Philly’s The War On Drugs announce a new album, have a new song, and are playing two nights at the Met in January

The War On Drugs will return on Oct. 29 with I Don’t Live Here Anymore, the Philadelphia band’s first album since 2017′s Grammy-winning A Deeper Understanding.

The Adam Granduciel-led sextet released a new song Monday from their album called “Living Proof” and will embark on a North American and European concert tour next year that will include two nights at the Met Philadelphia on Jan. 27 and 28.

The 2022 tour will feature the band’s first-ever performances at Madison Square Garden in New York and the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The band will play one 2021 date at the Desert Daze festival in California on Nov. 21 before kicking off in Austin, Texas, on Jan. 19.

» READ MORE: Philly's the War on Drugs reach for greatness and 'A Deeper Understanding' (from August 2017)

“Living Proof” is the first track on the album and was recorded at Electro-Vox in Los Angeles, one of seven studios where I Don’t Live Here Anymore was assembled over a period of three years. The album was coproduced by Granduciel and engineer Shawn Everett.

The track, which the band teased with a brief snippet in an Instagram post on Sunday, sounds like a War on Drugs song, and it doesn’t.

Rather than employing the band’s familiar approach with singer, guitarist, and auteur Granduciel creating multiple layers of overlapping guitars, keyboards, and drums, it has a more open, live in the studio slow-building feel, featuring the full lineup, including bassist Dave Hartley, drummer Charlie Hall, keyboard player Robbie Bennett, guitarist Anthony LaMarca, and sax player Jon Natchez.

“I’m always changing, love overflowing,” Granduciel sings, in the song that shares a title with a track from Bruce Springsteen’s 1992 album Lucky Town and features a video shot on 16 mm film by Emmett Malloy. Does the more spacious, less dense sound reflect a new direction for the band? Time will tell.

The shows at the Met will be the largest in Philadelphia for the band other than their 2017 headlining gig for Connor Barwin’s Make The World Better Foundation at the Dell Music Center in 2017. (And the band also co-headlined the XPoNential Festival at the BB&T Pavilion in Camden in 2018.) The group’s last five shows since the tour for A Deeper Understanding ended at London’s O2 arena in 2018 have all been Philly holiday charity gigs, including dates at the Tower Theater, Fillmore Philadelphia, Union Transfer, and Johnny Brenda’s, the latter being the intimate spot the band got its start playing regularly in the late 00′s.

Last year, the band released an in-concert album, Live Drugs, culled from the tours for A Deeper Understanding and 2014′s Lost In the Dream.

Tickets for the January shows at the Met and for the entire tour go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. at thewarondrugs.net/tour.

Watch the video for “Living Proof” below.

I Don’t Live Here Anymore tracklist.