DEAFHEAVEN
“Taking it out of the forest and making it real…”
Deafheaven were last year’s loudest quiet success story.
Formed by George Clarke [vocals] and Kerry McCoy [guitars/bass] after decamping to San Francisco in 2009, the band signed to Jacob Bannon’s Deathwish Inc in 2010, before releasing their debut record, Roads to Judah, a year later. Merging extended passages of post-rock melodicism with straight-up blasting black metal, Roads… was immediately met with critical acclaim within and beyond the immediate extreme metal scene.
That record, excellent as it was, gave little indication of the scope of its follow-up, this year’s Sunbather. Sunbather was – is – an amazing record, as quietly evocative as it is relentlessly crushing, and certainly one of the most comprehensively realised and refreshing full-lengths of recent years (bolstered in no small part by the drumming of semi-permanent new member Dan Tracy). Preceding its release, hearing the track Dream House for the first time was startling; a confluence of sonic tropes so well melded, so affecting for it, that it felt as exciting as the first time we heard Rites of Spring or, god forbid, Thursday as teenagers. It was black metal, of a definable sort, but at the same time a million miles from it: encompassing, iridescent and without sounding like any particular attention had been paid to the genre’s often rigid confines and stylistic singularities, discarding the ‘traditional’ BM aesthetics of wind-whipped natural expanses, the occult and esoteric cultural asceticism, for something immediate and real. These were creative sentiments reflected to a fuller extent within the album proper, as well as through its stark live iteration.
Speaking to Crack before their second sold-out show at Dalston’s Birthdays in the space of two weeks, it quickly becomes clear how determinedly set apart from black metal’s central KVLT pathways McCoy and Clarke are, and just how driven by notions of an artistic and personal honesty over limiting and contrived insular self-definition their output is.
Sunbather is very different to your average black metal record, though it carries many of the recognisable tropes of the genre. The additional post-rock influences are obvious, but there’s a lot of European screamo in there too.
George Clarke: We both understood that we didn’t want to just make a traditional black metal record for any of our records. Our palette is too extensive to hold ourselves to one style, and I think the both of us would get bored if we did. But we don’t have a big philosophy behind the band or anything. We’re not trying to purposefully ruffle feathers or anything of that sort. We just like what we like. That’s where Roads to Judah came from, where Sunbather comes from and where we’ll continue to come from. Kerry has a term, ‘ADD Metal’, which totally makes sense because we’re always switching it up or wanting to do something different; no riffs repeat, things like that.
Kerry McCoy: Borrowing from different genres and piecing it together as what works for a cohesive song. In Dream House there’s this kind of chaotic second or third riff, where I really remember telling Dan ‘You should do a Funeral Diner-type beat’ and he threw something like that in. There was a time in my youth where I loved Orchid, Funeral Diner and Yaphet Kotto, but I don’t really listen to it a lot now. I think it’s just a thing of borrowing elements from post-rock, shoegaze, black metal, screamo and even, on this record, a lot of pop and rock, like Cranberries and Foo Fighters.
What is it ‘about’, from a lyrical or narrative perspective? It feels more personal than Roads to Judah, which still had a slightly obtuse, mystical vibe at times.
GC: Roads to Judah was very personal as well, but with Sunbather I wanted to make something that was completely self-reflective. Deafheaven’s never been anything other than a total personal product of our psyches. It has nothing to do with anything else other than the way the two of us feel. And lyrically, that’s what I went for. There’s multiple themes but they all have to do with my life and people in it. I always find it interesting when people connect with the lyrics, because it’s just for me. Musically, lyrically, the stage show … everything is very selfish and personal.
Regarding the two instrumental tracks on the album: the first has a reading of a passage from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and the second has field recordings of a drug deal and a preacher. What was the significance of these? What does that initial passage bring to the record?
GC: The Kundera reading is a small passage that deals with that character’s extreme insecurity and his romantic faults. That’s a part of the record lyrically; themes that deal with romantic failures and your own personal reasons for that happening. You’re essentially at fault for these things, because you have deep-seated insecurities so you react with infidelity, say, or things like that; things that shadow the fact that you’re so insecure and narcissistic. Above all I just felt that it would add a really cool dynamic to the harshness of that instrumental.We asked our friend Stefan [aka Alcest’s Neige] to read it.
