Destroyer – “Dan’s Boogie” (Merge / Bella Union)After three albums where Dan Bejar flirted with dance music, he has embraced his inner lounge and cabaret singer on the fourteenth Destroyer album. The record opens with the kind of sweeping strings you might hear at the start of an awards show in the ’70s with Dan is your host for the evening, though he’s the kind that might slide up to you afterwards and ask, “Hey mister, you wanna buy some diamond rings?” “Dan’s Boogie” presents a world of faded glamour, like a ’40s noir film full of seedy locales and seedier locals. Dan told us he sees this one as “a mix of “Poison Season” and “Your Blues” in a lot of ways” and while you can hear that in the songs themselves, the production is like no other Destroyer album. John Collins, who has been Destroyer’s chief sonic architect since ’90s, has really outdone himself here with the sound design. There is something in the atmosphere of these arrangements that makes the room you’re listening in sound three times bigger than it is.
Collins shoots the album in widescreen technicolor, allowing us to see the stains of this tableau that would be hidden in black and white — musically speaking, of course — as Dan’s signature word salad style makes your head spin. As with the best Destroyer albums, and this is one of them, don’t worry about the details and meaning. Be like Dan at a Destroyer show: sit back, have a sip of a beverage, and revel in the world of sound he’s created.
“Dan’s Boogie” is, in true Destroyer fashion, a contradiction: a breakthrough album for Dan Bejar that began its life as a disappearing act and, as such, does things no Destroyer album to this point has ever done. Its nine songs imagine Bejar as a lounge singer, a hustler, and, at times, a supporting character in his own fantasies in nine all-timer Destroyer songs that have the urgency of a state secret hiding in the mind of a tortured spy.
released March 28th, 2025
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