The desire for escape is central to Deafheaven. It’s often about attempting to escape cycles: the repetition of the everyday, things you’ve inherited, situations you don’t want to face, your very DNA. Maybe you can find temporary release through self-medication, day dreams, delusion, and maybe even art. Up to this point, though, something also seemingly central to Deafheaven’s music: the fact that no matter the approach you take, you can’t run away from yourself.
Deafheaven formed in the Bay Area in 2010 as the duo of childhood friends vocalist George Clarke and guitarist Kerry McCoy. Drummer Daniel Tracy joined in 2012, guitarist and keyboardist Shiv Mehra came on board in 2013, with bassist Chris Johnson joining in 2017. Together they’ve continually pushed what it means to make metal, they’ve also continued to feel just as open, honest, and soul-bearingly human as they did back in 2010.
The emotions that boil up in their songs are not vague or over-generalized: You see them as people, ones who are often struggling or failing, but people who are getting back up and wanting to keep going. This is especially true of the band’s sixth album, Lonely People With Power, Deafheaven’s first record in four years and their first for a new label. From Roads to Judah to their 2013 breakthrough Sunbather, a defining album for the heavy metal genre, through to 2015’s New Bermuda, 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, and 2021’s Infinite Granite, Deafheaven has never shied away from telling you exactly who they are: their humble beginnings, their battles with addiction, alienation, burnout, and depression. Autobiographical details surface and resurface throughout the songs like a breadcrumb trail: Sunbather was, in part, inspired by Clarke growing up in an apartment with his mother and brother without any money and wondering what it’d be like to have it. There’s also his realization that, like some of his family, he’s able to be emotionally cold, and not necessarily able to love. This returns, in full on, Lonely People With Power.
They wrap heavy human emotions in some of the most beautiful, dynamic music you’ll ever hear. As lineups have expanded and contracted, they’ve consistently experimented with and expanded their sound. And while there are certainly signatures to what they do—Clarke’s anguished screams, McCoy’s colorful layers of MBV-meets-Emperor guitar heroics, drummer Daniel Tracy’s blastbeats—it’s the heaviness of the emotion that defines the discography.
Deafheaven’s music feels like a project of accrual—on each album they fill new songs with elements of what they’ve learned in their earlier experiments. You hear echoes of past recordings in the howls of the present: the sun-dappled screamo histrionics of Roads to Judah are more fully realized in Sunbather’s pastel star-scapes; New Bermuda doubles down on the heaviest elements of both of those records; Ordinary Corrupt Human Love threads together elements of the soft and the heavy into an especially epic statement. Infinite Granite, often described simply as Deafheaven’s record with mostly clean vocals, compressed it all into something strikingly solid. That was true, but there was much more to it than that; listening to Lonely People, you can hear its echoes everywhere—and if you listen closely, you can find deeper ways back into it when you listen to it again.
Lonely People With Power is particularly cumulative. “A lot of making this album felt like doubling down on an identity it took a decade to fully understand,” Clarke explains. “Essentially staking claim to an assortment of ideas we’ve thrown together through the years that now feel cohesive. An identity we spent years crafting.”
While this has always been a part of what the band does, with Lonely People With Power there was a conscious decision to make something that felt like a representation of who they are now, both as a band and as people. Clarke goes further: “In the last decade, we made Sunbather and then it was like, ‘We’re not just this, we’re this.’ And we made New Bermuda. And it’s like, ‘We’re not just this, we’re this,’ and so on. There was always an effort to challenge ourselves, whereas with this one, there was actually a real comfort in looking back and feeling established in our own sound. Now that’s a broad sound, which is why there’s so many different things going on. Now that we really know who we are and we don’t feel the strain of self-challenging so much. The music is challenging alone in itself, we don’t need to overexert ourselves to prove a point. Kerry and I were like, ‘Let’s just do us to the most us we can do it.’”
On Infinite Granite, Deafheaven made a shift from the familiar to achieve a different sound and started working with Justin Meldal-Johnsen. Infinite Granite has a particularly solid, polished sound to it; there is so much depth and darkness to it. It feels like its title suggests: Meldal-Johnsen helped to produce some of the band’s heaviest atmospheres and tones, though it was not meant to be a traditionally heavy album. Meldal-Johnsen is back again on Lonely People With Power; on it, he’s able to let the emotion explode.
