Deafheaven - Lonely People With Power (Album Review)
Wednesday, 02 April 2025
Written by Emma Wilkes
Photo: Nedda Afsari
Though it remains a divisive record, Deafheaven’s ‘Infinite Granite’ might be remembered in time as a worthwhile experiment. The blackgaze pioneers sanded down their spiky edges into something softer and fuzzier – less ‘black’, more ‘gaze’ – and came the closest they’ve ever come to sounding genuinely soothing. But if it would be wrong to call ‘Lonely People With Power’ a return to form it is a restating of purpose: here they are back to sounding lethal yet beautiful and, crucially, heavy.
There are a few traces of ‘Infinite Granite’ here — Heathen’s dreamy, celestial verses or the blissful The Garden Route, where past and present shake hands — and there is a sense that the Californian quartet are communicating the absence of regret over what they created then. But, equally, it’s clear that their primary focus is on expanding again, brining a level of intensity to bear upon the things they learned last time out.
Amethyst takes on the quality of a blackgaze waltz, for example, its riffs swaying and trembling under George Clarke’s familiar shrieks to the heavens.
That mission to evolve persists even in a trio of interludes — Interpol’s Paul Banks delivers his dialogue during one of them in a matter not dissimilar from Neige’s narration on the ‘Sunbather’ cut Please Remember, while another embraces a chilly, Chelsea Wolfe-esque atmosphere before plunging into something hellish.
‘Lonely People With Power’ might be exploratory but it is also straight up the best thing Deafheaven have put out in a little while. Doberman is decptively accessible at first, its bright major-chord riffing the first stage in a gradual descent into a truly infernal sound, and later there is the standout Body Behavior, a feverish song detailing a man showing a younger boy pornography.
As the story accelerates, and the boy’s empathetic, romantic tendencies are ground down to unfeelingness, it explodes in intensity, the drums roiling beneath the churning riffs. This pacy, varied hour of music feels like a gift. At the top of their game, as they are here, Deafheaven are a truly stunning band.
Deafheaven Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Mon June 16 2025 - BRISTOL Trinity Centre
Tue June 17 2025 - BRIGHTON Chalk
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