Deafheaven - The blinding sun of blackgaze

Shoegaze and black metal are hardly genres for everyone, let alone their synthesis, blackgaze. And yet, around 2013, it was on the lips of every alternative music fan in the world. A result that the various forerunners - acts like Alcest, Amesoeurs, Agalloch, Pyramids and Wolves In The Throne Room - could never have believed, or perhaps even hoped for. Indeed, what Deafheaven achieved with their second album, Sunbather, in 2013, which thrust them into the spotlight and onto the bold-print headlines of the world's biggest festivals, is an achievement bordering on the miraculous. Usually operations of this kind succeed by smoothing out the edges, lightening the weight and friction, partly sanding down the rough harshness of the original proposition. In the case of the San Francisco band and their uncompromising sophomore effort, that wasn't the case. Explosions of ethereal light, clear Turner-esque skies and melodic trompe l'oeil certainly make the album easier to approach, but in substance it remains peremptory and faithful to the blackgaze canon of its originators, with Clarke howling like a flayed soul in some infernal circle, staged by mosquito-buzz guitars and a rhythm section like a demolition site. The reason for its success, then, lies in the skill with which the band managed to align these ingredients, making them - thanks also to their towering emotional charge - palatable to a wider audience. Not just the brutal onslaughts of black metal and the dreamy, melancholic expanses of shoegaze, but also post-rock (or post-metal) structures acting as the glue, the progressive hinge joining the two souls.

2010 - 2012: from the ashes of Rise Of Caligula to Roads To Judah

At first Deafheaven were a duo, made up of just George Clarke (voice, or rather screams) and Kerry McCoy (guitar), both coming from the grindcore outfit Rise Of Caligula. Determined to explore new, slightly more atmospheric territory, the two recorded an untitled demo tape, written and played mostly on an acoustic guitar (because it was all they had), which earned them a deal with Jacob Bannon's Deathwish Inc. (Bannon, among other things, being the voice of Converge).

The buzz that built up around the demo tape quickly led to the making of an album. But to fully realize what the two had in mind - something the early recordings, by necessity, had only sketched out - it became necessary to turn themselves into a proper band. Old acquaintances from the bay area were recruited, along with candidates found through Craigslist: Nick Bassett on second guitar, Trevor Deschyver on drums and Derek Prine on bass.

Between signing with Deathwish, in December 2010, and the release of their debut album, Roads To Judah, only five months passed.

Just four tracks long for 38 minutes, Roads To Judah is the Deafheaven album most closely tied to post-rock/metal, from which it borrows the narrative bent of its songs, which as they unfold seem to sketch out scenes and tell stories. Despite a production still far from the polish of their later records, the band's debut LP shows itself to be confident and decisive about the direction to take, to the point of seeming anything but a first effort.

Across its twelve-odd minutes, "Violet" unfolds like a kaleidoscope of tones, moods, stillness and eruptions, functioning almost as a catalogue of the varied expressive possibilities of the crew assembled by Clarke and McCoy.

Immersed in guitar arpeggios that reverberate and stretch out like flocks of birds - closer to Mogwai (it's no coincidence the band would often perform a cover of the Scots' "Cody") and Explosions In The Sky than to post-metal - the song's opening feels like standing along a shoreline at dusk. The storm is just around the corner, and it hits us in the form of swarms of guitars, desperate screams and drumming that seems to mimic a hailstorm. Fast and powerful, precise yet brutal and instinctive, especially when Deschyver pounds away on, among other things, the cowbell. A relaxed rhythmic pause ablaze with post-metal guitars is followed by an apocalyptic, dreamlike finale, where the guitars fire off flares like a boat in distress.

By contrast, "Language Game" is simply brutal. It begins in medias res, in the middle of a torrent of hyper-distorted guitars and the usual merciless drumming. There's barely a moment to catch one's breath in a few arpeggiated bars, and after every pause the pandemonium starts again, with all five members going even harder each time.

