Destroyer Rebukes All Possible Definitions on "LABYRNITHITIS"
By Parker Bennett
While not sonically dissimilar from their previous work, Destroyer’s thirteenth studio album shakes things up by pulling the spotlight off mastermind Dan Bejar and letting the music speak for itself. For long-term fans, Bejar’s lyricism has always been a delightfully impossible puzzle box. With every re-listen of every release, chances are that a new interpretation will rear its head at every phrase, presenting listeners with a monumental amount of work to make sense of. However, on LABYRINTHITIS—Destroyer’s thirteenth studio album, and second in the 2020s—Bejar seems to be asking his righteous interpreters: “Why bother?”
Over nearly three decades of releases, Destroyer has racked up one of the most sonically diverse catalogs in indie rock, with musical stylings rarely keeping consistent for more than a few years. From the lo-fi idiosyncrasies of 1996’s We’ll Build Them a Golden Bridge, the cathartic rock-orchestration of 2006’s Rubies, and the quiet new wave synth-pop of 2011’s Kaputt, Dan Bejar has guided his listeners through an ever-developing tapestry of genres, to the point where the very idea of a Destroyer song feels somewhat intangible. For most, the only through-line that makes any sense to follow would be the lyrics; witty, contradicting, self-referential tangents that always seem to fall perfectly in tandem with the instrumentation surrounding them. Bejar’s writing has given us some absolute classics, and certain words and phrases are bound to stick in your head, regardless of whether or not they make any sense whatsoever.
However, on the opening track of LABYRINTHITIS, it’s clear Destroyer is doing something different. For the majority of the nearly seven minute introductory track, “It’s In Your Heart Now”, Bejar is basically absent. The titular phrase is repeated just enough for it to stick before Dan disappears entirely for three minutes and lets the ear-worm guitar riff slowly develop into a sprawling soundscape of distortion. By the time he returns for “Suffer”, you’d be forgiven for completely forgetting this band even had a singer at all. From the get-go, the musicality of this album is given center-stage, and Bejar’s iconic presence feels much more like just another paint in the canvas, rather than the unequivocal star. For the first time since maybe his debut, lyrics are not the defining feature of a Destroyer album, and the music here is instead more like a beautiful wave that simply washes over the listener.
That’s not to say this is all going to be an easy-going soak. Lead single “Tintoretto, It’s for You” is one of the most discordant songs in the band’s entire catalog, where Aladdin Sane-esque piano riffs battle for melodic supremacy over the dark, grooving synth of the bassline. Here Bejar is in top-form, whispering unintelligible questions to an unknowable audience member, before randomly deciding to bring sixteenth century painter Jacopo Tintoretto into the conversation, just as the band unleashes a looming wall of synths that serve as the song’s de facto chorus. For a song that sounds absolutely nothing like anything Destroyer has made before, it manages to feel like one of the most on brand of the entire album. Bejar even throws in some classic “Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh” vocalizing at the tail end, a welcome throwback to the wordless chanting of Rubies’ era choruses.
Early in the album, “June” is another absolute stand-out, surely destined to go down as one of the band’s most quintessential. While a standard Destroyer song might be an intangible concept, the first half of this track comes pretty damn close to defining it. A gorgeous instrumental backdrop that sounds like New Order covering something off of The Queen is Dead (1986)? Check. Tongue-in-cheek existential musings that manage to be simultaneously poignant and hilarious? Check. A trumpet wailing somewhere in the distance, setting an impeccable mood? Definitely check. It’s in the second half of the song, however, that this track takes a dramatic left-turn into entirely unprecedented territory. For nearly three and a half minutes, the song’s structure slowly crumbles under a deluge of nonsensical spoken-word, layering and piling on top of itself until simply keeping up becomes an impossible task. These lyrics are possibly the most bizarre and incoherent of the whole album, and not a single foot-hold is given to even begin deciphering them. What the hell is a “low-born Madonna”? What is a “cubist judge”, and why would he ever be in jail? “Parrot weather”?? Once again, it seems the answer to these questions is to simply not answer them at all, and the result is a song that, like “Tintoretto”, is the freshest Destroyer has sounded in years.
The rest of the tracklist proceeds without any more major surprises. “All My Pretty Dresses” is a beautifully tender moment (my personal favorite), with some of the best guitar work on the whole album. The title track is an ambient, instrumental interlude: another wholly uncharacteristic departure from the written word.“It Takes a Thief” is a supremely danceable jam that ramps up the energy before the subtle decrescendo of “The States” and its sparse, haunting outro. Finally, we are left with the aptly titled closer “The Last Song”, wherein Bejar fully returns to his roots and offers a fragile acoustic sing-a-long, a style that feels utterly naked next to the vast electronic production of everything previous.
When the album comes to close, it feels as if almost no time has passed at all. This is the easiest Destroyer album to get lost in, making the title feel especially apt. In that way, it’s hard to believe that the actual word “labyrinthitis” has nothing to do with labyrinths or mazes, and is instead a common inner ear condition, similar to tinnitus, that millions of adults suffer from. Huh. However, this easy misinterpretation seems to be exactly the point Bejar is trying to make. In an interview with Pitchfork, he revealed that he chose the title for the album simply because it looked “insane”. It’s a decision that is simultaneously devoid of deeper meaning and also stuffed to the brim with it, and if that isn’t characteristic of what Destroyer represents, I don’t know what is. While not as altogether memorable as some of their past releases, LABYRINTHITIS is probably their most noteworthy Destroyer project since Kaputt. 13 albums in, it’s refreshing to hear Bejar rebuking his own star power, and simply putting out an album that exists as a lovely collage of whatever he wanted to make. LABYRINTHITIS is a great record, and further cements Dan Bejar as one of the most continually impressive and exciting figures in the current landscape of rock music, still capable of making a maze that is worth getting lost in time and time again.