Dan Bejar of Destroyer calls his upcoming album, Have We Met, a Y2K album. “The songs do seem to point at a very modern dread — one that heightens the more you consider it,” the band said in a statement, a sentiment that could easily apply to any Destroyer record.
Tuesday, Destroyer released “It Just Doesn’t Happen,” the second song off of their new album, out January 31, 2020. “You’re looking good/In spite of the light,” Bejar intones in the video for the new song as the headlights of a snowmobile cut through the dark, “and the air/And the time of the night.” Like the vehicle, Bejar’s vocals are solitary at first — with faint guitar strumming in the background.
After quoting the Platters (“Smoke gets in your eyes”), Bejar heads into the chorus —“You throw yourself down on the playground/Skid to a halt on the runway/You cast a poisonous look to the sun/You know it doesn’t just happen to anyone” — before ushering in bass and drums.
Have We Met follows Destroyer’s 2017 album, Ken, which was named after the original name of Suede’s song “The Wild Ones.” Bejar has said that he was thinking of the Margaret Thatcher era in British politics when working on that record — and it seems he’s now stuck on Y2K.
“I find it interesting how a certain economic climate or a certain political climate makes a certain kind of art or a certain kind of song,” he told TIDAL in 2017. “Any idea I had in my head was pure fiction. But that’s what records are supposed to do.”
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