Deafheaven’s Hope and Fury

A joy well acquainted with grief

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As I write this, I am listening to “Winona,” the second-to-last track from Deafheaven’s latest album, Lonely People with Power. Deafheaven’s genre is often classified as “black-gaze,” as in “black metal shoegaze.” I barely understand what this means, but I might try to classify it as the incongruous meeting of metal rock music with the more emotionally driven melodies, riffs, and general musical “introspection” that characterized the alternative and indie music of the early 2000s. There are premonitions of this kind of thing in some of the music of Sigur Rós. Consider the song “Glósóli,” for instance. Guitar-driven crescendos drive rather than thwart that song’s emotional resonance. You’d have to replace Jonsi’s contralto with relentless, undecipherable screaming, though, to approximate Deafheaven. And you would have to turn everything else up to eleven, too, particularly time signatures.

It is this incongruity between a music that is an almost unbearable noise: muscled, corded, and blunt, whose emotional signature combines urgency, unbridled anxiety, desperation, and unvarnished rage with a music of loss, melody, hope, and even transcendence that has led me to listen to the tracks “Dreamhouse” and “The Pecan Tree” almost once a day every day for the last three years. It will already be clear that I am not a music critic, still less possessed of a technical knowledge of the instruments and composition involved. I am simply a recipient and, as such, a kind of co-empath with Deafheaven. I will write in praise of them, even in dubious praise, since their allure continues to baffle and intrigue me.

Perhaps one reason I’ve grown to enjoy metal, and Deafheaven’s particular rendering of it, is its joie de combat. Let’s say, purely hypothetically, that you are the parent of a three-year-old and a seven-month-old. The seven-month-old does not sleep unless she is sleeping on you. You have a full-time job and multiple side hustles that require extensive focus and concentration. Caffeine will get you through the morning, but by the afternoon you are a shattered wreck of anxiety and exhaustion, prone to doomscrolling apathy instead of productive work. The best solution is sweat and metal. Mix, shake well, and the result is a bodily catharsis free of nicotine, alcohol, and whatever other drugs are ready to hand. Each day, you have to decide whether, if you’re going to go down, you’re going to go down guns blazing or with a whimper. Metal helps tilt the scales in the right direction.

There you are. You’ve slipped the bonds of your office and you are secure in the gym. High-quality noise-cancelling earbuds are now vibrating your entire head. For the first time all day, you exist as a body, albeit one ensconced in guitars with a limitless capacity to convey desperation and resolve. “Count it all joy, brothers” writes St. James, and the exultant excess in the opening minute of “Dreamhouse,” the ferocious riff in the middle of “Magnolia,” or the soaring catharsis of the final three minutes of “The Pecan Tree” are distinct flavors of a joy well acquainted with grief yet steeled in its resolve to exist. The key change in the fadeout at the end of “The Pecan Tree” strikes me as a stroke of genius in this regard: that song never actually ends. Somewhere, Deafheaven are still playing it, and maybe you can join them.