Deafheaven Find Joy in the Chaos

Listen to this article

Deafheaven make beautifully menacing music. It’s in their DNA, as their songs are designed to make you feel something—whether that’s soaring toward the heavens on Sunbather’s “Dream House,” or plummeting directly into hell in New Bermuda’s “Brought to the Water.” At the heart of Deafheaven is a push and pull between blackgaze brutality and lush dream pop—a hue of pink cutting through the dark. It’s what has endeared them to fans beyond the world of heavy metal music for more than a decade.

Their live show is loudly ferocious and religiously cathartic, and at the center of it all is vocalist George Clarke. On stage, he is an imposing figure—his height, steely build and icy stare match the cinematic, chaotic energy of the music he’s singing, as his body bends and lurches while he conducts a ravenous crowd caught in the palm of his hand. Clarke’s shrieking vocals explode through gritted teeth, his face contorts and his eyes bulge while he shouts and growls. Sometimes, he looks downright intimidating. However, when I speak with Clarke over Zoom in February, he is anything but. He is thoughtful, precise and appreciative. At one point, his cat even makes a brief appearance. He’s at home, both figuratively and literally, and no signs point to him having just made one of the (musically) heaviest records of his career.

Today, Deafheaven have released their sixth studio album, Lonely People With Power, their first for Roadrunner—the label home to metal artists like Slipknot, Type-O Negative, Code Orange and Turnstile. It is their most confident and direct set of songs yet, combining everything Deafheaven does best and more. Up until now, every record they’ve made could be described as a reaction to its predecessor. After the attention-grabbing Roads to Judah (2011) and their immaculate breakthrough Sunbather (2013), Deafheaven doubled down on thrash metal with 2016’s New Bermuda, before following that up with the widescreen post-rock of 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love.

Most Popular

Then, in 2021, the band changed direction on Infinite Granite, which saw the quintet—Clarke, Kerry McCoy (guitar), Daniel Tracy (drums), Shiv Mehra (guitar/synths) and Chris Johnson (bass)—softening their edges a bit by exploring the more ethereal part of their sound. It was a polarizing shift for the band. For those who couldn’t get into the black metal vocal delivery, here was an album that channeled Depeche Mode and Slowdive more than it did, say, Weakling or Leviathan. “Infinite Granite was born from a period of restlessness that we were feeling in the band,” Clarke says. “Our songwriting, in a lot of ways, started to feel formulaic. We were not listening to as much metal at the time, and we were getting kind of tired of ourselves.”

Infinite Granite was a record Deafheaven needed to make, with Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, Nine Inch Nails, M83) adding a bit of heft and sheen to the production. “We were lucky enough to find Justin, who was really instrumental in pulling that together and helping us refine our songwriting and build new tools, in terms of song structuring and the vocal delivery,” Clarke explains. It may be an outlier in the band’s discography, but it’s a great album nonetheless, one that Clarke says the band is still quite proud of. Yet, while touring Infinite Granite around the world, he and his bandmates found themselves retreating to the music they cut their teeth on, playing less new stuff and adding more visceral deep cuts, like “Black Brick” and “Gifts For The Earth,” back into their setlists. “Throughout the touring cycle, we were playing older material, and we found that those were the moments where we felt most engaged and excited,” Clarke continues. “As much as we love Infinite Granite, it was sort of revealed to us that we love having guitars and we love going fast and we love blast beats. That is the soul of the band.”

Clarke says that revisiting Sunbather for the band’s 10th anniversary shows in 2023 helped them rekindle that flame for making heavier music. During soundchecks, they would jam and play around with riff ideas. “Magnolia” was one of the first tracks to emerge from those moments. “The riff was actually totally different, as many of them are when they start out,” Clarke recalls. “We were playing that the beginning of that song for like every soundcheck, and at the end of the 45 seconds, or whatever that we had written, everyone would start laughing and [remember], ‘Oh, yeah, this is super fun.’”

He continues, “I think what’s important about those times is that, for this record, they can indicate a direction.” Deafheaven would jam on one or two ideas throughout the tour, solidifying a direction for each of them. Compared to the pandemic-trapped songwriting process for Infinite Granite, Clarke says the band had more time to develop the songs for Lonely People With Power together while on the road and in practice spaces. By the summer of 2024, the band brought the demos that would make up Lonely People to Meldal-Johnsen.

