Every Deafheaven Album, Ranked (Including Lonely People With Power)
Deafheavenare exhilarating and energizing, ferocious but divisive. They're (undeniably) popular and (arguably) one of the best metal bands of the last two decades. The group, formed in 2010 by vocalist George Clarke and guitarist Kerry McCoy, fuses elements of post-rock, crust-punk, shoegaze, alternative, goth, death- and black-metal into a sonic tsunami referred to as "blackgaze."
While not the first to do so, Deafheaven is the most critically successful of this new generation of American black metal bands, thanks in large part to 2013's Sunbather, which arrived to universal acclaim. Pitchfork rated it8.9 and named it Best New Music. The A.V. Club ranked the album an A-grade. NPR, Spin, Complex, Stereogum, Time Out London, and The Daily Beast included it on their year-end lists of 2013's best albums.
The success elevated Deafheaven to new heights. But it also distanced itself further from black metal's die-hard fans. George Clarke is a striking frontman with a natural stage presence; some might even call him handsome. The band also eschews the traditional "corpse paint" makeup, defying black metal's dress code. "[They] look like they could fix your laptop," joked Two Minutes to Late Night's Gwarsenio Hall, highlighting how certain metal fans disregard this band.
But the music rips, and on March 28, 2025, Deafheaven released their sixth album, Lonely People With Power. Now is the time to see how it stands up to the rest of the band's discography (Note: I am only including studio albums in this ranking. No EPs, though their 2010 demo is worth tracking down).
Album Title | Release Year |
|---|---|
Roads to Judah | 2011 |
Sunbather | 2013 |
New Bermuda | 2015 |
Ordinary Corrupt Human Love | 2018 |
Infinite Granite | 2021 |
Lonely People With Power | 2025 |
6 Infinite Granite (2021)
"I know what this costs us, I know it's exhausting you," 'The Gnashing'
This is not a bad album; it's arguably not even a bad Deafheaven album. However, if you have never heard the band before, Infinite Granite is a bad place to start. Blast beats? Gone. Soaring guitars? Gone. Howling vocals like a skeletal priestess summoning the end of all mankind? Gone. Instead, George Clarke's singing is not just clean, but pristine. The songs are spacious. Whereas the band once overloaded your senses with sheer might, here, they give you room to think. The music has elements of softness, more akin to the post-punk of Echo and the Bunnyman than the blackgaze of Wolves in the Throne Room.
Those harsher black elements aren't completely gone. They peek out once or twice on Infinite Granite. Clarke lets his growl out on "Villain," but just as the music threatens to submerge, the floodwaters recede. Metal journalist Michael Nelson describes the album's closer, "Mombasa," as a storm full of "pure fury," but the threatening clouds move on well before the full downpour.
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This is a strangely sunny day for a black metal band, but not all that unusual. Modern black metal bands are unafraid to experiment (see the quietness of Alcest's Shelter or the bluegrass on Panopticon's Kentucky). Knowing Deafheaven cite The Cure as an influence as much as Deicide, Infinite Granite makes sense - even more so when you realize it was the middle part of a trilogy. So, best to come back to this later on.
5 Roads To Judah (2011)
"Come to life / Walk the roads to Judah," 'Language Games'
After building a buzz with Deafheaven's demo, Clarke and McCoy recruited like-minded musicians to help make the band's debut LP, Roads to Judah. The initial lineup included guitarist Nick Bassett (Nothing, Whirr) on guitar, drummer Trevor Deschryver, and Derek Prine on bass. The resulting work was good, but it's slightly crunchy when compared to the band's later work. It's a good first impression, but not the best.
"On Roads [To Judah], more editing had to get done on that record than any of the others,” said producer Jack Shirley in Daniel Lake’s USBM, Decibel Books' tome covering American black metal. “It didn’t go as smoothly as some of the other ones. When it got some attention and started to build, I feel like we all looked at each other like, ‘F—k, we probably should have worked on that a little bit longer. Next time, I guess." Next time would be Sunbather.
4 New Bermuda (2015)
"Tricked into some fodder about this oasis,” ‘Luna’
Darkness fell after Sunbather. Deafheaven felt the pressure to follow up on their smash breakthrough. No easy task. "“I’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking that everyone was mad at me because the record sucked,” McCoy told Stereogum, “and we’d all have to go back to [working at] Whole Foods — everyone was laughing at us."
2015's New Bermuda leans more into the traditional black metal sound, cutting back on the layered texture of Sunbather. The album opens with "Brought to the Water," a fierce thrasher that signals we're in for a bumpy ride. The entire album has a darker, brooding sense to it, likely due to the pressures of newfound fame and the band's ongoing struggles with substance abuse. Still a phenomenal piece of work, and definitely what one should put on after Sunbather, but one that comes with a lot of baggage.
