There’s a certain kind of brain damage that sets in when you’ve been a professional culture writer for many years. You find yourself thinking constantly in terms of lists — how will this thing I’m currently playing fit into the inevitable retrospective I’ll be tasked with writing at the end of the year? This process is heightened whenever the year happens to end with “9.” Not only are you thinking about the year-end list, you’re also ruminating on the decade. In fact, who cares about single years when you can define an entire era? I feel like this explains why I’ve been fixated lately on Lost In The Dream, the breakthrough 2014 album by The War On Drugs, which happens to turn five years old on March 18. Lost In The Dream is one of my favorite albums of the 2010s — I can remember when I heard it for the first time (early December 2013, via an advance promo stream), I doubt I have listened to any album more (with the possible exception of Kurt Vile’s Wakin On A Pretty Daze), and I suspect Lost In The Dream has most influenced what I look for in other albums. We all have artists that we feel especially bonded with because we watched them grow up. The War On Drugs is like that for me. I remember connecting with them immediately in 2008 after hearing “Arms Like Boulders,” a Dylanesque standout from WOD’s debut LP, Wagonwheel Blues. The band’s next release, 2010’s Future Weather EP, was even better, and the positive if relatively modest reception from critics allowed The War On Drugs to tour wider and further than before. I saw them for the first time in Madison, Wisconsin, the first act on a bill opening for Destroyer on the Kaputt tour, several months before the release of 2011’s Slave Ambient. I stood in the front row with a handful of other people, transfixed by future Slave Ambient standouts like “Baby Missiles” and “Brothers” (both of which were previewed in embryonic form on Future Weather). I loved them, though I had fallen for enough indie bands by then to feel knee jerk pessimism about the War On Drugs ever finding a larger audience. Lost In The Dream, however, made the War On Drugs’ ascendency seem like more of a sure thing. By then, Arcade Fire had pivoted from the booming arena rock maximalism of their first three records, creating a void that Lost In The Dream was fortuitously well-suited to fill. I wrote as much in an enthusiastic profile of the band that was posted three weeks before the album was released. After years of lingering in the indie rock shadows, The War On Drugs suddenly had expert timing. When I interviewed Adam Granduciel — the band’s singer, primary songwriter, and acknowledged mastermind — in early 2014, he didn’t sound like a guy who had just made the best album of his life. He seemed a little broken. If anything, he was relieved to have finally put Lost In The Dream behind him.

The story of the album’s gestation has since become part of its legend. Granduciel, who formed The War On Drugs with Vile in 2005, had spent most of the first decade of his music career on the road. “My twenties were, in the best ways possible, a total f*cking blur,” Granduciel told me. “I traveled the US probably like 47 times in 10 years.” But when he settled into his home studio in Philadelphia — you see him standing in the house on the cover of Lost In The Dream — to make a new War On Drugs record, all he had was time to work and rework songs. In the process, without the constant distractions of tour life, he discovered that he was prone to anxiety and depression. For more than a year, he cycled through different versions of Lost In The Dream‘s tracks. One of my favorite songs, the rampaging guitar showcase “An Ocean In Between The Waves,” progressively got worse and worse to Granduciel’s ears, devolving from the spare, haunting demo he recorded 14 months earlier. Just two weeks before he turned Lost In The Dream in to his label, Secretly Canadian, he scrapped almost all of the work he did with the band, and started again with the original demo. Another pivotal song, the stately “Eyes To The Wind,” also came together relatively late in the game. Granduciel’s instinct to bury his vocals in waves of noise and layers of instrumentation played against the emotional directness the song required. Eventually, at the last minute, he was persuaded to put his vocals higher in the mix. “I started going off the rails a little bit in my own head, getting a little too sucked in,” Granduciel explained wearily. His state of mind naturally seeped into the album, which on slower tracks like “Suffering” and “Disappearing” floats along in a spooky, lonely daze that sounds like how depression feels. While Granduciel’s songwriting draws on forward-facing classic rock, Lost In The Dream is projected inward, resulting in a kind of arena rock of the mind, in which the cheap seats are perched in the far reaches of the subconscious, where fear, doubt, and demons lurk. Once Lost In The Dream was released, comparisons to Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty quickly became staples of articles and reviews written about The War On Drugs. (It was also reminiscent of less fashionable vestiges of FM rock, like Dire Straits and solo Don Henley records, which some critics mentioned as a means of discrediting Lost In The Dream. Though in the end it just made me hear Dire Straits and solo Don Henley records with fresh ears.) As a The New York Times headline from 2017 put it, critics tend to view them as a band that plays “rock and roll the old fashioned way.” But I don’t think that’s quite right. Play Lost In The Dream next to Darkness On The Edge Of Town or Damn The Torpedoes and the distance between the spotless, Jimmy Iovine sheen of those classic rock warhorses and The War On Drugs is pretty gaping. Noticing that distance, in fact, is entirely the point. It’s what makes Lost In The Dream one of the emblematic albums of 2010s rock.