We’ve been here before, but let’s go back. Could we just go back? To “Mombasa,” I mean. The last minutes of “Mombasa,” the last song on Deafheaven’s last album, 2021’s Infinite Granite.
That album, Infinite Granite, it hangs like a gray day in an off-season beach town – dolorous, languid, cloudy with occasional corridors of golden light streaming out the cracks. And those clouds close when we reach “Mombasa,” the saddest, sweetest song of them all. It lingers, lovely. Wistful. Until it hits. Oh man, when it hits. Whiplash. The lightning. The thunder. The deluge. It howls, pure fury. It lays waste. It buries you. Everything just goes black. It doesn’t even end, it just vanishes, vvvwwwip! It gets cut off. Somebody slams it shut. It doesn’t really end, though. Does it?
OK, welcome back to 2025. Let’s unpack this crate. Watch yourself. It’s heavy.
Deafheaven have been around now for 15 years. Fifteen years! Has it really been that long? And it’s not just that they’ve been an active entity for that duration; they’ve been nothing less than kind of a big deal since day one. Deafheaven’s first demo came out in 2010, and even then, at the very beginning, they were kind of a big deal. Of course, lots of bands are kind of a big deal when they first arrive and announce themselves. The difference with Deafheaven is, they became actually a big deal. They became, actually, a great band. Even now, today, after 15 goddamn years, each and every new Deafheaven album is an event. This week’s Lonely People With Power is Deafheaven’s sixth studio LP. Six albums! Could you ever have imagined? That’s a point at which most big-ish metal bands put out new material solely so they have a press-generating engine around which to tour, at which point they will play the old songs that people actually care about.
With Deafheaven, though, it feels like they’re still peaking, always peaking, endlessly peaking, much in the way their own songs can tend to feel like they’re always, endlessly peaking – see, for reference, “The Pecan Tree.” (“The Peak-ing Tree”? Is there something there?) By way of contrast, by the time Metallica reached LP6, they had long since passed their peak and had altogether abandoned any pretense of making art (preferring instead to buy art haha). They were men in their early-ish 30s turgidly bashing out deep-fried slop like “Ain’t My Bitch” and “Mama Said” – material that would turn the stomach of any self-respecting Metallica cover band. So that’s no longer an instructive comparison with regard to Deafheaven. It once was! I made that comparison in my review of Deafheaven’s third album, New Bermuda, and I intended it as a compliment! But we’re well past that point. So … what instead, now?
At this late date, quite frankly, there’s no real milieu in which to contextualize Deafheaven other than that of Deafheaven itself. They’re not part of any scene or movement. Where could they possibly be slotted? They’re fundamentally a metal band – the bedrock of their sound is absolutely black metal – but nearly every choice they make is antithetical to black-metal dogma; they don’t even do “weird” in the way that black metal bands tend to do it. Their music is, secondarily, known for including elements of shoegaze, but they’re also not at all a shoegaze band when you get right down to it. Nobody would ever compare Deafheaven to My Bloody Valentine – except that they’re both monumentally loud – and if nobody will ever compare you to My Bloody Valentine, you’re not a shoegaze band. (This despite the fact that Deafheaven’s last album was plainly a shoegaze album.) I find it impossible to categorize them among post-rock bands (they’re too screamy) or screamo bands (they’re too gothy) or goth bands (they’re too proggy) or prog bands (no hate, they’re just not a prog band). The only classification that would really seem to fit is blackgaze, but that’s largely a result of nearly the entire blackgaze genre being galvanized under Deafheaven’s influence. And, yes, we’ll get to that at some point down the line here, not to worry.
I first wrote about Deafheaven in 2011, when the band was just a modest duo (albeit kind of a big deal) comprising vocalist George Clarke and multi-instrumentalist Kerry McCoy. At the time, I was serving as editor of the metal blog Invisible Oranges, and I did an email interview with Clarke about the band’s then-new debut album, Roads To Judah. I’d listened to the album maybe once, but the site needed content – the beast required feeding, as we romantically say in the biz – and I figured, why not, I could probably parlay the piece into a spot on the guestlist for their show at Bowery Ballroom. (Deafheaven were touring with Russian Circles and the Men, two bands you don’t necessarily think about every day in 2025!) Roads To Judah was an impressive debut from a hot new US black metal band, but there were so many hot new US black metal bands at that moment in time: Krallice, Liturgy, Panopticon, Woe, Wolves In The Throne Room, Nachtmystium, probably half the Flenser roster, basically the whole Profound Lore roster … I can honestly say there are hundreds whose names aren’t coming to me right now but whose names I knew then. And I cannot honestly say that Roads To Judah stood out to me, not among that crowd. But the Deafheaven I saw on stage that night? That band was peerless. I was floored. Anybody who wasn’t floored wasn’t there.
