The mixing board had already been cleared, the master approved, but Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs could not let the record go. He wanted to rework the mixes of a handful of tracks on the band's fifth studio album, I Don't Live Here Anymore, a move that pushed Atlantic Records to delay its release. When the album finally arrived on October 29, 2021, it was only because Granduciel and engineer Shawn Everett had locked themselves in a studio for one last desperate pass.
Three years and a pandemic pause
The road to that final session was three years long. Work began in 2018 and stretched into 2021, with every song rewritten, reworked, or remixed multiple times. Granduciel co-produced the album with Everett, and the two men had already been through a forced separation: the COVID-19 pandemic split them apart in March 2020, leaving the record in limbo for months until they reunited that October.
The album grew out of sessions in seven different studios, but the sound was always Granduciel's. He started writing in a New York studio while still touring behind A Deeper Understanding, the 2017 record that won a Grammy. That earlier success raised the stakes: the new album was only the second under a two-album deal with Atlantic, and the label wanted something worthy of the band's rising reputation. The early work was built around close collaborators. In March 2018, Granduciel spent a week at the Outlier Inn in New York making demos alongside bassist Dave Hartley and Anthony LaMarca, who plays multiple instruments, and later sessions took shape at Studio G in Brooklyn, Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan, and Electro-Vox in Los Angeles.
One last twelve-hour mixing session
By the time final mixing and mastering were done, Granduciel still felt something was off. He asked to redo several mixes, and after a month of revisions the release date slipped. The solution was drastic: a twelve-hour session in Everett's studio, where the two men remixed tracks and then remastered the songs themselves. It was a producer's gamble, betting that one more pass would fix what months of polish had not.
It was a producer's gamble, betting that one more pass would fix what months of polish had not.
The album was revealed on July 19, 2021, with the single "Living Proof" and a video by Emmett Malloy. A second single, the title track featuring the band Lucius, followed in September, and the full record arrived just over a month later. All six members of The War on Drugs played on it, a rare moment of full-band presence after years of Granduciel working in fragments.
Critics responded with near-unanimous praise. The album holds a score of 85 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 25 reviews, and NME gave it a perfect 5 out of 5. It topped Stereogum's year-end list and landed high on rankings from Entertainment Weekly and Uncut, proof that the long, uncertain process had produced something listeners could feel was worth the wait. The album's reach extended beyond its original release. In September 2022 a deluxe edition appeared with two bonus tracks, "Oceans of Darkness" and "Slow Ghost," and the song "Harmonia's Dream" earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Song. Granduciel's own playing also stood out: on "Rings Around My Father's Eyes" he performed on Walter Becker's old bass. The record's total running time came to 52 minutes. Rolling Stone rated it 3.5 out of 5 stars. Granduciel's playing was also a defining part of the album: he handled acoustic and electric guitar, piano, several synthesizers, and harmonica.
The record also reached fans in every format that mattered: vinyl, CD, cassette, download, and streaming. Five years on, I Don't Live Here Anymore stands as the album that almost didn't arrive, saved by a stubborn frontman and one long night at the mixing desk.