At first, "Unrequited" is a poetic suite, a delightful ecstasy of melancholy and tremolo - languid, almost like Slowdive. At least until it's torn open by a bark from George Clarke, who by now vocalizes like an insatiable wandering Romero zombie, dragging behind him a devastating instrumental rampage, the most epic on the record.

Across its elusive ten minutes, "Tunnel Of Trees" stands as one of the most visionary peaks in the band's output. In its headlong opening, it really does feel like running through a dense forest of dark, sturdy trees, tripping over bushes or crashing violently into menacing, crooked trunks. Pounding drum solos, deafening droning pauses, punishing riffs, abyssal screams and a finale that fades into mournful piano notes draw the picture of a desperate flight from an invisible, invincible enemy.

With four tracks that feel like four tales frescoed on the walls of a castle, the San Francisco-based five-piece delivered one of the high points of blackgaze and of post-metal's recent past. But it was only the beginning of a decade that, barring a few missteps, the band would spend in the spotlight, carrying with them what anyone would be hard-pressed to call an accessible genre.

2013 – 2016: the years of consecration

Despite the enormous success of Roads To Judah, an album conceived and recorded from start to finish as the work of a five-piece band, for their sophomore effort Clarke and McCoy decided to work alone, bringing in new members only for part of the recording sessions and for the tour. Hence a new drummer, Daniel Tracy, who would also take part in recording the album. Then bassist Steven Clark and the thunderous guitarist Shiv Mehra, who signed on only when it was time to take the record out on stages around the world.

Gathering a record number of glowing reviews from both the metal and the alternative press, and even cracking the Billboard chart at position 130 (no small feat for an album like this), Sunbather marked the band's total consecration. And yet, as we mentioned, it's not a more accessible record than its predecessor. If anything, in some ways it sounds even harder, sharper, more jagged. The shifts between the black metal and shoegaze passages, which at times blend together more seamlessly than before (credit also to alchemical producer Jack Shirley), are savage. The noise is deafening, the rhythms even faster and more torrential, the pain raw and screamed out with no hope and no restraint.

While promoting the record, however, Clarke spoke of a greater "pop attitude". That statement is certainly reflected in a few melodic concessions, especially in the interlude tracks, and more generally in the role played by the lead guitar. None of which, though, is enough to make Sunbather a softer record than Roads To Judah.

Sunbathing, as the minimalist lettering on the album's elegant pink cover puts it. Until you get burned, though - until you're flayed alive, revealing a substrate of pulsing, desperate tissue, and beneath that a subconscious weighed down by everyday frustration and latent despair. Screamed until it hurts, Clarke's lyrics describe the impossibility of what he imagines to be a perfect life - a utopia eroded by pain, misunderstanding, loss and other dramas that tangle themselves up in our daily routine.

Compared to Roads To Judah, the main compositional innovation Clarke and McCoy bring to Sunbather is the alternation of proper songs with long instrumental interludes. A choice that results in the album's monstrous runtime, just three minutes short of a full hour.

Highly structured and evocative in their own right, these interludes are all very different from one another and act as overtures to the songs that follow. "Irresistible" is an autumnal post-rock piece in search of grace, which it stumbles into in the form of piano; "Please Remember" wraps guest Neige (of French peers Alcest) - reciting a passage from Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" - in obsessive guitar arpeggios, before erupting into a deafening drone; the last, "Windows", is the darkest of the three, sampling death-tolling bells and fragments of a conversation about faith.

It opens with what is probably Deafheaven's most famous song to date, "Dream House". A fan favourite that unleashes the frenzied rhythms typical of black metal, abrasive guitars, shoegaze with no volume ceiling, searing and scorching, and George Clarke screaming - ever more cryptic and unintelligible - some of his most poetic and sophisticated lines, though they remain unintelligible, even to a native speaker, without the help of the liner notes.

