Album review: Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power

It is often the simplest move that comes as the biggest surprise. Complicated and challenging in both sound and intent as Deafheaven’s last album was, 2021’s Infinite Granite, it was also the sort of thing you’d expect them to eventually do, especially following the Oasis/Paul Weller touches of 2018’s brilliant Ordinary Corrupt Human Love. To wit: they almost entirely dropped the metal from their sound, singer George Clarke stopped screaming, and instead used tools seemingly handed to them by Radiohead and ’80s British post-punk to create an album that was different but also completely them.

Four years later, an absence of the raging black metal and calculated heaviness that make up two big branches of what the San Francisco quintet do has, apparently, made the heart grow fonder. Six albums in, Deafheaven have made both their heaviest and most balanced, rounded record, perhaps ever.

George told Kerrang! recently that onstage something felt somewhat missing not having the moments of whitewater ferocity to get swept away in. Lonely People With Power has loads of them. First track proper Doberman raises the curtain with an aggression that’s both startling and stately. On Magnolia, they lead with an icy, thrashing riff that nods to Norwegian progressive black metal legends Enslaved, while towards the album’s end Winona guns ahead on a blastbeat before widening out into something not a million miles away from the glassy melodies of Svalbard.

Of course, this being Deafheaven, there are a million other shades of sound to work through as well. The Garden Route sees them drifting on a pleasant, glistening guitar closer to Interpol than Immortal, while the eruption on the second half of Amethyst is pre-rolled by a quietude somewhere between Opeth and American Football. All of this is put together with great care, so that each element is its own, without jarring against its neighbour, ably exploring the themes of power and its motivators and effects.

All of which is very Deafheaven. But there’s a gleaming shine on everything that fills it all with vitality. Far from a step back, or attempt to redress something, a return to heaviness is simply the next piece of the picture. That you can hear them fair running towards it with refreshed enthusiasm for such things only makes it sing all the louder.

Surprising? Yeah. But then again, you should have learned to expect such things from Deafheaven by now.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Enslaved, Converge, Blood Incantation

Lonely People With Power is released on March 28 via Roadrunner