One of the most celebrated bands on the American alternative scene, Bradford Cox's outfit has forged a personal style built on evoking nostalgia by laying pop melodies over shoegaze guitars and ambient textures, putting their name to some of the most important records of the 2000s
Deerhunter were formed around 2001, in Atlanta, by singer-guitarist Bradford Cox and drummer Moses Archuleta. Cox is the main driving force, the architect of the band's sounds and atmospheres, and virtually all of the imagery associated with the group can be traced back to him, even though the project would prove to be quite collaborative. His chief source of inspiration is his own life. A deeply emotional person, Cox has never hidden his past. His parents divorced when he was young, an event that marked his childhood, which he describes as a desolate period in which he essentially grew up on his own. His shy nature had to face a further challenge when, around the age of ten, the Marfan syndrome he suffers from began showing its symptoms, altering his appearance and lengthening his limbs.
The combination of difficulties relating to others and his physical appearance pushed him into a period of isolation in which music became his only lifeline, which explains rather well why some of his later work would lean so heavily on the nostalgic power of that art form. In high school he nonetheless managed to forge some friendships, gravitating toward people he sensed were closer to his own condition of isolation. He grew particularly close to Lockett Pundt, who would later join Deerhunter. The first stable Deerhunter line-up featured Cox, Archuleta, guitarist Colin Mee and bassist Justin Bosworth, who sadly passed away following a skateboarding accident even before the band got to record their debut album. He was replaced by Joshua Fauver.
Turn It Up Faggot came out in June 2005 on the small local label Stickfigure. The title refers to a line shouted at Cox by an audience member during one of the band's early shows. It would certainly have been hard to expect a skeletal beanpole who describes himself as asexual and often wears women's clothing on stage to be welcomed with open arms in a state as decidedly unprogressive as Georgia. The album is nearly unlistenable, a jumble of distorted sounds, pulsing rhythms that rarely vary, filtered vocals, scrappy little shrieks, all thrown together haphazardly with no instrument ever managing to stand apart from the others, in an abrasive, amateurish sonic mush. The songs show no interest whatsoever in developing coherent melodies and sound almost literally played at random.
Cox would later admit that Bosworth's death pushed him toward an extreme, negative approach during those sessions, the results of which he no longer recognized as his own just a few months later. Pundt's arrival on guitar changed things completely. Just as introverted as Cox, with whom he felt completely at ease, he managed to steer the band's sound toward more defined territory and helped it develop far more carefully crafted textures, avoiding the easy shortcut of noise for noise's sake.
The second album, Cryptograms (2007), marks a decisive step forward. The title track is a driving experiment in the vein of kraut-rock and British experimental rock, two currents that both Cox and Pundt are passionate about. Listening to it brings to mind in particular Neu! for its hypnotic pulse and early Stereolab for its chant-like melody. “Lake Sommerset”, with its jagged guitars and distorted declamations, reveals an admiration for Mark E. Smith's Fall. The record's tour de force is “Octet”, nearly eight minutes of syncopated pulses and voices drifting by incomprehensibly, while Pundt takes charge on “Strange Lights”, building a wall of sound worthy of classic shoegaze, even without pairing it to a clearly defined melody.
The Deerhunter style, the one that would make them recognizable within a few bars, would be properly focused on the double album that followed. Here the band's reference points still sound a bit cumbersome, yet their talent begins to shine through clearly. Cryptograms is undoubtedly a formative work, but surprisingly solid and worthy of respect. After its release Mee left the band, by then superfluous given the balance that the guitar interplay between Cox and Pundt would soon achieve. Meanwhile the band began to get noticed, earning enthusiastic reviews from the alternative press. Without ever reaching huge audiences, Deerhunter would carve out an exceptional place for themselves in the indie universe.