The title track proves even more dazzling and scorching, unleashing a deafening wall of guitars that hits, envelops and blinds like a photon ray. Here the singer recounts the scene that inspired the album's title and concept: sitting in his car on a Los Angeles side street lined with greenery and opulent houses, he stares at a girl sunbathing, sunk into the grass of her garden. The beauty of a scene that seems so simple is, for Clarke, revelatory: he will never have a life so carefree, unable as he is to free himself from his all-too-human trap of lies, misunderstandings, ineptitude. The song's trajectory follows the typical pattern of the new Deafheaven: a deafening section is followed by a brief, ecstatic pause. But here the contrast is taken to extremes, even more pronounced than elsewhere on the record. Every pause is followed by an even steeper, more violent plunge into a fresh black metal abyss.

More closely tied to the post-metal structural devices of Roads To Judah, "Vertigo" comes close to the fifteen-minute mark, building through a slow but literally vertical crescendo, and surprising with a muscular central section that sends the song soaring into a flurry of thrash metal-derived guitar lines. No less deafening is the closer, "The Pecan Tree", eleven hair-raising minutes that only find peace toward the very end.

Considered by many to be the band's masterpiece, Sunbather is certainly their most famous work and, all things considered, their most accessible - at least if you take some of its parts in isolation. Together with its predecessor, it shows off a balance between shoegaze and black metal sections that the band would rarely achieve again in the future, leaning, depending on the moment, toward one genre or the other.

After the success of Sunbather, a veritable orgy of positive reviews, New Bermuda could only be the band's most anticipated record. Waiting for Deafheaven at the gate, however, weren't just the fans won over by their now-institutional sophomore album, but also a sizeable crowd of detractors - mostly early-day fans and metalheads - more upset by the band's success with the hipster crowd than by any supposed lightening of their sound.

Fresh off a triumphant tour around the world, this time Clarke and McCoy decided to record the album with the full band, whose line-up retained Mehra on rhythm guitar, Clark on bass and Tracy on drums, alongside, of course, Shirley at the production desk - who, to this day, has had a hand in every one of the band's five albums. Distribution, meanwhile, was handled this time by Anti-.

Looking closely, even on this third chapter the band's ingredients are essentially the same as ever: post-metal, black metal and shoegaze, now alternating, now fused cold into blackgaze. But the proportions of these elements, the mix, and the lingering on tones even darker than before make the band's third record a creature profoundly different from the two that preceded it. In short: it's the US band's most metal and most gothic album, a quality that stands out right from its bleak, impressionist cover art (a dark oil painting by Allison Schulnik).

Deafheaven's greater lean toward metal on this record is certainly down to the presence of Shiv Mehra in the studio, who drops a fair dose of thrash and sludge riffs into the songs ("Brought To The Water", "Luna", "Baby Blue"), but also to the way Shirley mixed the record, with Clarke's voice sitting much further forward, less swallowed by the magmatic wall of sound, and used by the singer in a very different way. Where on previous records the frontman sang like a soul from hell gripped by unspeakable torment, screaming until his larynx tore, on New Bermuda he unleashes a more pressing, mephistophelian delivery. Here, he himself is the devil.

Clarke's mutation can be felt just about everywhere, but it's most obvious on the closing track "Gifts For The Earth", where the shimmering, airy shoegaze arrangements truly steal the show.

By contrast, in some of its sections, New Bermuda reveals the dreamy, ethereal side of Deafheaven in a way that had never before been so transparent, to the point of planting the seed for the full-shoegaze turn the band would take in 2021 with Infinite Granite. It's there at the heart of the shapeshifting "Luna", in the form of crystalline dream-pop arpeggios, in the long intro of "Baby Blue", and in the closing stretch of "Come Back", which turns one of the band's most brutal blackgaze assaults into a celestial dance led by guitars swirling through the ether and a placid, creamy bass.

The signature track of such a multifaceted, and in a sense schizophrenic, album is undoubtedly "Baby Blue". A masterpiece structured like a haunted-house ride through all the genres the Californians hold dear. It starts with the brakes pulled by a long dream-pop intro, then shifts into an obsessive post-punk section with guitars reverberating hauntingly into the void. Then, after a black metal avalanche, Mehra lets loose in a whirlwind of solos worthy of his idol Kirk Hammett, before launching once more into a barrage of grumbling thrash riffs.

