Deafheaven weren’t always this good. The San Francisco band’s early shows found a scrappy, ambitious bunch of punk kids trying to warp black metal with shoegaze in a way that, for all its advances, felt familiar. In late 2010, they signed to Deathwish, the label run by Converge’s Jacob Bannon, and there were expectations in the underground. (Though, at that time, people seemed to focus more on the fact that they didn’t look like a metal band than what they were creating.) When vocalist George Clarke and songwriter/guitarist Kerry McCoy released their debut LP, Roads to Judah, in 2011, they added wrinkles to that live sound, especially on the opening track, “Violet.” The collection didn’t always match those standards. It sometimes felt muddled, like they were trying to squeeze too much into the frame.
But that gorgeous 12-minute set-piece established the template and scope for the band’s excellent sophomore album, Sunbather, a record that finds Deafheaven living up to and then surpassing expectations. Basically, they’ve learned how to take the sounds they’ve dreamed up out of their heads so we can hear them, too. If you go back and listen to Roads, you’ll find the elements that appear on Sunbather with 10 times the intensity. So while the approach here isn’t a surprise, the force with which Deafheaven pulls it off is a revelation.
Sunbather’s a seven-song collection that fuses into a massive 60-minute piece. The sequencing, moving from brightness to darkness and back, is brilliant. Throughout, McCoy gives in to his inner Johnny Marr, offering deeper, prettier, more eclectic guitar tones. His lines are smeary with tremolo and delay, and the band seamlessly incorporates melancholic piano, harsh Godflesh-style noise bursts, spoken word, lush acoustic strums, and eerie samples. That, and new drummer Daniel Tracy plays big, adding a wallop they’ve missed in the past. (Deafheaven have always been Clarke and McCoy with a shifting lineup around them; let’s hope this one lasts.)
This is music that inspires the kind of wide-screen feelings people look for in Sigur Rós, Mogwai (who Deafheaven have covered), or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Words of anger and frustration collide with the sheer beauty of the music. The power of that blend—raw black metal and hardcore basking in pastel-colored post-rock guitars—is something you don’t experience in those other groups. There are plaintive moments here, but this is largely music about romantic lust, anger, and disappointment delivered by a band who know their punk and hardcore as well as their metal. They know their Cure and the Smiths, too. Remember the ecstatic closing moments of Fuck Buttons’ “Sweet Love for Planet Earth”? Loop that and ask Explosions in the Sky to play the accompanying music and you're tapping into this sound.
While Deafheaven push this epic music as far as it can go, they retain a central emotional core, and are always in control compositionally. The opening song, “Dream House,” is over nine minutes long; the closer, “The Pecan Tree,” which moves from dire black metal to triumphant post-rock without any stitches showing, is closer to 12. The four longer songs don’t repeat themselves; each is stunning in its constant motion and variation. “Sunbather” is bleaker than “Dream House,” for instance, and on “Vertigo,” they downshift from gossamer prettiness to full-on heavy with a warped My Bloody Valentine transition followed by their most power metal guitar soloing to date. At the five-minute mark of that song, blast beats enter and it goes black metal. Two minutes later, though, it’s soaring again with hook-laden guitars and floor-punching dynamics.
Even the interstitial parts inspire. “Dream House”’s delicate closing arpeggios blend with “Irresistible,” a three-minute swatch of melancholic guitar and piano that works as a gentle pause before the massive “Sunbather,” but is in of itself a gorgeous composition. The grinding industrial noise at the end of “Sunbather” dissolves into “Please Remember,” a relatively brief piece that features Alcest’s Neige speaking lines from Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. (Clarke explained its inclusion in a recent Show No Mercy: “That passage is really important to me. It just screams insecurity, which I have huge faults with.”)
Clarke’s voice mixed with the mountains of cascading guitars and drum crescendos is so strong that you don’t need to know what he’s saying to feel the effect of the music. But if you do decide to read the lyrics, you won’t be disappointed: Sunbather was in part inspired by the singer growing up with his mother and brother without any money and wondering what it’d be like to have it. There’s also his realization that, like his largely absent father, he’s able to be cold emotionally, and not necessary able to love. The album’s central image is of a girl sunbathing outside of her upscale house. Clarke spotted her after moving back home for a bit and while stuck in an existential crisis. He wondered what he’d end up doing himself and, more so, what it would be like to have that girl’s existence. And, of course, what it would be like to have that girl. “Dream House” ends with a dialogue Clarke says he pieced together from drunken texts between him and a woman he was crazy about: “‘I’m dying.’/‘Is it blissful?’/‘It’s like a dream.’/‘I want to dream.’”
With Sunbather, Deafheaven have made one of the biggest albums of the year, one that impresses you with its scale, the way Swans’ The Seer did last year. Like M. Gira’s masterpiece, it has the ability to capture the attention of people who don’t normally listen to heavy music. It’s also one of the most successful examples of a band using black metal as a starting point and ending up somewhere else entirely. People cite the short-lived San Francisco band Weakling’s seminal 2000 album Dead as Dreams as the pinnacle of American black metal; Sunbather is another. Like Weakling, Deafheaven have changed things with this record—black metal won’t be the same now that it’s been released. Of course, folks will argue over just how black metal—or even metal—Sunbather is, and will discuss the “un-metal” pink cover art and the fact that Clarke could probably be a J. Crew model. These kinds of arguments are irrelevant. Instead, try focusing on how much better Sunbather is than any other black metal album released this year, and how it’s, by far, one of the best in any genre. Or, maybe, just talk to your friends about what it feels like to listen to a modern classic.