Microcastle appeared in the spring of 2008, preceded by an infamous leak that surfaced well before its official release, planned for October. It doesn't take long to realize this is the record that brings Deerhunter to full maturity, immediately setting a new benchmark for the entire American alternative scene to match. Even today, the album hasn't lost a drop of its sense of novelty and difference. Fully immersed in modernity, with its load of anxiety, frustration and alienation, yet too personal and deeply felt to be imitated, Microcastle sounds like Cox's most painfully wrought creation, his schizophrenia at the time having reached worrying levels, well documented by the album's constant cover changes - fourteen in all! Blessed madness, we might say, judging by the ecstasy and heavenly grace of these twelve immaculate tracks. Little remains of Cryptograms' kraut obsession, except for the big single "Nothing Ever Happened", with its frantic rhythm and geometric guitar detours, culminating in a coda that finally revealed Pundt's talent to the world. Amid layered vocals and complex instrumental textures, the track is a crash course in the art of Deerhunter, a band capable of sounding "ahead" by redefining well-worn styles and genres. Whether it's ambient, folk-pop or shoegaze, every song unmistakably bears their stamp. While many believe it's increasingly difficult to create anything truly "new", Deerhunter rework ideas and sounds with a sensibility that clearly sets them apart from the ranks of imitators lacking a distinct personality.
There are so many unforgettable moments on this now-classic album: the metronomic nursery rhyme of "Agoraphobia", sung by a thoroughly listless Pundt with casual nonchalance, the ecstatic folk-pop of "Never Stops", a blend of lightness and emotion with a gorgeous coda that brushes up against shoegaze, the two faces of the title track, now listless, now propulsive. The album's middle section takes a turn into languid, dreamy ambient territory (listen to the distant, almost cinematic piano of "Green Jacket"). The closing section, on the other hand, is the emotional high point of the whole record: "Nothing Ever Happened" has already been praised, but "Neither of Us, Uncertainly" is no less remarkable, expansive and airy in Pundt's signature style, and above all "Twilight At Carbon Lake", with its unexpected, sudden eruption that closes the album in epic fashion. One thing this album made clear is the band's fundamentally pop sensibility, which until then had only surfaced in the second half of Cryptograms, and in a few passages of the Fluorescent Grey EP. The songs on Microcastle, by contrast, are fully-fledged pop songs, with structures that are certainly unusual and not immediately accessible, but the product of a mind that knows the history of pop, especially that of the Fifties and Sixties, extremely well. The lyrics reveal all of Cox's tormented sensibility, as he feels trapped in an inescapable web of nightmares and unattainable dreams. The opening of "Never Stops" is emblematic in this respect: "I had dreams that frightened me awake, I happened to escape, but my escape would never come". And further on: "Winter in my heart, it never stops". What remains is the desire to abandon everything, to give it all up once and for all, to be buried so as not to be tormented by the feeling of being constantly cast out by society: "I have a dream, no longer to be free; I only want to see four walls made of concrete" ("Agoraphobia"). This baring of long-repressed feelings makes Deerhunter a band deeply attuned to the sensibility of people excluded or pushed aside because of their difference. Another key element in the imagery Deerhunter have built is the inevitability of old age, a constant specter even for children: "Kids walk behind, slowly stalk that old man, to get older still", runs the delicate "Little Kids". Far more than the mere sum of its parts, Microcastle has a unified tone and concept that make it a singular, self-contained body of work even within Deerhunter's own discography.
Released as a companion to Microcastle, but far more than a mere collection of leftovers, Weird Era Cont. is indispensable, even though it tends to be overshadowed by its larger counterpart. It would be a crime not to give it its due attention. The album delivers a series of exquisitely pop gems, alongside a deep exploration of the ambient side that on Microcastle was confined only to the middle section. "Backspace Century" opens the record with lopsided, effects-laden noise pop; "Operations", amid constant rhythm changes and a danceable melodic line, once again shows off Cox's talent for crafting original pop songs. Pundt contributes the ethereal "Dot Gain", a luminous, radiant slice of blurred-edged indie-pop. Almost moving, "Vox Celeste" carries the mind back to the turn of the Eighties into the Nineties, when the first shoots of shoegaze were starting to bloom (echoes of My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr. peek through). The almost spoken psychedelic melody of "Vox Humana" (one senses a subtle erotic undercurrent) sounds blurred and elusive, while the greater rhythmic drive of "VHS Dream" and "Focus Group", with a whiff of Smashing Pumpkins, once again reinterpret Nineties noise pop in a thoroughly personal key. The album's masterpiece is the closing "Calvary Scars II/Aux Out", a tender lullaby that explodes into a thrilling final crescendo, teeming with celestial sounds amid a torrential, cathartic ambient/shoegaze backdrop.