Clarke explains that the title Lonely People WIth Power came to him when he was reading about industrialists and technologists and considering how people who tend to amass influence, or want to amass influence, don’t often possess intimate connections. This sort of alienation can then shape their idea of humanity and how then they try to imbue themselves with power. “I think a lot of people who are seekers in this way tend to be morally ambiguous,” Clarke explains. “Some lonely people have mastered the idea of ephemeral relationships, and learned from them to be manipulative. The power in mastery can go both ways depending on the person.” There is very much a solitude and loneliness that comes with mastering your artistic craft, too. There can be loneliness that leads to mastery that leads to achievement that then spreads to a sort of positive influence. There can, as often, be the ugly side, where resentment or isolation takes over. Basically, power can lead people to double down on their worst impulses.
The “Lonely People” in the title also references other people who have an influence on our personal lives. It’s about parents, recognizing how their perspectives shape us and our worldview. “I sometimes use loneliness as a stand-in for ignorance,” Clarke says. “Sometimes your parents don’t know what they’re doing and they teach you things that they’ve been taught. It can be natural and not malicious. And so I was thinking about that. I was thinking about loneliness as a spiritual vacancy.”
The album largely suggests power can be negative, but gaining power over one’s own worst impulses, and righting the ship, is the bigger part of the record. Clarke notes that while his lyrics include a recognition of suicidal ideation, it’s a realization that there is life beyond the present. “It’s the idea of the panopticon as a cage of mirrors,” he explains. “How reflection can be deceptive. You trick yourself into thinking this is all there is.” So, no, maybe you can’t fully escape your DNA, but you also don’t need to be defined by it.
Returning to the closing lines of Sunbather—“I am my father’s son/ I am no one/ I cannot love/ It’s in my blood”—much of Lonely People With Power deals with masculinity: What men teach you, how men’s lessons affect your view of women and reality. Clarke looks at his father and his sobriety, his uncle’s funeral, and there is an image of Saturn eating his child. “Heathen” is a song about commitment issues. On “Body Behavior,” we see a father figure showing a boy pornography and using that as a misguided way to try to teach a kid something about the world. “I was thinking a lot about relationships between men,” Clarke says. “This is a very common experience and I don’t think really something that’s really often touched on is how actually pretty deeply affecting those kinds of ‘life lessons’ can be.”
The song “Magnolia” is a reference to the state flower of Mississippi, the place where Clarke’s uncle was buried. “‘Magnolia’s about my uncle’s struggles with depression and alcoholism,” he explains, “And my father’s the same, and they’re brothers, and it’s about how family sometimes can feel like looking into an unchanging reflection like their destiny is your destiny.”
Ultimately, Lonely People is a record that is anti-loneliness. It’s about finding less harmful ways to escape: your chosen family, your community, and even magic. “The Marvelous Orange Tree,” which closes Lonely People, is named after a trick by Houdin from the 1830s. Though that song is about suicide, it almost feels like it’s more about the beauty of the San Joaquin valley, the magesty of the trees and ravines. It feels like religious revelation.
No, you don’t have to feel this way. No, you’re not beholden to your family history. You can live in the present. Clarke explains: “Sometimes reflection can be deceptive when you’re doing it alone and when you’re in the vacuum and you create ideas for yourself that aren’t real. Lonely People With Power is about freeing yourself from the idea of destiny and reintroducing yourself in a healthier way.”
One of the compelling things about Deafheaven is that as much as they experiment, expand, shift, and regroup, and as much as they make music that feels 100% capable of melting the stars, they remain at their core the scruffy young punks they were when the band formed 15 years ago. That said, there’s a beautiful emotional growth in Lonely People With Power.
This is crystalized on “The Garden Route,” a love song that’s not a daydream about love, but an actual song about an actual love—and an actual road trip. Fittingly, it’s not the last song on the record. We don’t get some sappy cinematic finale. Not even close. Instead it shows up as song 4 of 12—after it we get songs about suicidal ideation, questioning life, songs that feature funerals and absences, songs that dig into embarrassing and scarring moments of youth. Life can sometimes feel like a movie, and Deafheaven’s music can soundtrack those moments, but nothing’s ever completely cut and dry. The band’s been examining, expanding, and distilling this territory for a long time, and they get that. In fact, it’s a particularly dark image (“With my endless illness/ walking into blackness”) that ends Lonely People With Power. So was everything that came before it meaningless? No, it’s a reminder that nothing’s perfect: As much work as we put in, as much as we try, we’re still human, which is ok, and life does continue to echo—even in the smallest of ways—until it stops.
