan's phrasing and Petty's chords laid over a krautrock engine and washed in shoegaze haze. Lost in the Dream (2014) made them a headline act; A Deeper Understanding won the Grammy for Best Rock Album.
MusicRoots documents 6 artists who influenced The War on Drugs and 0 artists The War on Drugs influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.
Who influenced The War on Drugs?
- Bob Dylan — The phrasing and the writing habit both. Granduciel was deep in Dylan in the Philadelphia years and took from him the idea that a song is worth staying with far past the point it works.
- Bruce Springsteen — The heartland engine under the haze — and not an abstract debt: Granduciel named his first son Bruce.
- Tom Petty — The third of the trinity, and the one Granduciel talks about as a model for how to run a band rather than how to write a song.
- Dire Straits — The clean, wide, delayed guitar tone and the unhurried adult-rock sound of A Deeper Understanding.
- Spacemen 3 — The drone underneath. What keeps the Americana from being nostalgia is the repetition — a chord held and pushed rather than resolved.
- Neil Young — Crazy Horse specifically: the long, ragged, one-riff guitar workout that Granduciel builds his solos out of.