New Bermuda perhaps lacks a bit of cohesion, with the songs feeling more disjointed than on the band's other records. Even so, the band is still at the top of its game and, although it lets its influences show more than in the past, it still sounds damn personal and tremendously gripping.

2017 – 2021: the urge to change

After the success of New Bermuda, and with the public's attention still firmly fixed on the band's live shows, Deafheaven decided to record all future work as a five-piece. With the only lineup change being the bassist - Prine out, Chris Johnson in - Deafheaven were no longer just Clarke and McCoy plus session players, but a genuine five-man unit.

The period following Deafheaven's first lethal trio of albums is marked by a constant urge - almost a necessity - to confound their own fanbase, chipping away time and again at every certainty. Despite the mixed results, we can say the approach has, so far, paid off on balance.

Discussing New Bermuda, we noted that it's an album perhaps not as perfectly realized as the two that preceded it, but one in which the American band's flashes of brilliance, along with a few visible shifts in production choices, keep the listener engaged, reaching emotional peaks not unlike those of Sunbather. In a way, a temporary downward path had been taken. Fortunately, the dip in quality in the San Francisco band's output would last only for the duration of Ordinary Corrupt Human Love.

Despite Deafheaven's evident desire to shake things up, their fourth album lacks the explosive emotional charge of its predecessors and suffers from a sound that wavers too much, never quite finding its footing.

"You Without End" is, in fact, a surprising track: a voluptuous female vocal thrust to the front, virtuoso hard-rock textures rising out of a piano progression lifted straight from an Adele song... only a few minutes later, hidden beneath all this melodiousness, George Clarke's tormented-demon scream finally peeks through. Here the Deafheaven equation is completely inverted. Where once it was melody that had to cut through layer upon layer of pitch-black distortion to catch a glimpse of the sky, here we find the exact opposite scenario: it's the melody that oppresses, crushes, and so muffles the brutality. An attention-grabbing opener? Certainly. A track you'll remember? Probably not.

What follows are two fairly ordinary black metal numbers, "Honeycomb" and "Canary Yellow". Amid the latter's shrieks and swarms of mosquito-like guitars, a stadium-sized chant swirls by - another novelty, and again a fairly harmless one. "Near", meanwhile, is the classic atmospheric ballad that any new shoegaze band might write while trying to land its first aching ballad: reverb-drenched acoustic guitar, a tremolo-laced solo slaloming through the clouds, a forlorn vocal. Shame that Deafheaven aren't exactly shoegaze newcomers.

Across the ten minutes of "Glint", the band alternates black metal detonations with post-rock arpeggio interplay - essentially their own turf, the combination that made their name - but here everything feels frayed, like a sloppy patchwork. "Night People", featuring the shamanic Chelsea Wolfe, is instead a fine slice of dusty pop, where the two voices walk arm in arm through a sweet night of neon-lit guitars and piano dew.

Insecure, stilted: those are the first adjectives that come to mind when thinking back on 2018's Ordinary Corrupt Human Love - to this day Deafheaven's only true misstep. A seven-track record in which the San Francisco blackgaze institution seemed almost to be shouting out its need to change course, to derail from its metal tracks, from a language it had itself helped establish. What likely held them back was an almost programmatic, by-the-book need to surprise, to produce something that sounded, if not unheard of, at least original. The result was pointless, strained pairings of black metal with piano progressions seemingly torn wholesale from some hypothetical Adele song. Stuff that didn't sit well together three years ago, and still doesn't on a relisten today.

Almost shocking, especially for anyone craving brutality from Deafheaven, the three singles that preceded Infinite Granite (the band's fifth album) instead reveal a band freed from its old constraints, completely at ease in its new guise. Alongside the band's age-old need to experiment with bold, new pairings, Shiv Mehra has put away the mosquito-like guitars so crucial to black metal, making his instrument the centerpiece of a shoegaze so pure we'd never have expected it from this band.

If "The Gnashing" is still a decent blow to the back of the neck (nothing, though, that Nothing couldn't have recorded, at least in terms of sonic shockwave), "In Blur" opens amid dreamy reverb in "Souvlaki" territory, and in its verses flaunts crystalline jangle arpeggios. Not to mention the following "Great Mass Of Color", so autumnal and brazenly indie-pop that it brings to mind Durutti Column.