KM: The idea behind the second track, as with the first, was trying to compare or juxtapose things. With this, it’s comparing a field recording I made of a drug deal happening with a field recording of a street preacher that I took in San Francisco behind this very woozy, reverse-sounding delay stuff. It’s the juxtaposition of two ideas of hell, two people caught in this inescapable version of personal hell. This guy has to sell this stuff on the street every day, and the street preacher is screaming about it to people.
With this record, its lyrics, visual aesthetic and those transitional tracks, there’s far more of a sense of the urban – and particularly the suburban – than is common in black metal, a genre that’s often obsessed with natural or esoteric realms. Is Sunbather a ‘city’ record?
GC: 100 per cent. I feel that you can’t talk about anything other than your surroundings. And when I talk about the suburban atmospheres, that’s because I moved away from the city for a while to clear my head, and I got this different perspective of life. But in the city you have your typical urban struggles. You live in a poor artist community, you’re a young adult figuring it out, the typical trials and tribulations of that lifestyle. That’s something I took from Bay Area bands before us.
KM: Taking it out of the forest and making it real … showing that you can make this kind of music and not be some dude who lives in a cabin. It’s very relatable, emotional music. When you put it in the right context you can really express yourself, things that you’re going through and things that everyone is dealing with.
Do you appreciate these bands that fixate on disconnected themes?
KM: Yeah of course. I just appreciate it when people, from the very outsider point of view, appear to be keeping it real. At least they’re being honest about it. I prefer that over a guy who lives in the suburbs in the Bay Area but who’s talking about runes and Pagan stuff.
GC: It’s all about the appreciation of honesty. Certain bands pull it off excellently, and there’s a slew of others that just front. It’s astonishing how many people are just not honest and how many people are quick to ridicule those who are. That’s been one of our biggest things, and we’ve got a lot of flack for talking about the things we do and having the outlook that we have on certain issues. But all I’m doing is being honest. There’s no reason to talk about forests. I hate camping.
What’s your take on the shadier corners of the genre, such as National Socialist Black Metal?
KM: There’s a difference between merely accepting that these things exist and appreciating them for their intrinsic value even if you don’t agree with it. And there’s a difference between listening and actually supporting those bands, giving them your money, wearing their shirts. Hate Forest has cool riffs, but I don’t agree with anything they say. Not only do I not agree, I don’t understand or know what the dude is talking about when he talks about elder gods or the pure race. I just want to hear some hard vocals over some cool riffs.
More and more is being written about black metal being appropriated as a “yuppie marketing tool”. You recently played the Pitchfork Music Festival in Paris, an objectively leftfield addition to that bill, and you’ve been covered by magazines like SPIN. How do you feel about BM being disseminated through these avenues?
GC: Here’s the thing: the person that understands that the most is me. I know that sounds arrogant, but the person who is going to understand both sides of the coin is the person who is directly involved with those two sides. And I would say that it is weird. Us playing Pitchfork is weird. We are a sore thumb. But it’s not negative.
KM: It boils down for me to two points. One, we’ve never sought any of these things out, we’ve literally only accepted opportunities that have come to us. I have always felt we have yet to make a choice that I disagree with. And second of all, anyone that thinks, ‘oh, they’re ruining my thing’: it was never yours in the first place.
GC: And the people we respect the most have always shown us mutual respect. So I’ve never felt like we were doing anything wrong. We have Justin Broadrick [highly influential industrial artist behind Godflesh and Jesu] saying things like ‘I like your record, you guys are doing cool shit’. In the whole realm of music, there’s so many people who have opinions that have no idea about anything. On a few occasions we’ve been attacked for ‘gentrifying’ black metal or something. Gentrifying? I don’t think we’re a soft band by any means. We have pretty passages but we are a metal band. Pitchfork and all that? Yeah, it’s weird but I think it’s cool. It’s good that there’s diversity; why would you ever argue against diversity?
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Sunbather is out now via Deathwish
Words: Thomas Howells
Photos: Hannah Godley
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