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Dan's Boogie is a breakthrough album for Destroyer, both in the sense that it makes moves that no Destroyer album to this point has made, and in the sense that, to record it, Bejar had to burst through a series of intentional and unintentional barriers to write the songs. Initially challenging himself to not write songs so the ideas would well up inside of him until they breached containment, the months following the completion of LABYRINTHITIS turned into one year then two, at which point Bejar gave himself a New Year's resolution to play the piano every day for an hour. That lasted about four days, but the songs Bejar credits as coming from that resolution-InchCataract Time,Inch InchHydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,Inch InchBologna,Inch and InchDan's BoogieInch among them-are all-timer Destroyer songs across the vast spectrum Bejar and his collaborators have established for themselves spectacle-laden pop epics, personal piano ballads, and smouldering works of mood that blur the lines between song and novel and cinema, each brimming with the urgency of a state secret in the mind of a tortured spy. Lead single InchBolognaInch is the most radical frame for this energy, as it's the first time Bejar wrote a song where he imagined himself as a supporting character. Taking lead is Fiver's Simone Schmidt, whose voice-tough and expressive, piercing through the murk of the scene-is a siren's call that haunts the album. The gravity of their voice pulls Dan's Boogie into order around a sense of impending doom, the way a fatale's promise of the unusual and the ecstatic dooms the principal character of an erotic thriller. InchHydroplaning Off the Edge of the WorldInch is a delicious bit of contradiction, a peppy song that came out of the havoc Bejar was intentionally wreaking on himself-it's holiday cheeriness making the angst of it's lyrics go down smoothly until the song
