If the mesmerizing motorik hum of the War on Drugs' earlier records gave leader Adam Granduciel an outlet to escape his problems, Lost in the Dream is where he pulls a U to survey the emotional wreckage. The result is the band's most lustrous, intricately detailed, and beautifully rendered record to date.

 As detailed in a recent Grantland feature, Lost In the Dream was the product of a grueling, year-long recording process. Though Granduciel involved his touring band more so than any previous War on Drugs record, his perfectionist tendencies still held sway, resulting in endless cycles of recording, revising, and scrapping. And such self-doubt wasn’t helped by the fact that Granduciel was recovering from the flame-out of a long-term relationship, the ashes of which are scattered all over his lyric sheet here. But the obsessiveness and insecurity pay off massively on Lost in the Dream—this is the War on Drugs’ most lustrous, intricately detailed, and beautifully rendered record to date. In essence, the War on Drugs have evolved as a band on an album-to-album basis in precisely the same fashion as so many of their songs: what at first seemed like a fairly straightforward, traditionalist roots-rock exercise has very gradually, very subtly blossomed into something wondrous and profound.

 — Pitchfork