Weird Era Cont. is the calm after the emotional storm of Microcastle, but that doesn't mean it's a soporific record. Over its course the band shifts its focus toward more expansive, dreamlike sounds, without losing any substance. It's an album whose lyrics remain perpetually indecipherable (barely intelligible), mysterious, without clear points of reference, once again a wholly unique entity. It's the introversion of Microcastle taken to the extreme, turning into a kind of aching autism. The icy atmospheres, the cryptic titles, the constant experimentation, on one hand echo certain passages from Cryptograms, and on the other anticipate solutions that would be more fully developed in the side project Atlas Sound (particularly on Logos). An album that can't be broken down into individual tracks, meant to be experienced as a continuous flow, it's a hugely significant variation on the Deerhunter sound, as well as an integral part of what cemented their status as giants of the indie scene.
In light of such a glorious predecessor, Halcyon Digest, produced by Ben Allen, is the first Deerhunter album to generate almost frenzied hype ahead of its release. The fact that it arrived at the peak of their fame, and fully lived up to expectations, effectively makes it their defining, career-crowning album, standing alongside Microcastle as a work to be passed down to posterity. The genesis of Halcyon Digest was less tortured than that of its predecessor: buoyed by unexpected success, Cox opened up to a closer relationship with his fans, directly involving them in the album's promotion by launching a contest to spread a promotional flyer across every corner of their respective cities. To the generous fans who emailed in photos of their efforts, the band revealed the tracklist and artwork ahead of time, also sharing the lead single, "Revival".
The concept behind Halcyon Digest, according to Cox himself, is the retrieval of memories belonging to a past that is sometimes real, sometimes invented, with the aim of creating a kind of collective memory that each of us can connect with and draw inspiration from. The way nostalgia makes us mythologize even the ugly moments of our lives, the joy of rediscovering a feeling not felt since adolescence, the thrill of rediscovering the past in something new that appears before us. All these many shades of memory are explored on the album through a series of stories and reflections. Compared to Microcastle, a ray of hope opens up among the dark corners of the soul, a trust in sharing as a path toward overcoming traumas and pain rooted in the past. This thematic shift is matched by a fairly pronounced stylistic one: less purely guitar-driven and broader in sonic range, Halcyon Digest takes an even bolder step into pop territory, coming across as more immediate and direct.
The album's opening is an instant gut-punch: "Do you recall waking up on a dirty couch in the gray fog?" goes "Earthquake", carving out space amid the fog of memory with a heavenly gait driven by the autoharp. Thanks to a more polished production, the album sounds rich in detail that rewards repeated listens. Two tracks like "Revival" and "Memory Boy", though very brief, keep offering stimulating angles of interpretation: the southern-gothic-tinged folk of the former, lost in the coils of unspecified presences ("I felt his presence heal me") and religiously-tinged obsessions, and the garage-pop of the latter, are fine examples of how the band manages to combine concision and immediacy without ever slipping into banality. The result is a set of universal songs, like the album's signature track, the gorgeous "Helicopter", which updates their catalogue of ultra-dreamy ballads with a cascade of electroacoustic sounds (over a backing track already veering into r'n'b territory) framing its aching melody, the story of a Russian prostitute found murdered.
If on one hand the band broadens its sonic palette, on the other it loses some of the cohesion found on Microcastle. What ultimately makes this record slightly inferior to its predecessor is a handful of dead spots that clash with the internal harmony built across the rest of the tracklist. "Don't Cry" is a track Deerhunter could churn out on autopilot (just take "Operations" and you already have a far superior example), "Sailing" is excessively catatonic and poorly placed in the sequencing, "Basement Scene" clashes with the overall production, sounding unfinished. Still, the highs are high enough to forgive any filler. "Desire Lines", a genuine indie anthem and Pundt's best-known composition, unleashes an epic, unforgettable melody and a guitar coda that's enough to make you lose your senses. Sax pokes through on the Strokes-esque "Coronado" and "Fountain Stairs", while the closing "He Would Have Laughed", a moved tribute to friend Jay Reatard, closes the album amid languid electronic reverb.
Alongside their work with Deerhunter, both Cox and Pundt have pursued side projects. Cox has released several efforts under the Atlas Sound name, among which Logos, from 2009, stood out in particular. On it, "Quick Canal" is a standout, where Cox fulfills his dream of collaborating with Lætitia Sadier, singer of Stereolab. The song is a masterpiece, almost nine minutes of hypnotic rhythms, keyboards turning liquid and guitars expanding into indefinite sounds, while Sadier's voice splits into two, four, eight, chasing and weaving through itself in a dazzling play of reflections. In the sense of serenity it exudes, it represents the definitive exorcism of Cox's existential anxieties.
