Album Review: Dan's Boogie by Destroyer

Graceful rhythms swirl and rattle behind a wall of hazy synthetic string arrangements before melancholic discordance sets in, extracting warped beauty from the abyss. This curious juxtaposition lies at the heart of Dan's Boogie, the Canadian songwriter's magnetic and sublime fourteenth effort. In many ways, it's very much quintessential grade Destroyer; full of dream-like soundscapes, Bejar's fractured, impenetrable poetry and reliably thrilling flirtations with the avant-garde.

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Reckless, euphoric and relentless, this may be the most surprising record of Dan Bejar’s wonderful career so far Dan's Boogie is the 14th studio album by Destroyer (also known as 'the Dan Bejar project') and it follows – in 2022's Labyrinthitis – one of the best of all the previous 13. The album before, Have We Met, was good too, but it served more as a capstone to the previous decade. Much like David Bowie's Lodger (also its creators' 13th album), it toyed with form and structure but ultimately gave listeners a potted history of where the artist had been for the previous decade.

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Destroyer are not so much destroyers of worlds as destroyers of methodology. Dan Bejar's impressive Canadian experimental art rock outfit seem to start each new record - or perhaps finish each record - with a process of unlearning, a period of time in which to recalibrate, reconceptualise and rewire. Nevertheless, there are some things you cannot unlearn, and Dan's Boogie, Destroyer's fourteenth album played by a decades-established seven-strong band, sounds magnificent from the outset, a tribute more than anything to doing this job for so long.

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One reliable aspect of a Destroyer album is that it will mark a change in style from the Canadian band's previous release. But regardless of the genre or genres--glam rock, country, synth-pop, and more--that the group dabbles in, another constant in its music is frontman Daniel Bejar's patented sardonic worldview. Destroyer's 14th studio album, Dan's Boogie, reportedly ended a period of writer's block for the singer-songwriter, and the songs here sound like they were conceived in a jam session.

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