Deafheaven

Last year the uncategorizable rock band Deafheaven went into Atomic Garden in Palo Alto with longtime producer Jack Shirley to track 10 Years Gone. The live studio album covered eight standouts from the Bay Area five-piece's back catalog, from early cuts like "Daedalus" and "Language Games" to more experimental recent songs like the 11-minute "Glint," from 2018's Ordinary Corrupt Human Love. At the end of a decade in which Deafheaven had constantly pushed their sound forwards — always pulling from punishing black metal but increasingly folding in shoegaze, post-rock, ambient music, and even alternative rock — it was a remarkably natural-sounding record. This was a band retelling their story in their own unique language, one that they'd refined and willfully mutated over time. It also left some people, myself included, wondering who else was left to shock. Deafheaven had always been controversial among black metal purists, but the critical adulation that followed each of their records — particularly from 2013's epochal Sunbather onwards — suggested that there were more than enough acolytes in the wider world to compensate for those that Deafheaven had pissed off. A gentle nudge forwards wouldn't feel right; but where else could Deafheaven go? Infinite Granite, their fifth album, answers that question emphatically. The most obvious change this time around is lead singer George Clarke's voice — the incendiary, blood-chilling, alien scream that bled into reverb on past records is almost completely gone, replaced by clean, melancholy vocals that borrow from Tears for Fears and Chet Baker. And Deafheaven have continued to evolve deeper in the mix; some listeners will hear arena rock, others will hear art rock. Infinite Granite was produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen, who's also helmed albums by M83, Tegan and Sara, and Paramore. But despite all these radical shifts, Infinite Granite still sounds unmistakably like a Deafheaven album: expansive, uncompromising, and extreme — even when that doesn't mean heavy. A couple o