While Cox as Atlas Sound gave an even more evanescent quality to the Deerhunter sound, Pundt as Lotus Plaza gave free rein to his passion for ambient textures, releasing The Floodlight Collective (2009). While it makes for elegant background listening, the album never quite shakes off a vague, generic feel, never reaching the songwriting heights Pundt is capable of.
With Spooky Action At A Distance (2012) things change. While it doesn't come close to Deerhunter's brilliant melodies (except on the fantastic single "Strangers"), the album delivers excellent, crystalline guitar-pop for much of its runtime. And so the aforementioned "Strangers" drifts off into guitar flights reminiscent of Real Estate, while a taste for lopsided grooves emerges on tracks like "Rhodes" or "Jet Out of The Tundra". Moments of choral epic also pop up, as on the second single, "Monoliths", which stretches out over a liberating, enveloping chorus.
Side projects that underline just how much Deerhunter's magic is the product of the alchemy between two different sensibilities: Cox's melodic gift and Pundt's guitar craft.
Very well received by a critical establishment that seemed increasingly won over by the band, but less appreciated by their fanbase, Monomania (2013) confirms Deerhunter's ability both to handle chaos (“Leather Jacket II”, a garage-rock track with real personality, arguably the best song on the record) and to indulge their never-dormant pop instincts (“The Missing”, “Sleepwalking”); they can sound more American on “Pensacola” but also take on a spy-story stride on “Blue Agent”, or turn tender on “T.H.M.” and “Nitebike”, relegating the only sonic digression to the instrumental tail of the title track. Compared to the past, there's a sharper song form at work here, a more canonical format that often veers toward a certain slanted pop, leaving less room for experimentalism and thematic digression. The result is a partial turn that takes the Atlanta quintet away from certain ambient-punk explorations.
More direct and immediate than its predecessors, Monomania grabs your attention from the very first listen, but just as quickly reveals an evident lack of depth. There's less epic sweep and more concreteness on a record that comes across as more accessible but at the same time more repetitive and less surprising than past works. The psychedelic streak all but disappears, as does the refined production of the previous album. The structures are left deliberately rougher and less polished. The album marks the debut of bassist Josh McKay, replacing the departing Josh Fauver, who passed away prematurely in November 2018.
Fading Frontier (2015) is a clear step back toward the reassuring territory of Halcyon Digest and Microcastle, and it's no coincidence that it emphasizes their polish and softness. After one of their rowdiest efforts, Deerhunter produced their most relaxed one, as if in a kind of melodic rejection. The jangle-pop enchantment of “All The Same” lands somewhere between “Agoraphobia” (whose dreamy verse it echoes) and “Never Stops” (whose chorus it revisits, distorted but gracefully). “Snakeskin” is a brilliant single, a funk-infused track that makes you wish you could hear the band more often with syncopated guitars and driving rhythms like these. Given the instrumental intro that opens it, it could well be considered Deerhunter's “Sex Machine”.
While Cox dominates as usual, Pundt confirms his “few but good” approach with the splendid “Ad Astra”, a slow, evocative march with echoing drums, blankets of keyboards and an enchanted melody that seems to arrive from far away, crossing through space and radio interference. The traditional “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” surfaces at the end, in the 1928 version by Bascom Lamar Lunsford. It fades out in a tangle of interference, making it abundantly clear how few bands today, even at their peak, can compete with Deerhunter when it comes to manipulating the memories and emotions that time deposits onto music. The rest may not be quite as brilliant, but the relaxed electronics of the still rhythmic “Duplex Planet”, as well as the dub-bass intro of “Breaker”, show a band still in fine form and leave us hopeful for the near future.
