New Music (10.06.2015)

Deafheaven
New Bermuda

Departing from a schedule is pretty hard for yours truly to do, but when something as intensely epic as a new Deafheaven album appears, it's just that easy.

Deafheaven are clearly the best metal act currently racking up critical acclaim points, and with good reason. New Bermuda is an artistic masterpiece on par with their previous release, Sunbather, except here the beats hit faster, the guitars crash louder, and the weighty lyrics are as psychologically damaging as ever.

With great success comes great responsibility, a burden so frequently shouldered poorly by "groundbreaking" acts of past years: Sleigh Bells, Purity Ring, and Twin Shadow all come to mind; those bands and performers who implode under the pressure of staying on top. It's like Harvey Dent says, "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Such is the tragedy of the industry.

This is where Deafheaven consistently triumphs however, in the face of ever-mounting demands, their foundation of art and music first, and eschewing the checking of boxes for innocuous, inconsequential genre labels, has built them a sound they can easily reinforce and a market they easily corner: black metal even your mom can listen to.

By no means does that make Deafheaven, or New Bermuda "soft." Quite the opposite in fact. Where the lush guitar arrangements might have you thinking shoegaze-dream-pop, the constant, unyeilding drums and intense production are screaming doom metal. While frontman George Clarke's lyrics might have you thinking Camus-esque existentialism, the obviously harsh delivery will drive home the crushing despair that is a world without hope.

It is a rare thing to find a metal album, speed-, black-, sludge-, doom-, or otherwise, that one would describe as "gorgeous," but Deafheaven creates such an environment consistently and with the utmost care and precision. It's hard to stay on the top of the mountain, especially with as fickle a fan base as heavy metal brings to bear, but New Bermuda is the kind of disparate-audience-spanning, new-genre-defining frontispiece that even the most pugnacious of metalheads cannot deny.