It’s hard to believe that San Francisco’s Deafheaven have reached their fifteenth year. Pivotal in shaping the whole “blackgaze” scene, it feels as if they’ve been around forever, yet there’s also a freshness surrounding the band that renders them totally contemporary. Their sixth long player, Lonely People With Power, walks a fine line between honouring the past and looking to the future and as such, it stands as one of the band’s best.
When approaching a Deafheaven album it’s always best to expect the unexpected, but the introduction that is opening instrumental ‘Incidental I’ stopped me in my tracks. It’s sixty seconds of pure discombobulation which disorientates the listener and leaves them exposed for the following ‘Doberman’. Baring it’s teeth and crazed with bloodlust, this finds the band in classic Deafheaven mode; lurching straight for the throat George Clarke’s vocals are particularly caustic and could corrode even the toughest substance. After experimenting with clean singing on the band’s previous album (2021’s Infinite Granite), this album finds him on more familiar ground, but that’s not to say he’s regressing, far from it. There’s still the same type of exploration that characterised his early career, his vocals are still versatile, becoming an instrument within itself and adding dark shades to the band’s already dark sound. There’s still room for clean singing, such as on ‘Heathen’ where, buried deep in the mix, they seem to emanate from another dimension, but mostly he deals in the hard stuff and on an album that’s hard as nails, it makes the perfect fit.
The ability to create a sense of time and place that Deafheaven have always been able to muster is used to great effect here, and no more so than on the claustrophobic ‘Incidental II’. With the aid of guest artist Jae Matthews, Deafheaven take the listener to a dark place with the walls slowly closing in and the fine veil separating this world from the next slowly pulling apart. It means that when the following ’Revelator’ kicks in, it kicks in hard; the sonic shift between the two is both stark and startling, and immediately pulls us from our altered state. As such, Lonely People With Power is the type of album that’s best consumed in one sitting to fully appreciate its ebb and flow as the band lift us up on the tumultuous wings of ‘Body Behavior’ one moment then drop us down to earth with the darkly ambient ‘Incidental III’ (featuring a guest appearance from Paul Banks).
The blackgaze genre has afforded Deafheaven an exorbitant amount of musical freedom, and they’ve certainly put it to good use on Lonely People With Power, an album that rivals their past work and sets the standard for others to follow.
- Lonely People With Power is released via Roadrunner Records on 28th March 2025.
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Track List:
- Incidental I
- Doberman
- Magnolia
- The Garden Route
- Heathen
- Amethyst
- Incidental II
- Revelator
- Body Behavior
- Incidental III
- Winona
- The Marvelous Orange Tree
