Review: Deafheaven’s Lonely People With Power
Deafheaven
Lonely People With Power
Roadrunner
Emerging four years after their last release, Deafheaven return under a new label (Roadrunner) for their sixth album, delivering Lonely People With Power and a return to their powerful, aggressively raw roots. In their inventive, evolving approach, the post-metal veterans yield what may be their best album among a discography spanning 15 years, reintroducing the band’s black metal intensity, contrasting 2021’s Infinite Granite and its softer, lush dream-pop tones.
Where Infinite Granite delivered seven tracks of clean, cathartic vocals and subdued sounds, Lonely People With Power returns to searing, tortured screams and hefty blast beats spanning 12 tracks on an exploration of ephemerality, emotional disconnection, and personal reckoning. Its heavy themes, bolstered by an unmistakable black metal ferocity and introspective shoegaze textures, harken back to the band’s seminal Sunbather LP.
Despite that thematic and stylistic shift, Lonely People With Power offers little opportunity to adjust. A brief introduction in Incidental I leads into the powerful and tormenting percussion of Doberman, which, bolstered by synth and a crescendo of strings, builds into a powerful finish. It’s just the beginning of an unrelenting listen that barely lets up across its expansive 62 minutes.
Magnolia follows, and here palm-muted guitars and pitch harmonics contrast deeper, guttural vocals from George Clark in a story of grief and existential reflection, establishing that this album is built out of years of crafting dark, heavy music. However, tracks like The Garden Route—a poetic love song—Heathen, and later, Winona, prove Deafheaven can still land lean, with emotional songs that draw from what the band learned creating Infinite Granite in a truly beautiful fashion.
The album ebbs and flows in harmony as opposed to conflict, with songs like Amethyst—one of the album’s strongest tracks sonically—and Incidental II building slowly into explosive, moving expressions. The latter, featuring haunting spoken-word vocals from Boy Harsher’s Jae Matthews, slows the entire album before dropping listeners back into the distorted vocals of Clarke and noisy, industrial synth sounds.
Revelator and Body Behaviour mark a return to the dark and symphonic, with gripping guitar hooks and scorching vocals galvanised by powerful percussion and catchy bass. The album’s hefty closer, The Marvelous Orange Tree, sums up Deafheaven’s ability to go all over the map stylistically, blending heavy reverb, clean vocals, and a slower pace to deliver a strong finish.
Lonely People With Power marks a fierce return to Deafheaven’s black metal roots while also drawing from new influences, with the band citing Krautrock, Radiohead, and Interpol as influential to the album’s sound. While being shaped by current culture and politics, the record also incorporates industrial noise, synth, choir, and spoken word, marking their most intensive and ambitious production yet. By balancing chaos and introspection, the record echoes the impact of Sunbather while pushing Deafheaven’s evolving sound to new emotional depths, making it stand out as the band’s most mature and impactful work to date.
A powerful synthesis of their past, Deafheaven have moved beyond genre labels, influences, and audience expectations. Now more than ever, they sound entirely and unmistakably like themselves.
JONO OUTRED