That was just the beginning, of course. Or maybe it was just a little bit after the beginning, but if things had gone differently, it easily could have been the middle, if not the beginning of the end. Deafheaven were part of a crowded class, remember, and the majority of their peers at the time never graduated. They failed or bailed or, like, smoked a ton of weed in the parking lot and talked a bunch of shit or something.
Deafheaven weren’t about that life. Their second album, Sunbather, was a hands-down instant classic. Big, big sound. Big, big songs. Plus the clean and stylish rococo-pink album art, which was iconic, not to mention iconoclastic; such a thing was absolutely not an acceptable option for black-metal bands. (Nowadays, you see it quite a bit more often than you’d think.) Same thing for that album title. If Sunbather hadn’t delivered? Yeesh. I shudder to think. It’s a moot point. The thing crushed. Just like that, Deafheaven were mopping the floor with the dismembered heads of the dudes around them. None of those other motherfucking bands – not one – released their own Sunbather.
Rather than repeat themselves – or worse, run the risk of getting retroactively clumped in with a bunch of new bands that were just repeating Deafheaven – the band changed their whole approach for their third album, New Bermuda. They stepped away from the effects rack, and instead, kept one foot on the distortion pedal and the other on the gas. New Bermuda was filled with bone-dry thrash riffs, weird, wild whammy-bends, and tightly wound black-metal frenzy-thons, all threaded through with strands of gentle slowcore and “Champagne Supernova.” It was another instant classic – and frankly, if anything, it was maybe a notch or two better than Sunbather.
Their fourth album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, took things, once more, in entirely new directions, largely steering away from the sweeping dopamine surges for which Deafheaven were best known, into an array of unfamiliar territories. Gothy, discordant, bizarre … It felt to me almost Lynchian at points. Apparently it got them a Grammy nom – and apparently they lost to High On Fire (?!) – but I honestly can’t remember any of this actually happening. (Did Matt Pike wear a shirt to the ceremony? Fuckin’ sellout.) For what it’s worth, OCHL is my least favorite Deafheaven album by some distance, but I also know people who are (or at one point were) of the opinion that it’s the best one – and more relevant to this conversation, it’s just nothing like any of the others.
Deafheaven followed that with LP5, Infinite Granite, which tore up the playbook yet a-freaking-gain, rebooting Deafheaven – rebuilding them, really – as a melancholic Britpop band with loud guitars, strong prog chops, and occasional screamies. Sparse screamies. The screamies came few and far between. For about 95% of Infinite Granite, Clarke swapped out his signature venom-spitting hiss-shriek in favor of a reserved, serene, swoon-gaze croon (as well as, I’m pretty sure, an affected British accent). I have no doubt there are a lot of people who think Infinite Granite is the worst Deafheaven album, but man, it’s my favorite. We’ll get into that a teeny bit down the page here – to the extent that it’s relevant to the subject at hand – but I’m happy to provide you with this meaty document that I whipped up on the album at the time of its release.
That was four years ago. Four years! Where does the time go? Oh, it doesn’t matter. What’s important is where the time takes us. Which is: here, now. LP6. Lonely People With Power. We’re back, baby. Deafheaven are back.
The lineup on Lonely People With Power is fundamentally the same as that of its predecessor: Clarke and McCoy, along with longtime drummer Daniel Tracy, secondary guitarist/primary synthist Shiv Mehra, bassist Chris Johnson, and producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen (M83). It’s the first time Deafheaven have released a new album featuring the same key personnel as the preceding one, assuming you consider Meldal-Johnsen to be “key personnel,” which you really must, considering how much he has enriched a sound that was already quite rich.
You might think that the returning lineup would result in a similar approach to the music, but as you’re surely already aware – assuming you’ve heard anything off the album by now – that’s simply not the case here. Lonely People sounds basically nothing like Infinite Granite. That’s most immediately evident in the vocals. Here, we have screamies galore. The screamies are robust. And the speed is fast. And the guitars are nasty.
Lonely People picks up at pretty much the exact spot where “Mombasa” left off, bursting out the gate with two of Deafheaven’s gnarliest songs to date, “Doberman” and “Magnolia,” and it doesn’t let up much from there. In fact, I’m gonna say that there are at least three songs here heavier than those two. (From my notes on “Revelator”: “This sounds like a nuclear war.” It actually sounds like Watain but tomato/tomahto.)
