The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel on new live album, tour and his ‘life-changing’ time in Philly

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!

Fresh off the release of a new live album, the band The War On Drugs has marked Tuesday’s tour stop at Philadelphia’s Mann Center as a “big homecoming.”

“That’s the fifth show of our tour. The one that’s circled on our calendars,” said frontman Adam Granduciel. “That’s our home.”

“Live Drugs Again,” released Friday, is the band’s second live album and is the next release after 2021’s “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” — which earned its spot on several end-of-year best lists, including Pitchfork and Spin, and was named album of the year by Stereogum.

Granduciel said the band’s first live album, Live Drugs (2020), served as the end of something, while the new record acts as a celebration of dedication.

“It’s like a real celebration of the six other people on the stage besides myself and their dedication to the project,” Granduciel said. “And the levels to which they elevate the recorded material.”

The album’s release comes in tandem to the Zen Diagram Tour, co-headlined by indie-rock band The National.

Tuesday’s show will bring Granduciel back to the place where the Grammy award–winning band began. He called Philly home from 2003 until the mid-2010s before resettling in Los Angeles.

“My time that I lived in Philly was 100% the most inspiring sort of time I could ever imagine having in a lifetime,” Granduciel said. “I credit living there and being open to whatever Philly threw at me at that time of my life. It’s like a special sort of intersection that happens when you’re ready to soak up what is thrown your way.”

The highs of his time in Philly also coincided with some low points.

“It [anxiety] was just consuming my day-to-day life, because every waking second, [I] was wondering whether or not I was about to go into a full-blown panic attack,” he told NPR during a 2017 interview.

“I was feeling very sort of disconnected from whatever a normal life was or a normal sort of mindset,” Granduciel told WHYY News while reflecting on that time.

Work that emerged through that rough stretch appeared on “Lost In The Dream,” the breakthrough album released in 2014 that catapulted the band’s success.

“I’m not ungrateful about being able to make something when you’re going through all that and then have people respond to it in the way that they did for that record,” said Granduciel. “I mean, that basically changed my life.”

And despite residing across the country, Granduciel said the trip back to Philly “still feels like I’m coming home again.”

Tickets for Tuesday’s show are still available through Ticketmaster. The show starts at 6:30 p.m. Lucius is set to open.