Review Summary: The hosts of Heaven melting trumpets now.
I'm bringing them bile
I'm clearing desires
Coins on their eyes
I'm clipping the flowers
Of spiritless leaders
Oh, they tremble in towers
Lonely people with power
Devoured by God
Weak men with rotting ideologies rule the world. The casual cruelty and sweeping scale at which the everyman is subjected to their will and wants is impossible to fully comprehend, yet the callous carelessness of their actions has become abundantly clear in the last few months thanks to the likes of a ketamine-addicted slug who wields a “chainsaw of bureaucracy” or the official White House account tweeting out AI art in the style of Miyazaki depicting the deportation of undocumented (or even perfectly legal!) people. It’s not enough that these people can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone; they are black holes that can never be full. How else can you explain, in the face of all this money and power, tearfully padding Path of Exile 2 stats for the approval of Fellow Gamers or holding T-Pain hostage in the studio with a broccoli cut to record a joke cover twenty years too late? These people aren’t happy; they are sad and numb and
lonely.
This backdrop is more or less the namesake for Deafheaven’s
Lonely People With Power, a dazzling triumph that finds the band not only escaping their own shadow to deliver the best work of their career, but will surely stand alongside the decade’s best with a vital and timely examination on the nature of power and empathy. The album’s weighty meditation on lust, masculinity, and guilt angles at shrinking the cosmos down to a rundown motel in the 90’s and telling a sort of original sin tale about a father’s misguided attempt at connection with his young son through sharing pornography and hiring an escort, and the trauma cycle beyond. More importantly though, it whips as
s.
Rather than completely evolve their sound as they’ve attempted to do with each post-
Sunbather release, Deafheaven have instead chosen to buckle down and sharpen the tools in their war chest. To be clear, the band isn’t standing still, but building skyward as the dozen offerings here pull from each and every bit of the band’s catalog to create a captivating listen that only gets better on repeat journeys. The metal is back in a big way, as George Clarke resurrects his banshee shrieks. He’s never sounded more demonic than the posture-correcting reveal on “Incidental II” or more urgent than the talk-bark adorning the Interpol-but-make-it-black-metal “Body Behavior.” Likewise, Kerry McCoy and Shiv Mehra concoct their most diabolical riffs to date with barn-burning pit anthems like “Magnolia” and “Doberman,” the latter having a stank-face inducing, shimmering breakdown. “Revelator” takes its position as the proxy title track seriously, sounding utterly apocalyptic with rising synths, bells, and oscillating cries that sound like they escaped hell itself. “Heathen” single-handedly puts 2021’s
Infinite Granite to shame working in that record’s post-punky sensibilities with clean vocals and debonair electronics, doing so with aplomb
and blastbeats, making that album’s entire conception feel like a rough sketch.
Still, as maligned as
Infinite Granite has been for being a bit of unnecessary Slowdive cosplay, it’s clear that the band have taken all the right lessons from their time playing dress up. The tighter songwriting has made each and every song here feel not only worthwhile, but vital to the construction of the album’s narrative. The “Incidental” trilogy of interludes are anything but, with the aforementioned “II” containing a seismic shift of darkness and “III” brilliantly delivering us to the album’s final quarter with blindingly bright synths over a spoken poem delivered by Interpol’s Paul Banks. If there’s a feeling of
Lonely People With Power merely being the strongest collection of songs that the band have produced yet, “Winona” and “The Marvelous Orange Tree” are what truly make the package shoot to the stratosphere into special territory. “Winona” is the most ambitious song that Deafheaven have put to tape, making good on its teasing, heavenly buildup with an actual choir and thunderous release. There are horror stories of drummer Daniel Tracy needing to submerge his arms in ice water to combat the brutality his arms endure during live performances and he does himself absolutely zero favors here, with one of his best performances to date, signaling that he is dutifully emptying the clip almost immediately upon the song picking up. “The Marvelous Orange Tree” makes good on the band’s history of having excellent finals by sounding impossibly huge, as if the album is sailing off into its “blue valley” sky, “with a head full of midnight” as its rapture is met with distant echoes and fading glimmers.
Lonely People With Power is a masterpiece that turns Deafheaven’s story on its head, leaving greyed out charcoal marks where
Sunbather was once penciled in. In fact, declaring it the band’s best work is probably the least interesting thing you could say about the album when there is so much thematic resonance to latch onto and seemingly endless points of musical intrigue packed into this dense of a package that will only continue to reveal itself in time. It’s hard to imagine anyone with even a passing interest in Deafheaven or blackgaze not finding
something to love here, if not taking the ride’s invitation to give in completely. I cannot possibly dream about where the band could go next from such a singular, all-encompassing work, but I will be keeping a close eye on the next Apple Keynote presentation to see where this album will be displayed.
