There’s no argument that La Dispute’s upcoming show at GLC Live at 20 Monroe on Sept. 28 will be the biggest concert of their entire career.
The influential Grand Rapids post-hardcore band will celebrate the tenth anniversary of their landmark 2014 album, Rooms of the House. It is the only U.S. show as part of the album’s anniversary, and is only one of five shows total worldwide where the band will perform the record front-to-back in its entirety.
“I can’t remember another show that we’ve looked forward to in the way that we are this one,” La Dispute lead vocalist Jordan Dreyer told Revue. “We toyed with adding New York, and adding Los Angeles, and maybe doing Chicago, and the more we thought about adding those, the more we felt like we’d have to add more, but also the more we felt like it would take away from what we wanted the Grand Rapids show to be. Not just to have an opportunity to play a show in our hometown… but also to incentivize other people in the country, and elsewhere, into coming to Grand Rapids to see the place that’s been really special to us.”
La Dispute first formed in Grand Rapids back in 2004 when its members were just teenagers. The group slowly gained an underground following, frequently playing at all-ages venues like Skelletones and The DAAC during the early 2000s, before breaking out after a nationwide tour with post-hardcore icons Thursday and Thrice catapulted them to other cities, and international acclaim.
“Our oldest and strongest friendships are still in Grand Rapids,” Dreyer said. “We started making music in high school, and playing basements and what have you. So it’s a homecoming for most of us individually who were born and raised in the area, but it’s also a homecoming for the band on an abstract level, where we’re returning to the place that is the most consistently visible character in our songs.”
The band celebrated the release of their last album, 2019’s Panorama, at an almost instantly sold-out show at The Pyramid Scheme, and after the extended pause the pandemic put on the touring industry, returned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their 2011 album Wildlife, with another immediately sold-out show at the club in 2022.
“The three years of COVID shutdown where touring was effectively nonexistent, and we were not able to even really be in the same room as each other for a long time, kind of reinforced the parts of it you love the most and makes you appreciate them more, especially coming out of a lot of touring in the years prior to that,” Dreyer said. “I think there was a degree to which we started to focus a little too much on the negative aspects of existing in the touring economy, and in the modern era of music. So I think having a forced time away, really made us focus back on the things that we really loved about it. And I think the two things we love most are being in a room together and making music together. That’s the main reason why we still love to do it, but also just having the opportunity to be in a space with other people, and to be able to focus on what that means to us, and the connection you have, and the dialogue between you and an audience, and just the feeling of community, I think, that comes with being in our little corner of the universe.”
While La Dispute toured the country in 2022 revisiting Wildlife, they wanted to take a different approach with their return to Rooms of the House.
“When we did Wildlife, just even practicing songs individually and then together and thinking about what they meant to us, the songs are still very relevant to us because the album has played a probably outsized role in helping us continue to do this over the years, but they exist very clearly in a previous era of our lives,” Dreyer said. “Revisiting Rooms of the House and playing these songs, it feels like we understand the songs better now, having experienced some of the traumas on the record than we did when the album was written. There’s an immediacy that surprised me when it came time to start playing these songs, and practicing them, and think really intently about what they are to us. And there’s a degree to which they feel more relevant than they did ten years ago.”
As an album Rooms of the House thematically grapples with the concept of time, and growing older, something that has only compounded with the fact that the band had a full-length documentary film, “Tiny Dots,” made about them during that time in their career, which they’ve since reposted online to YouTube.
“It’s the most intimate documentation of any era of our band,” Dreyer said. “And it was a particularly important one, given how much was changing.”
The documentary ends with original La Dispute guitarist Kevin Whittemore playing his final shows with the band, including sharing the stage with Corey Stroffolino, who joined the band as his replacement, and has worked with them ever since.
“Corey’s been in the band since right after Rooms of the House came out,” Dreyer said. “He started touring with us on the Rooms of the House tour. So it’s been ten years that Corey has been a full member of this band, and he’s taken a larger role this time around in songwriting.”
Currently working on an upcoming new album, and not wanting to get too swept up in nostalgia, Dreyer said that the band is a better place emotionally and creatively than they were coming out of Rooms of the House and going into Panorama.
“This time around, I think we’ve really been a little looser, and a little less precious in some respects with how we write, and everyone’s feeling very excited and in a healthy place,” Dreyer said. “I think that we’re all just really, really focused on making this coming record the best thing we’re capable of doing, and hopefully the best thing that we’ve done to date, not for anyone else, but for us, and I think we’re all looking forward to opening a new chapter after dwelling on the past for a few years.”
La Dispute: Rooms of the House Tenth Anniversary
Wsg. Soft Kill, Vagabonds
GLC Live at 20 Monroe, 11 Ottawa Ave. NW, Grand Rapids
Sept. 28, 7 p.m. doors, 8 p.m. show, $41.75+, All ages
Ladispute.org, Glcliveat20monroe.com