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3 Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (2018)
“I’m reluctant to stay sad. Life beyond is a field, a field of flowers,” ‘Honeycomb’
Deafheaven started off as a two-piece, and underwent some lineup changes as it bloomed into a full band. Daniel Tracy took over on drums in 2012. Shiv Mehra joined in 2013, playing guitars, keys, and backing vocals. Witht he inclusion of bassist Chris Johnson in 2017, Deafheaven found a lineup that has remained steadfast ever since.
The first album with this quartet was Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, a watershed moment. After the rawness and darkness of New Bermuda, the group found a new lightness. OCHL incorporated more alternative and post-rock sounds, dipping back into the dreaminess of Sunbather.
“I think we remembered what it was we loved about [Deafheaven] in the first place,” Clarke says in USBM. “We got really recharged. Kerry went through a huge creative burst. I think our energy reflected very positively on the rest of the guys, and we all kind of ended up on the same level.”
Ordinary Corrupt Human Love opens with a piano-led arrangement, with Nadia Kury reading excerpts from a Tom McElravey short story. Chelsea Wolfe appears on "Night People." Overall, out of the seven tracks on the album, only four really thrash, and that's....okay, actually. Beautiful, atmospheric elements on the album hint at where the band would go next with Infinite Granite.
The record is what Clarke described as "our most collaborative record," one where Deafheaven sounds very much like "a unit of people who are in a positive place. When I hear it—even the way it’s recorded, sonically—it sounds bright, like what this band is supposed to be: artful and emotional."
2 Lonely People With Power (2025)
“I ate from the apple of my ruse, and stared into the mirror of my truth,” ‘Doberman’
Lonely People With Power is a triumph for Deafheaven. It marks the culmination of a journey that started with Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, had Infinite Granite as the middle act, and closes with a fitting finale.
On that journey, the band achieved equilibrium with its seemingly incongruent elements. "Heathen" returns to the clean vocals and spacious sound of Infinite Granite before shifting to the rawness of New Bermuda. The spoken-word elements of OCHL are back, with Boy Harsher's Jae Matthews and Interpol's Paul Banks appearing on "Incidental II" and "Incidental III," respectively. These feel natural, thanks to the precedent set by OCHL.
"Magnolia" served as the lead single. It's a relentless assault of pure black metal carrying Clarke's reflections of his uncle's funeral. Much of the album wrestles with modern masculinity. Clarke "was thinking a lot about relationships between men" while working on the album, according to a press release, including lessons men teach boys ("Body Behavior"), men's behavior towards commitment ("Heathen") and how they handle loneliness ("The Marvelous Orange Tree," a song named after a Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin magic trick, but speaks about suicide).
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If we view Roads to Judah, Sunbather and New Bermuda as a trilogy documenting the band's ascension—from showing its potential, achieving it, and fighting the struggles that come with fame and success—then we can view this new set as a triumvirate. Ordinary Corrupt Human Love has post-rock/shoegaze. Infinite Granite has dream pop and alternative. Lonely People With Power has the furious black metal. All three elements rule Deafheaven's heart in equal measures, and with this album, the band is complete.
The only thing preventing this album from being named Deafheaven's best is time. It's too soon to hand it the crown, but if the coronation comes after we've all sat with it, it will be a worthy successor.
1 Sunbather (2013)
“My heart flourishes at each passing moment / Always and forever,” ‘Sunbather’
Perfection is the death of creativity. Perfection is a hard stop, the end of artistic growth. By that definition, Sunbather isn't a perfect album—but it's very close.
The first 20 seconds of the album let you know the hype is real. "Dream House" buzzes around your head like a siren alerting you that something big is coming. You brace yourself for the hit but that crushing explosion still knocks you on your ass and it just doesn't stop for ten minutes.
A song like "Dream House" would be the crescendo for a lesser album, and here, it greets you at the door. And you barely register it's over when "Irresistible" comes in, gives you a glass of water, before pushing you back into the thrall of the title track. "Please Remember" amplifies the paranoia through drone and distortion, before sweet guitars bring us back from the brink. That fear comes back again in "Windows," between the intense "Vertigo" and the epic "The Pecan Tree."
Sunbather rejects the sword and sludgery of typical black metal lyricism for songs about income disparity, estranged fathers, and desiring a better life that seems too far out of reach. Clarke's black metal howling might be indiscernible at first listen, but when you learn what he's saying, Subather becomes quite relatable.
Time will tell if another Deafheaven album eclipses Sunbather. Until then, this shines on as their best.