The biggest transformation, however, isn't even Mehra's, because on Infinite Granite the one who's totally unrecognizable is George Clarke. Barring a few rare and pointed exceptions ("Villain" and the stunning finale of "Mombasa"), the singer leaves his trademark, searing scream at home, showing off instead a clear, emotional, controlled voice. On "Shellstar" his words are feathers drifting among waves of feedback, on "Great Mass Of Color" the voice is more assertive but never fully solid, while on "The Gnashing" he delivers an instant singalong chorus - the very last thing we'd have expected from a purebred screamer like him.

Superbly played, solid and moving, the record is a pleasure to listen to without needing too many sharp turns or abrupt braking (the ambient interlude "Neptune Raining Diamonds"), establishing itself as their best work since the essential blackgaze one-two punch of Roads To Judah/Sunbather.

The fact that the eight minutes of closer "Mombasa" culminate amid infernal screams, drums and guitars, turning it into a track that's genuinely one step away from black metal of old, robs us of any certainty about the band's future. It makes you think that perhaps Infinite Granite is merely a celestial parenthesis between one hell and the next, and that new, searing damnations await us down the road.

Unlike what happened on the uneven Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, on Infinite Granite we watch the band abandon its most distinctive traits, try its hand at an already codified and well-established sonic formula and, despite that, still write great songs. In a way, then, it's precisely this fifth album that certifies, that reaffirms the stature of the American outfit.

Between the two albums, in 2020, Deafheaven, aiming to celebrate their ten years of history, released their first live album, 10 Years Gone. Recorded at Atomic Garden Studio East in Oakland, California, the record revisits the noisiest episodes of the band's catalogue (excluding, obviously, Infinite Granite) and successfully captures the energy and violence of their actual live shows.

With twenty-five years of career now behind them, Deafheaven seem intent on doing more or less whatever they please, unconcerned with any judgment or prejudice. After all, we're talking about a band now canonized as the most influential blackgaze act on the planet, one that, at the same time, has never won over a sizable crowd of haters who, since the beginning, have viewed them as a metal band for posers and hipsters. A dispute that leads nowhere and one that George Clarke and co. have never cared about.

And so the melodic turn, the shoegaze embrace, call it whatever you like, of Infinite Granite (Sargent House, 2021) was just a parenthesis, a divertissement. A good record that did leave something behind, as we'll see further on, but one that seems destined to remain a one-off in Deafheaven's thunderous discography.

Were it not for the dreamy tail end of "The Garden Route" and the beautiful, delicate "Heaten" - the album's only moment in which Clarke uses a human pitch - we'd be talking about Lonely People With Power (2025) as the San Francisco band's toughest record. Which, of course, says it all.

The mosquito-whine guitars and steel-mill drums bare their teeth right from "Doberman" and never let go. They let you breathe only during the two interludes "Incidental II and III", voiced respectively by friends Jae Matthews (Boy Harsher) and Paul Banks (Interpol). It hardly matters whether you're caught between heavyweight thrash accents ("Magnolia") or a black-metal descent into hell ("Body Behaviour"): Clarke's screams and snarls are indecipherable, ferocious, the searing vocals of a damned soul, if not of Cerberus himself.

To underline just how great shape Deafheaven are in, it's worth noting that this time the best tracks, "Winona" and "Magnolia", are also the most demanding in terms of composition and the most steeped in post-metal's evolutionary spirit. And so, behind a cover that looks lifted straight from Lana Del Rey, complete with a big American car and heavy makeup, lies one of the most ruthless records of the year.

Lonely People With Power doesn't graft anything new onto a tried-and-tested formula, but track by track it reaffirms and deepens each of the band's qualities and possibilities - from the theatrical post-metal of debut Roads To Judah to the blazing shower of light of masterpiece Sunbather, from the martial drive of New Bermuda to the adamantine designs of Infinite Granite.

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