In the years after Deafheaven released their seminal masterpiece Sunbather, the group has been caught in a sort of tug of war between straying too far from what works and sounding too much like themselves. Even their best moments post-Sunbather have felt self-conscious about how well they were riding the line. From the other side of Infinite Granite though, it feels like that sonic departure was the palate cleanser they needed.
Lonely People in Power finds the group as self-assured as ever, offering up a comprehensive blend of their different modes that feels less like an attempt to fix what isn’t broken than an embrace of everything they’ve done.
2021 was a spectacularly immense year for music. It felt like all of the bands who weren’t able to tour last year spent 2020 writing and recording new albums. Then this year, they released them.
than Deafheaven.
Since my second or third year of college, the surest way to keep me from listening to something has been to drop the word “metal” in its description. Metal (and by extension, hardcore) was something I had enjoyed while I was following the scene, but I had grown out of it and moved on to the greener, more mature pastures of folk, electronica, and art rock.