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Who shaped them

Destroyer

Destroyer

Since 1995 · Canada

Destroyer is the primary vehicle for Vancouver songwriter Dan Bejar, who has spent decades restlessly reinventing the project's sound across a catalog that has touched glam, chamber pop, yacht rock, and lounge jazz without settling on any single identity for long. Their story

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Who they shaped

Behind them, left to right: The Jesus and Mary Chain, Pavement, Joni Mitchell, Roxy Music, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Cure, New Order, David Bowie, Scott Walker.

In front, left to right: Car Seat Headrest.

Not in the photo: . Often assumed; they've said no.

The bigger the face, the stronger the proof: they said it themselvesreporteda critic, or widely accepted

Kaputt cover

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Kaputt (2011)

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Kaputt trades Destroyer's earlier guitar-based songwriting for smooth, saxophone-laced arrangements that sound closer to soft rock and lounge music than anything else in Dan Bejar's catalog. The title track rides a hazy, almost narcotic groove, Bejar's half-sung, half-spoken vocal drifting through it like an afterthought that turns out to be the whole point. Nothing about the record's polish undercuts its strangeness — if anything, the smoothness makes the lyrics' oddness land harder. It remains the most unexpected and most acclaimed reinvention in a catalog defined by reinvention.

Sleeve notes

Destroyer

Kaputt · 2011

Destroyer is the primary vehicle for Vancouver songwriter Dan Bejar, who has spent decades restlessly reinventing the project's sound across a catalog that has touched glam, chamber pop, yacht rock, and lounge jazz without settling on any single identity for long. Bejar has cited New Order, the Cure, and Echo & the Bunnymen as more basic reference points than the artier suggestions interviewers sometimes propose, and has pointed to early-1970s glam-era David Bowie specifically as a catalyst — distinct from the Bowie of the Berlin trilogy, which he says he deliberately avoided while making some of his most acclaimed records.

Kaputt (2011) marked one of the project's most dramatic reinventions, trading the guitar-based songwriting of earlier Destroyer records for smooth, saxophone-laced arrangements closer to soft rock and lounge music than anything in Bejar's back catalog. The album became one of the most widely praised records of Destroyer's career, its unlikely embrace of a previously unfashionable sonic palette reframing Bejar's reputation as a songwriter willing to follow an idea regardless of where it led.

Since 1995 · Canada