What happens when a band renowned for complexity suddenly streamline their sound? We got a glimpse on the last Deafheaven album, ‘Infinite Granite’, when after years of carefully crafting a signature hybrid of black metal and shoegaze, they made an abrupt, wholesale lurch towards the latter. It did away with myriad core tenets of the Deafheaven style: drummer Daniel Tracy cushioned his percussive blasts, guitarists Kerry McCoy and Shiv Mehra retired their riffs in favour of My Bloody Valentine-style maelstroms of reverb and – most strikingly of all – frontman George Clarke stopped screaming, opting instead for soaring melody.
It was a jolting reinvention, but it worked, chiefly because it retained the most important part of the Deafheaven DNA: emotional literacy. The question was always where the band would go next. Deeper into the shoegaze water? Or back towards the old ferocity? ‘Incidental I’, the atmospheric, minute-long intro to ‘Lonely People with Power’ leaves both possibilities open, before ‘Doberman’ answers the question categorically in its opening seconds. Deafheaven pick up where they left off in 2018 on ‘Ordinary Corrupt Human Love’, drums and guitars locked in a breakneck race as Clarke reawakens his roar.
His return to screaming is the most symbolic indicator that Metal Deafheaven are back, but that’s not to say that they’ve written ‘Infinite Granite’ off as an anomaly in the catalogue. The lessons they learned on that record are palpable, especially in the album’s dynamics. Tracks like ‘Heathen’ and ‘Body Behaviour’ slip from crushingly heavy passages into melodic, softer ones, and then quickly back again. This happens in sweeping, seamless movements, not a clash of genres but a clever blend.
There are moments that feel like the culmination of the evolving palette Deafheaven have been painting with for over a decade. They’ve become adept at using the tension between styles to create genuine drama, as is the case on ‘Revelator’, when a floaty, almost ambient lull offers sudden respite from the chaos, only for the track to collapse back into noise. There’s new ground broken, too, with dreamy interludes that feature vocals by Paul Banks of Interpol and Jae Matthews of Boy Harsher. These songs offer us points of reflection during what might be the most emotionally intense Deafheaven album to date.
It is cinematic in scope, with Clarke touching upon both familiar themes (childhood trauma, loss, grief) and more novel ones – there are hazy new perspectives on love, and questions raised about the meaning of existence. That his bandmates are able to so artfully reflect his feelings back at him in sound speaks to the sharpness of the musical language they’ve developed. It feels as if they couldn’t have made this album 10 or even two years ago. There are occasional bumps in the road on what some might argue is an overlong journey; like most of its predecessors before it, ‘Lonely People with Power’ could perhaps have used a little pruning. For the most part, though, it stands as a testament to the power not just of forging your own lane, but becoming master of it, too.
Details
- Release date: March 28, 2025
- Record label: Roadrunner