It’s not wall-to-wall brutality (it wouldn’t be Deafheaven if it were), but nothing here is without some weight, some mass, some kick. The album abounds with such riches. There are Hannemanian riffs, Mustainian licks, and Panterian grooves. There is Quorthonian grandeur, Azagthothian wizardry, and Gorgorothian menace. There are double-bass rolls and blast beats and more fills than Jimmy Chamberlain played on the first three Smashing Pumpkins albums combined. (Faster, too.) There are pillowy pink-fog synths and chilly horror-flick synths, and they’re all organically interweaved through the mix so you’re not constantly aware of, like, “DRAMATIC SYNTHS!!!” (which has been a semi-consistent issue in extreme metal since 1990, when Nocturnus released The Key). There are filthy breaks and beat-down slams. There are dizzying progressions delivered at dizzying velocities. And there is a 16-cylinder low end under the hood, holding together all these frenetic elements, so they don’t just fly away.
There’s a fat stack of styles contributing to this thing’s heft, too: atmospheric black metal, old-school death metal, DSBM, USBM, thrash metal, groove metal, goth metal, post-metal, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
It’s just an orgy of sound; a feast of metal. Like a 20-car pile up. Metal all crashed and smashed into other metal. Layers of metal upon metal. Metals all the way down.
The shift made by Deafheaven on Infinite Granite – that is, the move to a softer, shoegazier style – was abrupt, but it wasn’t exactly unprecedented, nor should it have been entirely unexpected. Blackgaze pioneers Alcest (surely Deafheaven’s most obvious forebears and, I would imagine, one of their bigger influences, in one way or another) pulled precisely the same left turn at roughly the same point in their own career, with the release of the fourth Alcest LP, 2014’s Shelter, which very deliberately drained the band’s sound of all metal elements, airing out the room and letting in some sunlight, leaving the band in a place rather reminiscent of the one occupied by Slowdive (taking it so far as the inclusion of guest vocals from Neil Halstead!). When Alcest returned from Shelter, with 2016’s Kodama, frontman Neige had reconnected with his metallic muse, and it felt like the Rumspringa had invigorated his spirit and expanded his palette.
Seen in that light, Deafheaven’s return to the gnarlier stuff, too, feels like a natural progression, rather than any sort of regression or retreat. This is a step forward – maybe a couple steps forward – and you can hear it in the arrangements, which are tight and precise, as well as the production, which is clear as glass even when the music is dirty as scorched earth.
You hear it less so, however, in the vocals. Only one track here, “Heathen,” features Clarke’s tender melodic singing as its centerpiece, although even then it’s contained to the verses. As soon as that song hits its chorus, Clarke is once again rasping and seething. Gnashing, if you will.
Speaking of “Gnashing,” what I said before, about Lonely People sounding basically nothing like Infinite Granite? That’s not quite right. That’s wrong, actually. What it is, in a sense, is that the new album feels almost like the mirror inverse of the last album, almost as if they’re two halves of a double album. And you know what? Maybe they are! Maybe that’s it! There’s a strong connection between the two that I feel nearly certain is deliberate. Infinite Granite is Deafheaven’s lightest album; Lonely People their heaviest. The melodic-to-harsh vocal ratio has been diametrically flipped. The sparseness of the screamies on Infinite Granite is what made their little cameos so special, just as it is with the cleansies here. When it happens, it feels like a sudden shooting star, white fire against the blackness of an endless universe, a burst of light slowly falling across the sky. (From my notes on “Heathen”: “THIS SONG. This is the one.”)
Having said that … I kinda can’t help wishing there were more of those vocals on Lonely People. That’s not to say such vocals would have necessarily made for a better album. I’m not sure this could possibly be a better album, period. But, see, it’s just that, when that sound rushes into “Heathen,” my whole body is flushed with a tingly warmth, like when you’re getting an injection of contrast dye for an MRI. You’re in sort of a scary place, but it’s a lovely little sensation that shoots through your insides, if only for a moment. And once it wears off, you’re just in sort of a scary place. And you kinda feel like, couldn’t it last just a little bit longer? Couldn’t I get just a little bit more?
