Deafheaven are going to make Lonely People With Power. They’re going to melt your face off. However, you have to wait for it. It’s magic.
It is 1845, and a man in Paris has promised to make someone’s wedding ring appear inside an orange. He borrows a ring from his audience, which promptly vanishes inside a handkerchief. A small tree on a table is wheeled onto the stage, and the astonished audience watches as, in less than a minute, the tree sprouts small white flowers, which are replaced in their turn with five real, full-sized oranges that look like they have appeared in an act of spontaneous generation.
A final orange appears at the very top of the tree; it bursts open, and a pair of mechanical butterflies emerges, carrying the handkerchief and the ring between them. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin bows, his coup de théâtre complete. This effect is so beautiful, like an abstract scene from the golden age of stop motion come to life. The clearly mechanical butterflies make absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that this trick relies on an automaton. The sublimity of naked artifice is the point.
Unbelievably, it has been 12 years since Sunbather, the Deafheaven album that raised so many questions about black metal authenticity. If you walk through a dark forest under a waning moon at midnight you can still hear the echoes of black metal bloggers from 2013 complaining: “It’s too pretty; it’s fake metal—inauthentic—not kvlt at all.”
Looking back, it’s a little hard to understand why these guys were the ones to raise all that ire. Neige had been making pretty similar noises under the Alcest moniker for about a decade prior; “The Pecan Tree” doesn’t really sound that different from anything you’d have heard on Emperor’s Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, except that Deafheaven didn’t sample any corny owl noises. One could almost argue that everything would have been fine if frontman George Clarke had grown himself a big bushy beard and told us all to call him, I don’t know, Ignominious Nihilo or something.
Paradoxically, Deafheaven’s choice to do without the performative trappings of black metal opened them up to accusations of inauthenticity. There’s a type of metalhead who just won’t countenance a pink album cover, which is, of course, their prerogative and their loss.
Then, in 2021, Deafheaven “proved” the haters right. They made an album that was not, by even the most liberal definition of the word, a metal record. Slint‘s Spiderland is a more metal LP than Infinite Granite. Infinite Granite sounds like Explosions in the Sky hired a singer. It sounds like a version of Sunny Day Real Estate that could afford really nice delay and reverb pedals. It sounds like the call of the rarest bird in the whole 21st-century black metal landscape: a genuine creative risk. It was iconoclastic and divisive, fragile and pretty, putting the spin of real mystery on the question, “What on earth could these guys possibly do next?”
Now we know. Deafheaven are going to make Lonely People With Power. They’re going to melt your face off. However, you have to wait for it. The album opens with the underwhelming “Incidental I”, an instrumental synth ramp-up that lasts less than a minute and runs directly into the second track, raising some questions about why it is presented as a separate thing.
It isn’t until Clarke starts howling at the beginning of “Doberman” that the record really unleashes its full thunderous fury. A half-time drum line stomps through the first minute or so, exploding into blast beats worthy of the loudest track on New Bermuda, Deafheaven’s heaviest album before Lonely People With Power. It is tempting to say that Deafheaven are back, that this is a return to form, but that doesn’t adequately capture the fact that “form” for Deafheaven has always meant “exploring the sonic landscape that we’re most interested in right now”.
Listeners will probably appreciate that many of the sounds on “Doberman” are reminiscent of the sounds that first made people fall in love with the band. However, there are still ample signs of creative evolution: variation in drum patterns, a reverb-laden break three-quarters of the way through, harsh vocals that aren’t quite buried as deep into the mix as they used to be.
“Magnolia” is arguably one of the weirdest songs Deafheaven have ever created. It starts with a big old Riff that could almost be mistaken for an Iron Maiden B-side before the drums come in. Some of Daniel Tracy’s most impressive drum work to date is on “Magnolia”, and Daniel Tracy is one of metal’s great drummers.
“The Garden Route” starts in twinkly-guitar Infinite Granite mode, with a repetitive, Steve Reich lick mimicking a string quartet. Deafheaven do some of their best work when harsh vocals clatter against clean guitar tones that sparkle along in a major key, as “The Garden Route” flawlessly emphasizes. The heavy chorus opens up the song with such enormity and force that it sounds like the aural equivalent of seeing stars.
The vocal sample that opens “Heathen” is a new tool in Deafheaven’s arsenal, but it resolves into a straightforward, clean-singing shoegaze verse that sounds out of place within the crushing heaviness of the rest of the album’s first half. There is definitely room for this sound on the record; the placement of “Heathen” in the track list is just a little jarring. The harsh vocals even return for the chorus, but this track also features the first of a few corny speak-singing moments.
“He quit looking for the pears in paintings / Intimacy and its meanings,” Clarke solemnly intones, reaching for gravitas but sometimes moving a little bit past it. The song’s back half is just as crushing as anything that came before, demonstrating the group’s dynamic range and making the brief clean vocals moment feel even more like an afterthought.
Producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen is perhaps best known for his work on the high melodrama dreampop of French weirdos M83, and the chilly ambience of 2023’s Fantasy is on display in the beginning of “Amethyst”, an eight-minute barn burner that crescendos into a razor-sharp wall of distortion. Above a deluge of guitars, Clarke screams a shadowy narrative portrait: “Blood on the mattress, blood on the walls / All of the violence, all of the cops / And when the men came with their guns / First we hid in the bath then hid on the bed / I loved you then, I love you now.”
Desperate figures like this crop up all over the lyrics of Lonely People With Power. “Incidental II” starts in a similar place of ambivalent darkness: “I think I might be hiding from myself / It’s so good to be alone with someone else.” The blocky synths strongly evoke M83’s harsher, more distorted moments, especially their second album, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts (even though that LP didn’t have Meldal-Johnsen on the production team).
Nevertheless, not even guest vocals from Boy Harsher‘s Jae Matthews can save spoken-word lyrical delivery over droning synths from sounding a little overdone. The explosion at the end is amazing, though; with all the polite decorum of a jumpscare, Deafheaven transmogrify into the sonic cousins of scary industrial metal duo the Body. It’s one of the album’s best moments.
“Revelator” is presumably named after Blind Willie Johnson’s 1930 folk/blues classic “John the Revelator”, and it similarly carries the weight of the apocalypse. (Johnson’s version goes harder.) Lyrically, the song seems to genuinely invoke Biblical eschatology, joining Black Sabbath‘s “Lord of This World” on the list of metal songs that appear actually to be about the fear of God: “Everybody screaming / Everybody screaming / ‘No this cannot be’ / Wash the blood from my feet / The hosts of Heaven melting trumpets now.”
“Revelator” also serves the function of a title track, featuring the lines, “I’m clipping the flowers / Of spiritless leaders / Oh, they tremble in towers / Lonely People With Power / Devoured by God.” Clarke’s lyrics are gnomic by design, and while this appears to be a fairly straightforward denouncement of the current political reality in the United States, the cast of misfits and social outcasts that appears throughout the rest of the record also seems to ask what it would be like if people who lived with a different kind of loneliness were to seize a kind of power of their own.
As improbable as it sounds, the next song, “Body Behavior”, grooves. There’s a slinky bassline and a punchy, driving rhythm guitar track that almost invokes Bruce Springsteen-era dad rock for a second. The degree to which this is because the song is about being shown pornography for the first time by a male role model remains an open question.
The lyrics don’t necessarily carry the creep factor of Steely Dan‘s “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies”; this feels more like a story about reckoning with misguided people who try, but fail, as role models: “Don’t I owe them everything for all I’ve come to know?”, Clarke asks. Here is another lonely person with a uniquely difficult type of power to reckon with. The now-familiar blastbeats are liberally sprinkled all over the track, but the proggy interlude in the middle showcases Deafheaven at their most sonically daring.
The flow of Lonely People With Power is interrupted by one last “Incidental”, which features Paul Banks from Interpol reciting a short Raymond Chandler-esque story about “the woman / …On the strip of Ventura.” “Incidental III” adds more detail to the narrative suggested by the cover art, in which a woman leans into the window of a parked sedan and a child seems to shy uncomfortably away. “It was the way she touched me / Her arm on the window / And the way she said baby / And the way she said baby.” In the right mood, Banks’s staccato monotone repeating “the way she said baby” twice could hit with powerful dramatic effect; in the wrong mood, it could feel rather self-indulgent.
“Winona”, on the other hand, starts with the album’s prettiest synth swells, calling Infinite Granite’s glorious instrumental “Saturn Raining Diamonds” to mind. (That this song lyrically references Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son may or may not be an intentional callback.) The atmospheric guitar line howls over an inhumanly rapid drum onslaught to remind the listener that, while there are now many imitators, there is only one Deafheaven.
The music reaches a level of intensity that forces me to turn it off before I can write about it. Like all the other standout tracks across Deafheaven’s discography, listening to “Winona” feels like being caught up in a cyclone made of light and tossed into the waiting arms of a searing orange sky.
Finally, over the sound of falling water, “Winona” transitions into the song named after the gorgeous work of magical artifice that Robert-Houdin popularized: “The Marvelous Orange Tree”. If “Mombasa” closed out Infinite Granite as a reminder that Deafheaven still knew how to go hard, “The Marvelous Orange Tree” provides the perfect synthesis of Infinite Granite’s ethereal humming guitars and the epic, howling swell of distortion that Deafheaven have perfected for 15 years.
Call it “blackgaze” or “post-metal” if you want; nobody else combines emotional expressiveness and the harsh fury of heavy music like this singular band. It doesn’t break new critical ground to say that genre labels are artificial constructs that we, the listeners, come up with after the fact—monikers that, with varying degrees of imperfection and inaccuracy, try to give voice to the nameless thing that musicians are really doing.
Deafheaven’s orange tree is marvelous because it invites the listener to appreciate it for what it is: a harshly beautiful mechanism that transcends the boundaries of the fake and the real, staying true to itself alone. Lonely People With Power is more than a return to form. It’s magic.