Lonely People With Power

About

In following up their 2021 album, <i>Infinite Granite</i>, Deafheaven have chased a seismic shift with a melding of strength. Whereas <i>Infinite Granite</i> almost completely abandoned the band’s black-metal roots for clean vocals and a lush shoegaze sound, <i>Lonely People with Power</i> combines elements of both. “To me, this is the ultimate Deafheaven album,” vocalist George Clarke tells Apple Music. “I think it harnesses all these disparate ideas that we’ve had over our entire career in the best way that they’ve ever been done. While it does include sonic touchstones from our earlier album, it also includes some from our more recent material—just done in a way that, I think, is smarter. If we were to stop at this point, I think this is the record that would best explain what it is we do.” Lyrically, <i>Lonely People with Power</i> explores exactly what the title implie. “Initially, there was this broad scope that recognized that people who tend to want to amass power, people who tend to seek influence, are also people who tend to lack intimate connection,” Clarke say. “They’re people who are what I keep describing as spiritually vacant. I think there’s a void there that is often wanting to be filled with this sort of ephemeral influence. “As we kept writing and the subject matter got more personal, I was thinking about the idea of what is passed on to u,” he add. “Life lesson, things that you learn from your parent, things that you learn from your teacher, and how their handicaps and their perspectives shape your own worldview. And how, in a sense, everyone wields a certain amount of power. Everyone, in a sense, is a lonely person with power.” Below, Clarke comments on each track. <b>“Incidental I”</b> “The melody in ‘Incidental I’ appears again in ‘Doberman.’ A lot of the incidentals and the way that they function within the album were created by [guitarist] Kerry [McCoy], who very much likes to conceptualize records by using melodic reprisal. This one of the three is the shortest, but certainly one of the most mood-setting tracks of the record. I really love the way that it came out. It’s quite simple, but effective.” <b>“Doberman”</b> “This was the last song we wrote for the album. To me, it was the big single, which we ended up not going with. But in my estimation, it has a lot of our strength. What I really enjoy about it is that we leaned a little further into Emperor-like qualities in the chorus and used these types of synth textures to enhance the chorus part. And the bridge is very Aphex Twin-influenced. To me, this is our Emperor/Aphex Twin record, which is fun.” <b>“Magnolia”</b> “We decided on this as the first single because we wanted to come out with a haymaker. It’s one of the most to-the-point songs we’ve ever written. I think it’s very interesting and catchy, but in a condensed way that we’ve not yet explored in previous album. The beginning riff is something that we had been sitting on since 2023; it was our soundcheck riff. Kerry came up with it, and it would often get stuck in our head. Some of our writing happens on tour in those moments because everyone’s onstage, and we developed it from there.” <b>“The Garden Route”</b> “A lot of these songs really benefited from what we had learned on <i>Infinite Granite</i> in terms of songwriting and how to structure a song that’s lean and transitions well but still has an emotional punch to it. I think this song is one of those example. It really couldn’t have been written without having done <i>Infinite Granite</i>. And I like that we sometimes do this harsh vocal over a clean guitar, which we first experimented with in 2014 or ’15. At the time, it was almost uncomfortably jarring but has since really become part of our sound.” <b>“Heathen”</b> “Again, a song that really could not have been written without <i>Infinite Granite</i>. The thing that was interesting with this song is that we had originally thought there would be no clean vocals on this record. But Kerry had this vocal idea for the beginning, and it really stuck with me. It was immediately catchy, and it really fit with the lyric. After a quick conversation, we decided that the most Deafheaven thing to do is to do what’s natural to us and what we think sounds best. Setting a precedent for ‘no this’ or ‘no that’ was really contradictory to our whole etho. And I’m glad we did because I think it’s a welcome element once you’ve gotten this far into the record, to hear this variety. It’s one of my favorites lyrically, too.” <b>“Amethyst”</b> “As we were writing thi, we felt it was going to be the centerpiece of the album. I think it’s the favorite song on the record for a lot of us within the band. It might be my favorite. To me, it’s a fresh take on a very classic Deafheaven sound and structure. It has all the things that I like. And then, lyrically, it’s a centerpiece as well. The album artwork and the photography within the record are based on the lyrics to this song. I think both sonically and thematically, this is maybe the strongest representation of the album.” <b>“Incidental II” (feat. Jae Matthews)</b> “This was a lot of fun to put together. We have Jae Matthews from Boy Harsher on the track. We’re big Boy Harsher fan, and we have a lot of mutual friend. I was talking to one of them about what we were working on, and he suggested that we get in touch with Jae. We got on the phone, and I explained the themes of the album, and I sent her a very early version of the song to see if she was interested. She was excited, which I was really happy about. We flew her out to LA and spent a day in the studio. She wrote the lyrics for it after we discussed it. Much like ‘Incidental I,’ it’s such an important mood piece to the album, especially going into ‘Revelator.’ I think the two connect in a really wonderful way.” <b>“Revelator”</b> “This song is the bruiser. It’s just a lot of fun, and the credit goes mostly to Kerry. This is where his head was at a lot of the time when we were making this record, just wanting to go fast and write something that was pissed but sort of unhinged. There’s this clean break, and then it goes into this chaos of blast beat, and we layered a thousand guitar. It’s a very high-energy song, and one that I think is really built for our live show as well. A lot of these songs were written with the live show in mind, and I think this one most of all.” <b>“Body Behavior”</b> “I love this song. It i, even within our repertoire, a pretty strange one. It was the first song we wrote for the album. The guys were listening to a lot of krautrock, and so the verses come from there. It’s bass- and drum-driven and very cool. Again, that thing happens where this record couldn’t have been written without <i>Infinite Granite</i>. The entire bridge section is this <i>Infinite Granite</i> by way of [Radiohead’s] <i>In Rainbows</i> type of beautiful interacting guitar. Overall, I think this song was a little bit of us figuring out what we were going to do next. The first song you write for something new is always a little bit of that.” <b>“Incidental III” (feat. Paul Banks)</b> “This was purposely written to go into the next song, ‘Winona.’ They share the same kind of chord and lead structure. We discussed doing a monologue here, and then we agreed that it would be interesting to have someone other than me voice it. Having Jae on ‘Incidental II’ and Paul [Banks] from Interpol on this lets our audience more into the broader world of Deafheaven and what we like. To me, it’s obvious that we like Boy Harsher and Interpol, but I don’t think everyone else maybe sees it that way. This gives us an opportunity to show how well-rounded the project is—and to work with people that we really admire.” <b>“Winona”</b> “Winona is a 5,000-person town in Mississippi. It’s a town where my grandparents lived. A lot of my family is buried there and is from there. Along with ‘Amethyst,’ this is the other big epic on the record. The coolest thing about this song, for me, is that there’s a choir on it, which repeats throughout the track, and the choir is just a bunch of our friend. It was six men and six women, and Kerry and I conducted them, which we’d never done before. Much of the choir group were producers and musicians with real orchestral experience, so we’d be side-eyeing them, like, ‘Are we doing OK here?’ It was a lot of fun to make.” <b>“The Marvelous Orange Tree”</b> .

via Apple Music

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