The War on Drugs Made Their New Album at Home. Their “Home Studio” Is Not What You Think

“Home recording” used to conjure a fairly specific image.

A four-track recorder on a desk. A microphone in a bedroom. Maybe a cheap mixer, a guitar amp in the corner, and some blankets hung on the walls in an attempt to keep the neighbors happy.

Adam Granduciel has a slightly different definition.

The War on Drugs leader recently described the band's forthcoming album as “basically fully homemade.” Then he acknowledged the joke almost immediately: people come to his studio, see his vintage API and Neve equipment, and wonder whether “homemade” is really the right word.

It's a funny observation, but there's a genuinely interesting production question underneath it.

What does it actually mean to make an album at home anymore?

Because for Granduciel, it apparently doesn't mean making something deliberately lo-fi.

It means having enough time, equipment, and access to keep working until the record sounds exactly the way he wants it to.

And if the first new War on Drugs recording in four years is any indication, “homemade” can sound enormous.

“Who’s That” Gives Us Our First Look

On September 9, The War on Drugs released “Who’s That,” their first new studio recording since 2022.

Granduciel wrote and produced the track at his Burbank studio compound. According to the band's official credits, Anthony LaMarca plays drums, Dave Hartley handles bass, Robbie Bennett contributes Wurlitzer and Mellotron, Jon Natchez plays Hammond organ and baritone saxophone, and Eliza Hardy Jones contributes backing vocals. Granduciel piles on lead and acoustic guitars, six- and twelve-string electrics, piano, synthesizers, Mellotron, percussion, and vocals.

The recording was engineered by Austin Asvanonda, mixed by Jonathan Low, and mastered by Ruairi O'Flaherty.

So this isn't “Adam Granduciel recorded an album alone in his bedroom.”

It's still a band.

It's still professionally engineered, mixed, and mastered.

It's just being created largely on Granduciel's own turf.

That distinction matters.

The Song Took 10 Minutes. The Recording Clearly Didn't.

There's another contradiction I love about this story.

Granduciel says he wrote “Who's That” in roughly ten minutes, somewhere between his first coffee and taking his child to school.

Listen to the finished recording, though, and it certainly doesn't sound like something thrown together in ten minutes.

That's very War on Drugs.

The basic musical idea can be incredibly simple while the finished production becomes dense with guitars, keyboards, ambience, textures, and small details.

Granduciel reportedly plays nine instruments on the recording.

That difference between writing quickly and recording slowly is worth thinking about.

We often talk about songwriting and record making as though they're the same creative process.

They aren't.

You can write a song in ten minutes.

Then spend months figuring out what that song is supposed to sound like.

The New Album Is Supposed to Be “Homemade”

We don't yet have an album title or release date, so it's important not to get ahead of what The War on Drugs has actually announced.

But Granduciel said earlier this year that he was nearly finished making the band's next record.

More interestingly, he said he wanted to reconnect with the way he approached the band's earlier albums.

His description was:

“Basically fully homemade.”

That's where things get interesting.

Granduciel told Guitar.com that people laugh when he describes the project that way because his studio contains vintage API equipment and Neve gear.

This isn't a laptop sitting on a kitchen table.

But I'm not sure the equipment actually disqualifies it from being homemade.

Maybe we've been defining home recording by the wrong thing.

Home Recording Used to Describe the Equipment

For decades, there was a fairly obvious distinction between a home studio and a professional recording studio.

Professional studios had the expensive microphones.

The consoles.

The tape machines.

The acoustically designed rooms.

The outboard equipment.

And, importantly, the people who knew how to use all of it.

Home recording was defined partly by what you didn't have.

That limitation became an aesthetic of its own.

Four-track cassette machines, inexpensive microphones, primitive drum machines, and early digital recording systems produced records whose limitations were often audible.

Sometimes that was the charm.

But the technological distinction has been disappearing for years.

You can now put an extraordinary recording system inside a house, garage, warehouse, basement, or spare bedroom.

And if you're Adam Granduciel, apparently you can also put vintage API and Neve equipment there.

At that point, “home studio” doesn't necessarily describe the quality of the equipment anymore.