When McCoy and Clarke originally enlisted Meldal-Johnsen to produce Infinite Granite, the producer was expecting something more metal, but, to his surprise, the band was looking for a more spacious sound akin to M83’s Junk, which he produced in 2016. It wasn’t exactly what he—or the band’s followers—was expecting out of a new Deafheaven record, but it pushed the band’s sounds towards bold new horizons. Three years later, Meldal-Johnsen would be tasked with producing a heavier Deafheaven record. “He loved the songs,” Clarke says, smiling. “Early on, he mentioned that we were making something that felt really inspired. We kind of hit the ground running after he heard the songs initially. He was like ‘okay, I was in before, but now I’m fully in.’”

Bands grow and evolve, and if you’re lucky enough to be doing this for 15 years, you’ll have naturally learned some lessons along the way. While Infinite Granite may not be the consensus pick for Deafheaven’s best album, it might be their most important, since it became a true launch point for the band’s unwillingness to settle. Lonely People With Power sees them flexing their muscles in a way they haven’t since their run from Roads to Judah through New Bermuda, and Meldel-Johnsen’s bombastic production brings a newness to an already familiar volume. There are no punches pulled on these songs, no Oasis-like breakdowns or piano-driven interludes. Clarke’s screaming is also very much back and, aside from the scaled-back trio of “Incidentals” interludes—two of which feature Boy Harsher’s Jae Matthews and Interpol’s Paul Banks—Lonely People is a relentless onslaught of metal.

Despite the band’s past remarks about never wanting to make an album that sounded like New Bermuda again, “Magnolia” and the punishing “Revelator” would sound right at home on that record. However, the songwriting here is sharper and more direct than anything Deafheaven has done before, abandoning the repetitive assault of guitars that hold a song like “Vertigo” back. “One of the things that sort of drove the making of this record was doing the Sunbather Tour, and we’re playing ‘Vertigo.’ I love ‘Vertigo,’ but during the ending of it, we were like, ‘Okay, all right, we’re going another time through,’” he laughs. “At that time, that’s what we wanted to do, just hammering it. But that had its moment, it’s good, but as the songwriters we are now, we can create the same emotional impact that we desire from ourselves without needing to go a full repetition more.”

Clarke is also quick to mention that one of the main differences between Sunbather or New Bermuda and Lonely People With Power is, simply, that the band is in a better headspace now than they were in 2015. They got sober, grew up and honed their craft along the way. “Honestly, a lot of it is just a mental clarity about what we’re doing,” he says, before carefully adding: “And I say this with love and respect for all of our records, but there is an amateurism there that I can clearly see, in terms of the song structure—how long things go and how there’s some riff stacking there—starts and stops, things that weren’t necessarily thought through as well as they could have been because, at that time, we were not thinking super clearly.”

I ask Clarke if the heaviness of Lonely People With Power is a reaction to the gentler Infinite Granite (even though that one did have “Mombasa,” one of the “ultimate Deafheaven songs,” as he puts it). Clarke pauses for a second. “To be honest with you,” he continues, “this record, probably more than anything, is our most non-reactionary album. It’s our most confidently put together record.” This confidence (and not to mention the heft) is immediately apparent in the de-facto opener “Doberman” and the urgent “Body Behavior,” which Clarke says reminds him a bit of New Bermuda’s “Gifts For The Earth.” Deafheaven have taken what they’ve done for 10+ years and cut out any meandering fat, which makes for a sharper end product—like the great single “Heathen,” which Clarke describes to me as “ Infinite Granite meets the Demo EP”:

“[Lonely People With Power] is a better version of some of the first material we were writing,” he reflects. “To be able to go and listen that far back and appreciate things from that time that we were doing and then apply those in a modern context, I think it’s really cool. I think, because of that general feeling throughout making this, it was the most relaxed we’ve ever been [in the studio]. Every record has its stresses, you know, but there wasn’t this need to throw away the past or to try and reinvent ourselves. It was more of a reflection of the appreciation for who we are.”

“Amethyst,” Clarke’s favorite track on Lonely People, came together from a lot of struggle, he says. “I think it was rewritten more than any other on the record. We have, like, 20 versions of this song.” Like the best Deafheaven material, “Amethyst” waltzes and churns before erupting into fiery chaos by its end, when Mehra and McCoy drag and stack their guitars on top of a rumbling backline from Johnson and Tracy. “It’s a classic Deafheaven song,” Clarke declares. “It has all the elements that we use, but it’s just done in a really well-structured way. I really love the ending.”

