Lonely People With Power - Deafheaven: Review
Review by Lavender: Deafheaven are a once-divisive black metal band who made a huge splash in the first half of the 2010s by delivering a style of the notoriously insular genre that heavily incorporated elements of shoegaze and post-rock. That netted them tons and tons of critical acclaim, primarily centered around their 2013 masterpiece Sunbather, but also found them hit with some ultimately overblown backlash for their genre-bending approach to black metal. In the years since, they've spread those ambitions out even further with their previous album, 2021's Infinite Granite , shedding metal off almost entirely and focusing on dreamier indie rock and shoegaze. A year later, frontman George Clarke made heavy contributions to Alto Arc, an extremely experimental side project with a bizarre Mad Libs-style roster of contributors that I enjoyed a genuinely shocking amount. But now the band is back in full force, combining throttling black metal with expansive post-rock and dreamy la...