It describes who controls the room and who controls the clock.

The Most Expensive Thing in the Studio May Be Time

This may be the most revealing part of Granduciel's comments.

His reason for making the album this way wasn't simply that he wanted to use his own equipment.

It was access.

He said the record required having the time and access necessary to make it the way he wanted.

That's a very different definition of a home studio.

Commercial studio time has a clock attached to it.

Every hour costs money.

Every additional day costs more.

Eventually, someone has to decide the recording is finished.

Owning or controlling the recording space changes that relationship.

You can record something.

Live with it.

Change it.

Come back tomorrow.

Replace a guitar part.

Try another microphone.

Pull out a synthesizer.

Decide the first version was better.

Then change your mind again.

For an artist whose records are built around layers, textures, and obsessive refinement, unlimited access may be more important than almost any single piece of equipment.

The luxury isn't necessarily the Neve gear.

The luxury is not having to leave.

A Home Studio Can Still Produce a Band Record

There's another assumption worth challenging.

Home recording is often associated with solitary music making.

One person, one computer, and an increasingly powerful collection of software instruments.

“Who's That” demonstrates almost the opposite.

There are drums, bass, keyboards, saxophone, violin, backing vocals, and multiple guitar parts spread across a fairly large group of musicians.

Granduciel himself has said the forthcoming record still sounds like a band.

That's an important distinction.

The home studio isn't replacing musicians.

It's replacing the traditional environment in which those musicians have to work.

And that could actually encourage experimentation.

When the studio belongs to the creative process rather than the creative process belonging to the studio schedule, the room becomes another instrument.

We've Seen the Opposite Approach Work Too

This is also what makes recording stories so interesting to me.

There isn't one correct way to make a record.

We recently covered Melissa Auf der Maur opening her archive of '90s four-track demos, recordings made with dramatically fewer resources and preserved partly because their limitations capture something that would be difficult to recreate decades later.

Those recordings are compelling because you can hear the environment in which they were created.

Granduciel is approaching the idea of a personal recording environment from almost the opposite direction.

His “home” studio can apparently offer the tools associated with a professional facility while preserving the freedom associated with working privately.

Different equipment.

Different goals.

Same underlying advantage:

The artist gets space to figure things out.

Maybe “Home Recorded” Doesn't Mean What It Used To

For collectors, recording provenance tends to get reduced to a handful of familiar questions.

Was it recorded analog?

Was it mixed analog?

Was the vinyl cut from tape?

Was there a high-resolution digital step?

Those are useful questions, particularly when we're trying to understand how a record was made.

But they don't tell the whole story.

Where was the music created?

How much time did the artist have?

Was the studio booked for three days or available for three years?

Were musicians capturing performances, assembling layers, or doing both?

Who made the decisions?

And when did they finally decide to stop?

Those details can tell us as much about the character of a recording as the format used to capture it.

The War on Drugs May Be the Perfect Band for This Experiment

There is something particularly appropriate about The War on Drugs making a record this way.

Granduciel's productions often sound simultaneously like a band playing together and a recording that has been meticulously constructed.

There is movement underneath layers of guitars, keyboards, reverberation, and atmosphere.

You hear performance.

But you also hear production.

“Who's That” continues that tension.

It's built from a full group of musicians, yet Granduciel's fingerprints are everywhere.

That's why I'm much more interested in his description of the next album as “homemade” than I would be if it simply meant that the band saved some money on studio rental.

He's not describing a compromise.

He's describing control.

The Best Studio Might Be the One You Never Have to Leave

There's a tendency in audio to associate better equipment with better results.

Better microphone.

Better preamp.

Better converter.

Better console.

And those things can matter.

But Granduciel's comments point toward something harder to put on a specification sheet.

Time.

Access.

Familiarity.

The freedom to experiment without watching the clock.

A home studio filled with vintage API and Neve equipment may stretch our traditional definition of “home recording,” but maybe that's exactly the point.

In 2026, a homemade record doesn't have to sound homemade.

It can sound like The War on Drugs.

And perhaps the most important piece of equipment in Adam Granduciel's studio isn't vintage, analog, or expensive.

It's the key to the front door.