The Super High Quality Podcast

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of The War On Drugs' Lost In The Dream, we've put together a special long-form episode of The Super High Quality Podcast to tell the behind-the-scenes story of how the record was made. Between sessions in Hoboken and North Carolina, Adam Granduciel worked regularly with engineer Jeff Zeigler in Philly adding "paint" to a collection of songs that would be widely hailed as the band's first masterpiece on its release in March 2014. As the band st...

After a handful of North American festival dates in August, The War On Drugs headed out for their final run of shows in September and October 2022. As the band continued to refine their performances, the tour moved east to west, north to south across the US and Canada, and finally back to Austin TX where the tour had started in early January. An extraordinary and unbelievably rewarding year of touring finally concluded with a final show on Mt Tamalpais just north of San Francisco...

Following their 6-week run of shows across the US in January and February, The War On Drugs headed to Finland in mid-March 2022 to begin 6 weeks of shows across Europe. As one of the first international bands to tour overseas as pandemic-restrictions lifted, the band performed their epic full-production shows to enthusiastic audiences in 11 countries between March and April. The band recorded more Covid cases, but each time a band member went down, as had happened on their US to...

The War On Drugs have just announced a series of sold-out “Drugcember” benefit shows to take place on December 19, 20, and 21st at Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia. Proceeds from the shows will benefit The Fund for the School District of Philadelphia, a nonprofit that coordinates investment into the Philadelphia public schools. Adam and Dominic talk about the upcoming Drugcember shows, the band’s deep connection to Johnny Brenda’s, and their plans for a new season of the podcast to...

No one has been as instrumental in crafting the sound of The War On Drugs’ last two albums as Shawn Everett, the multi-Grammy-winner who has formed a remarkable studio partnership with band leader Adam Granduciel. Perfectly suited to handle all manner of explorations, detours, and deadline elasticity, Shawn and the band talk about their collective dedication to the process of making records, and the many ways their process informs the decisions and revisions it took to craft the final v...

Over 5 days in March 2018, during a short break in the band’s heavy touring schedule, Adam Granduciel took bassist Dave Hartley and multi-instrumentalist Anthony LaMarca to an Upstate New York studio. Decamping to Outlier Studios with Philadelphia friend and engineer Nick Krill, the four quickly realized that the session was becoming more productive than a typical demo session. With the added focus provided by the remote setting (immortalized on the cover of the new album I Don’t ...

With studio sessions put on hold and their new studio album postponed, The War On Drugs decided instead to release LIVE DRUGS. In Part 4 of The Super High Quality Podcast the band members share their individual experiences under lockdown and the ways the experience informed the decision to punctuate this point in The War On Drugs’ history with the release of a live album. From sanitizer-insanity to anticipation for a return to live performance with “David Lee Roth kicks”, the ban...

Connecting with a classic Warren Zevon album after relocating to Los Angeles where the band was recording 2017’s Grammy-winning A Deeper Understanding, Adam Granduciel presented Zevon’s classic “Accidentally Like A Martyr” as a song the band might try to cover. In Part 2 of The Super High Quality Podcast, The band discusses in painful detail, a less than auspicious debut performance for a private LA audience which happened to include the song’s original producer, Jackson Browne.&n...

In a year without concerts, The War On Drugs are set to release LIVE DRUGS on their own Super High Quality Records. In this podcast, guitar tech and band confidant, Dominic East, listens as the band talks casually about how they arrived at the performances and the decision to release their new live album.