In 2018 the band announced that their new album would be produced by Cate Le Bon. In the meantime, in May, a self-produced limited-edition cassette recorded in their Atlanta home studio was put on the market, to be distributed exclusively at the band's shows, becoming a collector's item. The two sides of Double Dream Of Spring are filled mostly with technical transmission tests, as much the reverse-effected piano of “The Primitive Baptists” as the treated wind and seagulls of the untitled third track, as well as the assorted noise-making of “Lilacs In Motor Oil”, only slightly softened by the presence of a music box. Then again, Bradford Cox and company did slip a few “real” songs into Double Dream Of Spring, starting with the lengthy “Dial's Metal Patterns”, an expansive motorik piece built on repetition, over eleven minutes that echo the recent exploits devised by Cavern Of Anti Matters, blending electronics and saxophones, acoustic guitars and small studio tricks. Or “Strang's Glacier”, another loop-based game, this time centered on a piano that flirts with various other instruments ready to settle onto a cycle repeated ad libitum. To actually hear Cox's voice you have to wait for the disorienting “Denim Opera”, a lo-fi avant-garde piece thick with distortion and effects, and the two closing tracks, “How German Is It?” — seasoned with what sounds like a sitar — and the funereal minimalism of “Serenity 1919”. But this isn't a project conceived to make lyrical pronouncements; rather, it's meant to test the possibilities of new musical directions/dimensions. All of which makes it especially appealing to Deerhunter's die-hard completists. These are sketches, notes, ideas, only occasionally brought to full fruition, but within them you'll find seeds more interesting than plenty of work made by those who claim “experimentation” as their day job.
On January 18, 2019, co-produced by Cate Le Bon, came Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, opened precisely by the harpsichord she plays on “Death In Midsummer”, snapshots of the October Revolution, tales of death, an emotional crescendo, atmospheres that gradually shift from baroque to electric. On the following “No One's Sleeping”, bursts of sax cut through an alt-folk-pop gait, with lyrics drawing on the brutal murder of British Labour MP and Europeanist Helen Joanne Cox at the hands of neo-Nazi militant Thomas Mair. Scenes of victims and blood, from the past and the present. Then Berlin, the late Seventies, pre-wave Bowie draws on Brian Eno's illuminations to craft “Low”, and “Greenpoint Gothic” is Deerhunter's own “Speed Of Life”, just a couple of minutes that teleport us into a timeless space.
So far everything is flawless, even light-hearted despite the weighty themes, but just around the corner a few missteps emerge, a handful of half-successful tracks, from the somewhat predictable accessibility of “What Happens To People?” to the robotic bird's-eye views of “Détournement”, down to the experimentalism of a “Tarnung” that's saved more by its lovely nocturnal sax than by Le Bon's backing vocals. Overall, though, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? holds up more than well: between the irresistible indie delights of “Futurism”, echoes of the Kinks' “Village Green”, memories of James Dean's last summer (in the almost-Jamiroquai funk of “Plains”) and the ecological concerns of “Element”, it glides into the lovely, extended instrumental tail of “Nocturne”. It's the seal on a record that continues Deerhunter's path of “normalization”, focused on refining a song format more “canonical” than in the past, at the expense of the appetite for adventure that defined the band up through Halcyon Digest. What remains intact is their ability to spin countless influences through the centrifuge, building a product that — with real personality — breaks free of its many reference points to shine with its own light.
2019 closed out with the release of a collaboration between Bradford Cox and Cate Le Bon. Myths 004 is a project created for a series of releases promoted by Texas's Marfa Myths Festival. Gathering a group of friends (Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint, Stephen Black of Sweet Baboo, Tim Presley of White Fence and Samur Khouja), the album was written and recorded within the space of a week, and so it sounds immediate and genuine, without too much overthinking. Across the seven tracks assembled on the fly, alt-pop impulses and noisy clangor converge, especially on the closing “What Is She Wearing” (which fuses Patti Smith and Velvet Underground).
But the two protagonists also pull hypnotic alternative-dancefloor moves out of their hat (“Constance”) and urban nightmares cast as nursery rhymes (“Fireman”, complete with a surprise saxophone in the second half of the track, an instrument that also crops up elsewhere on the album). Cate and Bradford, two artistically restless souls who here mesh perfectly, share the spotlight without ever stepping on each other's toes, taking center stage in turn — her on “Secretary”, him on “Canto!” (which inevitably recalls Deerhunter) — or letting their experimental impulses remain purely instrumental (“Companions In Misfortune”, “Jericho”). To dismiss Myths 004 as a mere one-off would be to undersell it: better to think of the whole thing as a delicious taste of colorful transmutations yet to come.
This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
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