"Under the Pressure" - the first single of The War on Drugs' universally acclaimed third studio album Lost in the Dream (2014) - is very direct on a lyrical level. Lead vocalist and songwriter Adam Granduciel had been touring for almost two years after the release of Slave Ambient (2011), and found himself under a lot of pressure when he returned to his hometown of Philadelphia, feeling estranged and lonely after his breakup with his long time girlfriend:
"I found myself totally islolated, emotionally and physically, from both myself and my community [...] It's a choice you've made and I wouldn't change it, but you feel alienated from people. I'd see people but it was all just fleeting hellos, weird drunken nights. I didn't know what I'd become or what I wanted out of myself. It wasn't making me happy and I didn't understand why. It wasn't like these were things no one had ever gone through before, but I'd never gone through them [...]
It started to spiral into emotional distress and physical manifestations of depression and paranoia [...] So that started to affect me negatively."
Michael Hann, The Guardian, 2014
The beauty of the track is how the lyrics effortlessly roll from one line to the next (Well the comedown here was easy/ Like the arrival of a new day/ But a dream like this gets wasted without you/ Under the pressure is where we are/ Under the pressure, yea it's where we are babe) in an understatedly poetic manner, and the track's euphoric instrumentals - which draw from Americana and 1980s rock, with Bruce Springsteen and Spacemen 3 being noted influences.
As Pitchfork's Stuart Berman notes, Granduciel blends traditional country and roots rock with psychedelia to create a sound that is riveting, sublime and profound:
"But even in the album’s opening seconds, the new album asserts itself as a more urgent affair—overtop the blurry, break-of-dawn guitar ripples of “Under the Pressure”, a stuttering drum machine sounds off like an alarm clock coaxing you out of bed and prodding you out the door. And if the steady-pulsed melody that emerges initially positions “Under the Pressure” as the most placid song about anxiety ever, by the third chorus run—at which point it’s amassed a swirl of dueling guitar solos, starburst synths, and brown-note saxophone swells—you feel the full weight of this nine-minute track bearing down on your chest."
The song may have been catalysed and propelled by Granduciel's personal battles with depression, loneliness and tour burnout (biographical influences that come through directly in the lyrics) but it's the sparkling, soaring rhythms - created by a complex and symphonic blend of synthesizers, keyboards, horns and ambient guitars - that elevates the song to eagle-soaring heights of aesthetic splendour, while keeping The War on Drugs' feet firmly on the well-trodden ground of American rock's romanticization of the everyday blue-collar experiece.
It makes complete sense that "Under the Pressure" has an outro that is almost a minute long. After that staggering build up and climax, the listener needs that much time to catch his or her breath again.
