Dan Bejar, founder of Vancouver-based band Destroyer, obliterates any notion of stasis when approaching songwriting. “When I first started Destroyer, I stopped looking at records as documents of what a band sounds like, and more just like studio constructions,” he tells the Weekly.
By kicking the crutch of genre, the band’s massive 13-album discography ranges from folk to lounge pop to ambient spoken-word experiments.
Bejar’s ability to reinvent himself has kept Destroyer’s sound as unpredictable as it is resonating. But no matter how often the sound shifts, captivating and often cryptic lyrics have been the constant.
“The writing part has always been the most natural, most thoughtless part of it for me, while the music part has always been the toil, the labor,” he says. “It’s kind of the exact opposite of most musicians, who whip up music and play and generally, at the last minute, they’ll come up with some words—with me, the song is always written word first.”
On the synth-pop forward track “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood,” Bejar exposes the pseudo-glamour of Hollywood and how the corrupt cycle only continues. He offers a form of escapism through dreams: “Now let me tell you about the dream/I had no feeling/I had no past/I was the arctic/I was the vast/Spaces without reprieve/I was a dreamer/Watch me leave.”
Not only is the track honest, thoughtful, and provocative, it’s so damn danceable.
Bejar notes that he’s in the homestretch of completing his latest project. And although this will be the band’s 14th stage of evolution, he’s “walking on pins and needles.”
Understandably so, given his tendency to shed his musical skin. “There’s momentum,” he says. “But it can waver between the excitement of the finish line and the dead-eyed stare of being bludgeoned by combing over songs for months on end.”
Bejar is preparing to hit the road again, this time taking a stripped-down approach, only enlisting his longtime collaborator David Carswell on electric guitar. “It’s more of a ritual now,” he says. “There’s a lot of older songs that I play that the band doesn’t really touch. Normally, when we tour, it’s like a seven-piece, quite loud. So this is a different style of singing, a different approach to the music. It’s more intimate.”
Destroyer’s upcoming show at Swan Dive is bound to be special. The last time Bejar graced a Vegas stage was in 2018, at the now-defunct Bunkhouse Saloon, where he played to a small yet attentive crowd. Before that, a decade earlier, he played Beauty Bar with the full band, “kind of a gnarly show,” as he recalls, where the group went on super late and played to a crowd he assumed washed up at the bar to end the night.
Bejar never quite knew what to expect from Vegas, and neither does Vegas know what to expect from Destroyer. The sound is a moving target and we’ll be here to bask in the result every time.
DESTROYER October 20, 7 p.m., $20+. Swan Dive, swandivelv.com.
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