Sequenced as the centerpiece to the record, “Amethyst” thematically encapsulates everything about Lonely People—from the artwork and video rollout on social media to the lyric, especially, as Clarke’s narrator grapples with familial trauma much like he did on “The Pecan Tree” from Sunbather. On the latter, Clarke lamented being unable to escape his father’s shadow: “I am my father’s son / I am no one / I cannot love / It’s in my blood.” “Amethyst” seems to directly speak to that line, as Clarke screams, “Wondering if I could ever wind up being him / He’s not me! He’s not me! / All this daydreaming without sympathy” before the song begins its descent into blown-out chaos.

I ask Clarke if any of the new material is explicitly autobiographical, or if Lonely People is his most personal record yet. “It’s all autobiographical, outside ‘Revelator,’ which is sort of this outlier lyrically,” he says. “I’ve always used the band as sort of a vessel for real personal expression. I think that’s part of what makes us us—discussing the personal in a pretty naked way.” But who are these “lonely people with power” and “spiritless leaders” who “tremble in towers,” as Clarke puts it on “Revelator”? Based on the album title alone, one would be forgiven for assuming that he’s talking about the current gaggle of politicians and billionaires hellbent on destroying the very fabric of society but with Deafheaven, it’s never been that simple. To Clarke, writing about politicians or billionaires alone isn’t interesting, but exploring the depths of our shortcomings is. Throughout the songs on Lonely People With Power, there is a common desperation for connection and empathy, something the power-hungry severely lack.

“In reading about history and reading about major figures—politicians, industrialists and these captains of industry types—in this quest for power, people that really tried to amass influence are often lacking community and personal connection,” Clarke says. “There is a spiritual vacancy there that needs to be filled with this lust.” He is quick to point out, too, that there is a version of lonely people in everyone, not just in those with power. He reveals that part of the record’s heft lies in the conversations around what gets passed along and inherited between generations, “life lessons and knowledge and what your parents teach you and what your teachers teach you, and how these people’s often wounded perspectives shape your worldview and how they themselves are too, in their own capacity, lonely people with power.”

Trees and water have become a continuous thread on Deafheaven records since the beginning—starting with Roads to Judah’s “Tunnel of Trees” before reappearing in “The Pecan Tree” on Sunbather, the gentle ocean sounds that bookend Ordinary Corrupt Human Love and during Infinite Granite’s “Mombasa.” Both of these elements appear again on Lonely People With Power via “The Marvelous Orange Tree,” yet another triumphant album closer in a catalog full of them. Where “Mombasa” ended Infinite Granite in a fiery, nuclear explosion, “The Marvelous Orange Tree” swells with grace. I ask Clarke whether there is a meaning in his references to the ocean and pecan and orange trees. He smirks. “A lot of making this record was recognizing and appreciating things that we liked to do. We live by the ocean, and Kerry surfs almost daily and he camps a lot. Stuff like that—streams and ocean water—these things are a big part of his life. So, he really likes to include these things in our albums because to him, they’re very indicative of his soul.”

And the trees?

“To be honest with you, I wish that there was some sort of grand scheme,” Clarke admits. “[‘The Pecan Tree’] and [‘The Marvelous Orange Tree’] are very emotionally resonant. They both deal with a confrontation of self and a kind of dour acceptance. I think there’s definitely an emotional tie there, and I like that.”

Perhaps what strings these albums together then is not necessarily literal trees or water, but the yearning to understand who we are as human beings and why we are the way we are. On Lonely People, Clarke seems to still be searching for his answer through an empathetic gaze, both unto himself and towards the people who raised him. Perhaps he’ll always be searching for answers, but that’s what Deafheaven does. Their soul is still being fleshed out. And, for 15 years, the band has never settled, always pushing the boundaries of what their music is capable of. What started out as a black metal project between Clarke and McCoy has matured into something way beyond just a simplistic genre classification. Deafheaven have totally entered into a league of their own, and Lonely People With Power is their legacy.

Jeff Yerger is a freelance music writer, musician, and hockey-loving sicko based in Charlotte by way of Philadelphia by way of NJ whose work has also appeared in Stereogum, SPIN, the Recording Academy, Treble, and others. He enjoys both the Collins and Gabriel eras of Genesis equally, and would very much like the New York Rangers to win a Stanley Cup sometime soon. Also, Go Birds.

Deafheaven Find Joy in the Chaos

Vocalist George Clarke talks about the pitfalls of those who lust after control and how the band rediscovered their love for heavy music again on their confident sixth album, Lonely People With Power.