Review: Deafheaven at The Rechabite

Deafheaven at The Rechabite
w/ SPY, Gloam
Sunday, July 5, 2026

Californian black metal masters Deafheaven kicked off their Australian tour at The Rechabite on Sunday night.

The five-piece returned to our shores in support of their excellent sixth studio album, Lonely People With Power, a record that marks a return from the milder, more accessible shoegaze of Infinite Granite to their most brutal sound.

If the venue wasn’t sold out, it was very close, with people streaming in from the wintry night to bask in the warmth of extreme metal.

Deafheaven were scheduled to arrive with a triple treat of international acts, with Californian hardcore outfit SPY and Philadelphia shoegaze band Nothing lined up as support. Unfortunately, Nothing were a late withdrawal from the tour, but that gave Perth’s own shoegaze act Gloam the opportunity to step in.

As the crowds poured into the venue’s Main Hall, the local four-piece warmed up the room with lush tones that filled the space up to the third-floor balcony. Reminiscent of the likes of DIIV, hubris and, admittedly, Nothing themselves, the growth in Gloam’s sound is captured on their brand new single Tunnel to Our Bliss, and indeed it was a blissful way to set the stage for what was to come.

Next up, SPY were an entirely different beast. The group brought everything you could want from hardcore: thick guitars, shrieking feedback, pounding drums and guttural vocals. The Bay Area band knew all the hardcore tricks in the book, then added a few of their own. Arriving with plenty of new material from last year’s record Seen Enough, the five-piece were firing on all cylinders but knew how to switch gears enough to keep things interesting. It was clear many in the crowd were here as much for SPY as the headliners, and they found full voice on the fan favourite Afraid of Everything, as buzzsaw guitar riffs and a sludgy rhythm section provided the perfect backdrop for Peter Pawlak’s hellish howl, with the vocalist sounding every bit as dangerous as Gulch or Show Me The Body at their fiercest.

Then it was time for the main event, and much like their last Perth visit at the Rosemount in 2022, it was difficult to get a clear view of Deafheaven with the excited crowd pressing in close.

“We’re playing a lot of new songs tonight,” said George Clarke, and he wasn’t lying. Kicking off with the big numbers in Doberman and Magnolia, almost all of Lonely People With Power was performed on the night. The band are clearly pumped with the new record and to be playing it live, describing Body Behaviour as a favourite.

It was as though they ventured into shoegaze territory with Infinite Granite, picked up a bag of new tricks, then brought them back to expand their already formidable sound.

As exhilarating as the heavier moments were, Deafheaven—and much of black metal’s enduring strength—lies in giving songs room to breathe. That was never more apparent than on Amethyst, where restrained clean guitar weaved together with looping textures to build tension before the band erupted again.

Witnessing Deafheaven live is something else entirely. It’s not just the music that makes for such a spectacle but also the sheer physical exertion involved. George Clarke is relentless on the mic from the opening note, while the pummelling drums drive both the songs and Daniel Tracy himself to their limits.

Guitarists Kerry McCoy and Shiv Mehra, each wielding gleaming gold-top Les Pauls, locked seamlessly together, while bassist Chris Johnson stayed firmly in the pocket, acting as the connective tissue between melody and rhythm.

If the pounding, almost thrash-metal riffage of Revelator wasn’t enough, it was finally time to “make the fucking earth move” with perennial fan favourite Dream House, the song that, for many, set the template and the benchmark for everything that followed for the band. It was one of the night’s highlights, with propeller-like blast beats and Clarke’s guttural vocals driving the song relentlessly to its conclusion. At times the drumming was so impossibly fast that, rather than moshing, people simply stood swaying, mesmerised in a trance.

When George Clarke descended into the crowd, he was instantly mobbed by fans. At one point he even split the audience like Moses parting the Red Sea before the pit crashed back together, swallowing the unbelievers. Signing off for the night, Clarke promised, “We’ll be back with new music,” before bowing out with another standout from the latest record, Winona.

Then, as the still-buzzing crowd returned into the winter night, it was as if the mist had cleared and the spell had lifted. Few bands command beauty and brutality like Deafheaven, and Sunday night proved their almost peer-less status as masters of both.

BRAYDEN EDWARDS

Photos by Stu McKay