Destroyer - Dan's Boogie
Merge Records
March 28th, 2025
Vancouver indie stalwart and unofficial musician laureate Dan Bejar has never sat on his laurels.
With the arrival of Bejar’s 14th album with his Destroyer project, Dan’s Boogie, we find Bejar & co exploring familiar hazy territory populated by new faces, new characters. The album is an entrancing variation on a theme that’s been imagined, reimagined, developed and redeveloped since 2011’s masterpiece Kaputt. Since that album, Bejar has projected himself into the persona of a lounge singer turned mad prophet, an absurdist commentator transmitting missives from a cigar-choked green room at the back of a sleazy club. It’s a perfect vehicle for Bejar’s free-associative lyrical style, his off-the-cuff vocal delivery, his effortless coolness. His gift for the theatrical flourish is matched with layered metaphors, often so oblique as to come across nonsensical—and perhaps, Bejar seems to winkingly suggest, sometimes it’s just bullshit. He is no stranger to testing boundaries, dipping and weaving in the way that only a seasoned songwriter and performer can, and on his magnetic and hypnotic album Dan’s Boogie, Bejar is in top form.
While 2022’s excellent Labyrinthitis saw Destroyer swerving into new wave influences—exploding at times into bonafide rock bombast—Dan’s Boogie sees the band laying back, easing the tempo. Songs like “Cataract Time” and “Bologna (ft. Fiver)” coast along in a melancholy breeze, and “Travel Light” finds Bejar delivering a straightforward piano ballad. However, the album is anything but sleepy, anything but complacent: “Sun Meet Snow” is an exercise in the dramatic build, crashing into a distortion-torched cathartic anthem at the halfway mark. It’s a much needed injection of riotous energy, and the band runs wild with it into the sunset.
Destroyer albums are always a mouthful, both in terms of lyrical overwhelm and in the sense that each is a uniquely filling, chewy listening experience, full of surprise and wit. Bejar is a master of verbal Rubik’s Cubes with no solution. The joy arrives not from the cementing of meaning, from the hard categorization of “not this” and “yes that”, but rather from the joyful scrambling of language, of symbol and meaning. This sense of experimentation and mystery has always given Destroyer its edge,vand will prove to be why we continue to hunger for the next turn, the next weave in their oeuvre, even as it edges into its third decade as a project.
- Harman Burns