Album Review: Lonely People With Power by Deafheaven

The hosts of Heaven melting trumpets now. I'm bringing them bile I'm clearing desires Coins on their eyes I'm clipping the flowers Of spiritless leaders Oh, they tremble in towers Lonely people with power Devoured by God Weak men with rotting ideologies rule the world. The casual cruelty and sweeping scale at which the everyman is subjected to their will and wants is impossible to fully comprehend, yet the callous carelessness of their actions has become abundantly clear in the last few months thanks to the likes of a ketamine-addicted slug who wields a "chainsaw of bureaucracy" or the official White House account tweeting out AI art in the style of Miyazaki depicting the deportation of undocumented (or even perfectly legal!) people.

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Although France's Alcest were the first band to have blended these two genres, Deafheaven have been the most commercially successful at doing so. Whilst debut album Roads to Judah (2011) went largely unremarked upon, second album Sunbather (2013) was hailed as one of that year's best albums by publications as varied as Time Out and Decibel, leading to the band being invited to appear at multiple decidedly non-metal festivals across Europe and the US. Whilst the album struck an appealing balance between lead vocalist George Clarke's death growls and lead guitarist Kerry McCoy's melodic riffing, its follow-up, New Bermuda (2015), was a more pummelling affair that was dominated by drummer Daniel Tracy's blast beats, one with which Deafheaven cracked the US Top 70 for the first time.

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Deafheaven have always been somewhat removed from the black metal scene that spawned them, not only musically but spiritually. In the true kvlt purist's mind, their textured, shoegaze-inspired sound signifies open-mindedness in a genre in which the opposite is often the point. Yet having tentatively pivoted to ethereal dreampop on 2021's Infinite Granite, the Californians have done another 180, to the point that many tracks here even resemble 90s Scandinavian pioneers like Darkthrone or Enslaved in their intensity.

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Deafheaven's sixth album boasts vast soundscapes and high intensity, treating the listener once again to the Bay Area-founded metal outfit's signature blackgaze fusion. A penetrating symphony of shredding guitars and roaring vocals, Lonely People with Power is complemented to sometimes sublime effect by the more subdued post-rock sounds of 2021's pivotal Infinite Granite. Lonely People's stunning "quiet-to-loud" dynamic, applied most effectively on "Revelator," "Incidental II," and "Winona," endows it with a commendable air of unpredictability.

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The black metallers are quieter now, more controlled. The tension is contained, the violence refined. Perhaps they've learned. Or grown tired. Perhaps they've just grown Deafheaven have made a name, perhaps a legend, for themselves in the blurred space where black metal once made normal folk ….

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At a time when heavy metal has mutated and evolved into so many different shapes that even the term "post-metal" feels reductive, it's hard to slap the term on anyone — especially, er, post-metal pioneers Deafheaven, whose unusual fusion of screeched vocals and blast beats with towering, majestic guitars and gentle interludes have always made them hard to pin down. Now 15 years into their career, the band had made a hard left in their sound with 2021's "Infinite Granite," which found singer George Clarke dropping the goblin shriek and singing in a more conventional, dare we say alternative style. It was a worthy experiment, but actually removed one of the key elements that made them so different, and with "Lonely People With Power," he's back to shredding his larynx about 90% of the time.

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The idea of 'rebirth' is something that every artist encounters at some stage, should their career stretch beyond its first couple of releases. Sooner or later, the creative forces behind the records that we hold dear as fans have to experiment, tread new ground, and pursue reinvention. Having taken on and conquered the heavy music sphere throughout the 2010s, Deafheaven arrived in the new decade with the desire and motivation to take one such leap.

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Few bands understand and embrace texture like Deafheaven. On this sixth full-length, the San Franciscan iconoclasts compress layers of loudness into tracks that glimmer like precious, sharp-edged gems. Gorgeous stretches like the midpoint grooves of 'Body Behavior' and the clean vocals which introduce 'Heathen' offer balance against the outfit's trademark exhilarating heaviness, such as on the relentless 'Magnolia'.

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