Maybe you feel it differently than I do. Maybe you don’t want that. More importantly, maybe Deafheaven don’t. Maybe even Deafheaven don’t love Infinite Granite as much as I do, but listen, that’s a high bar, because I love it a lot. I am in no way claiming that Infinite Granite is the qualitative best Deafheaven album. I am telling you it’s my favorite. And I think that’s partly because I expected it to be this big, embarrassing misfire – I would have bet you actual money on this, in fact – and instead, I found it to be intricately crafted and endlessly rewarding. I expected Clarke’s clean vocals to be flat and lifeless, but instead, I found myself drowning in them, connecting with them. Something about all of that – the way it confounded my expectations and spun my perspective – it just made the album feel especially important to me, triumphant as it was in its grand ambition and its gentle voice, and thinking, as I listen, about the courage it must have taken to make that commitment.
And there’s a lot of other stuff that makes Infinite Granite my favorite too – personal shit that’s beside the point here – but there’s something beyond even that. I can’t define it. It doesn’t matter. It’s just an album that has stuck with me, for four years now, and it especially stuck with me when I really needed it to be there. I kinda don’t care about anybody else’s opinion on this, but I kinda know, too, that I can’t be the only one who feels the way I do. And if I am? That makes me love it even more. Infinite Granite is mine.
Again, that doesn’t make it the best Deafheaven album, and I’m not making that argument. Just in case this doesn’t come across elsewhere among the intimidating volume of words you see before you on this page, I’ll say it now, point blank: The best Deafheaven album, qualitatively, is the one you’re reading about right now. There is absolutely no question whatsoever, as far as I’m concerned. This is the one.
Deafheaven have, by this point, become a sort of blueprint for a new generation of like-minded bands, but it’s honestly impossible to imagine any of them producing work of Deafheaven’s standard. And it’s not like the next-gen bands just kinda come up short here and there, or in one or two categories. It’s like, they all feel so much smaller, in both ideas and execution. There’s really only one Deafheaven, and after 15 years, I gotta be honest, I’m not expecting another. (But I’ve been wrong before! And I’d be happy to be wrong about this, too.)
It’s kind of a miracle that Deafheaven happened at all – as I said up top, there were A LOT of bands occupying that space at that time, and while most of them flamed out (or worse), a healthy handful of them have gone on to make some really awesome music, even over an extended period. But Deafheaven … I dunno. It hits different. They just feel somehow perfect, and for me, since that first night at Bowery Ballroom, they just always have. Even in their imperfections, I feel this way. Ordinary Corrupt Human Love isn’t an album that I love, but I love that it exists. I love that other people love it. I appreciate and applaud the determined ambition evidenced by such artistic exploration. I know a lot of black metal bands whose LP4 is a slightly louder and slightly lesser variant of LPs 1, 2, and 3. And more than anything, I know that there are things that Deafheaven first tried on that album – avenues they were only beginning to explore – that informed and emboldened and allowed them to make Infinite Granite and Lonely People With Power, both of which (again imo) are perfect.
Whatever chemical combination came together to create Deafheaven, it just seems so unlikely to be repeated. Even Alcest don’t quite operate at Deafheaven’s level, in terms of blowing the fucking doors off. Neige is too graceful to do that, too dreamy. And Sadness … look, Damián Anton Ojeda is a freak-of-nature real-life genius and I love him so much you have no idea, but every one of those 400+ Sadness records sounds like it was recorded on his laptop in whatever bedroom he was renting that month (which makes it so much more amazing, not less, but still). Sadness songs can break your heart – they can fill your heart, too, and make it fly away like a helium balloon – but they can’t shatter your skull. Neither Alcest nor Sadness has Daniel Tracy destroying drum kits like those things just grow on trees. They don’t have Justin Meldal-Johnsen making their songs sound bigger than the ocean and brighter than the moon. They don’t have Kerry McCoy shredding the room to ribbons.
And those three bands – Alcest, Sadness, and Deafheaven – they are the giants of this thing called blackgaze. The vast majority of the genre is just hundreds of bands cribbing from those three (sometimes openly paying tribute). For example, check out this song here, “Only Shallowness,” by the French band Nature Morte (who I actually really love and enthusiastically recommend). It doesn’t merely sound like Deafheaven; it sounds like those guys outright said, “Let’s write a Deafheaven song,” but in the process, they wound up somehow covering a Deafheaven song. It’s equally possible that it actually went the other way around. And then, of all things, they named it after a My Bloody Valentine song! God bless. I find this truly endearing, and I sincerely love that song – I promise you I would never have called out Nature Morte by name, or linked to their song, if I didn’t think you might love it too. (The same goes for every other band I’ve linked to in this piece.) But it also serves here to underscore the vast delta separating the tiers.
