Deafheaven
Lonely People with Power
ROADRUNNER
ABOVE THE CURRENT
It’s not a paradox to say that Lonely People with Power—Deafheaven’s sixth full-length album—is as ferocious as it is ethereal. Because while those seem like two opposing extremes, they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Since forming in 2010, Deafheaven have often straddled that line, tempering their black-metal grotesqueries (and frontman George Clarke’s demonic vocals) with moments of sheer bliss. That’s something they began to do more frequently as their career progressed, but never at the expense of their heart of darkness.
Lonely People with Power both bucks and continues that trend. It contains some of the band’s most bleak and extreme black-metal moments (not least the fireball of “Magnolia” and the fiery furnaces of “Revelator”), but it also offers up some of their most tenderly fragile. In terms of the latter, the most notable examples are the first half of “Heathen” (which sounds like a cross between Radiohead and HEALTH before exploding in a deafening crescendo of black noise) and the majestic lilt of “Amethyst”—which also, unsurprisingly, builds into a glorious inferno before cooling down and fading out into a delicate sadness.
There are also three moments of hushed contemplation that aren’t really songs: “Incidental I,” “II,” and “III.” The first begins the album unceremoniously with a minute of near-droning and a ghostly, whimpering voice—a preamble that feeds into the blisteringly malevolent “Doberman.” But the second two are different; “Incidental II,” which features vocals by Jae Matthews of darkwave outfit Boy Harsher, is almost an anti-song. It’s little more than sparse ambience and Matthews’ vocals for three minutes before it becomes a television possessed by its own static, formless but still powerful. And then “Incidental III” features an unlikely spoken-word cameo from Interpol’s Paul Banks that could be from some dystopian near-future (if the present world wasn’t dystopian enough).
That then bleeds into the slow-moving swirl of “Winona,” a seven-and-a-half-minute epic that feels—like much of this album as a whole, in fact—like a summary of the band’s entire career to date. As it fades, the sound of rain marks the transition into closer “The Marvelous Orange Tree.” It’s a scorched-earth finale, the sound of peace after a natural disaster—or, perhaps more accurately, the sound of nothingness, of annihilation, of what comes after those lonely people who do indeed seem to be in power all over the world have had their way and destroyed us all. If only the consequences of their actions could be anywhere near this stirring and beautiful. Because this is an album that relishes in doing the unexpected, of moving forward without leaving the past behind—even if, ultimately, these songs know that that’s impossible.
