Heavy Band of the Year Deafheaven Turned Up the Power and Found Their Identity

Consequence’s 2025 Annual Report rages on with our Heavy Band of the Year accolade, which recognizes an act in the heavy rock and metal sphere that dominated our year. For 2025, the title goes to Deafheaven and their excellent new album Lonely People with Power. Read our interview with frontman George Clarke below. You can also check out the rest of our Annual Report, including our rankings of the 50 Best Albums of the Year, the 30 Best Hard Rock and Metal Albums of the Year, and more.

If there’s one guiding principle that persists throughout Deafheaven’s discography, it’s a restless urge for progression. Each subsequent record seems to be in conversation with its predecessor, as the band uses what they’ve learned to forge yet another path forward. Their latest, Lonely People with Power, is perhaps the greatest (and most paradoxical) example of such an ethos that Deafheaven has offered up yet, synthesizing the stylistic pillars of each of their previous works in an attempt to create something entirely new. The result is a mesmerizing, complex, cathartic hour and change of black metal experimentalism; a triumphant effort that immediately ranks amongst their best work; and an album so captivating that we had no choice but to crown Deafheaven as our 2025 Heavy Band of the Year.

Since catapulting onto the scene (and sparking plenty of tedious online debate between black metal purists) with the now-classic Sunbather, the California blackgazers have spent the last decade churning out increasingly varied, genre-blending compositions with characteristically extended runtimes. With each subsequent release, the band prioritized authentic expressions and stylistic development, leading to the great Sunbather follow-ups New Bermuda and Ordinary Corrupt Human Love.

Then, in 2021, they took perhaps their most ambitious swing yet with Infinite Granite, a record that found the metal group forgoing their interest in heaviness and harshness for clean singing and melancholic dream pop aesthetics. It was a polarizing move, as some (like us) found themselves intoxicated by the album’s softer tranquility, while others missed the blackened, metallic core that anchored the rest of their discography.

“We did a real shoegaze sort of inspired thing for Sunbather, and as a reaction to that, we did more post-punk on New Bermuda… And then we had the dream pop thing,” Clarke explains. “We were always trying to figure out who we were and what we were trying to do, and we were trying to include these influences in really seamless, interesting ways. I think in some ways we succeeded. In some ways, we tried our best, you know?” he says with a grin.

So, as the years ticked on following Infinite Granite, it was unclear where Deafheaven would head off to next. Was Clarke done shrieking? Were the blast beats gone for good? Was the mode of Infinite Granite destined to be, well, infinite?

In January of this year, they returned with an answer: “Magnolia,” a song that has a legitimate bid for the band’s most ferocious, unrelentingly aggressive tune since, hell, maybe even their debut, Return to Judah. Headbangers rejoice, Deafheaven was back with a vengeance.

“It was kind of the opposite of what happened between Ordinary Corrupt and Infinite Granite,” Clarke muses. “We were touring so much on Ordinary Corrupt and playing those songs ad nauseam and just getting tired of ourselves… And then after the pandemic hit, we had a lot of time to reorient ourselves [for Infinite Granite] – And then we toured a lot on that record, and the same thing happened there. We were like, 'Okay, this is great, but I miss the power and I miss the speed and I miss the raw energy.'”

Thanks to Clarke and company’s general creative restlessness and refusal to simply go through the motions, the pendulum – perhaps expectantly, in retrospect – had swung back into the fiery depths of metal. And as the singer explains, it wasn't just because of the stylistic fatigue of performing the same songs night after night. The decision was also rooted in a particular revelation about his creative strengths and his identity as a performer.

“What was happening with the Infinite Granite shows was a lot of containment. I had to really stay still to focus, to sing, and to just present myself in a different way,” he says. “I don't think that's really who I am on stage. I think that we need to be a bit more wild. I need to be a bit more psychotic… And so, when we started writing songs again, it just naturally came out heavier, primarily because we wanted the live show to return to what it once was.”

Though, to be clear, Lonely People with Power is no course correction. It’s not a return to form that seeks to right the wrongs of a failed experiment. For one, while the songs re-incorporate stylings that were largely absent on Infinite Granite, Lonely People with Power is far from a project that merely rests on the band’s laurels. Just like each of their other releases, the tone, execution, and thematic power of the record are wholly and uniquely of itself and only itself.

What’s more is that there’s a whole lot more of Infinite Granite’s D.N.A. in Lonely People with Power than many fans likely realize. Listen closely, and you’ll hear the band bring over what worked on the 2021 LP just as much as you’ll hear the stark differences between the two projects.

“We did take a lot from Infinite Granite moving forward with this record, primarily in the song structures themselves,” Clarke explains. “The exercise with Infinite Granite was to trim the fat and not have things wear out their welcome. I think that we have a tendency to really focus on repetition, and I think that that serves a purpose, but having done it for, at that point, four records, we just needed something different. The big focus there was dynamics and reaching that emotional crescendo that we like to do in our songwriting in a quicker way – something more economical.”

“I think that we took those exercises and really applied them here. ‘Magnolia’ is a great example. In my opinion, it’s constantly fresh. No riff goes too long. There's a lot that's going on, but it's contained within five minutes. Which, for us, is a short song,” he adds with a laugh.

It's a change in form that's apparent even prior to hitting play. Whereas Deafheaven's first four efforts kept their tracklists short (never exceeding seven songs) and their song lengths long (often topping 10 minutes), Lonely People with Power aims for the inverse. The record boasts 12 songs (including three "Incidental" tracks that feature guest vocalists Jae Matthews of Boy Harsher and Paul Banks of Interpol), and not a single cut hits the double-digit minute mark. Yes, there are still some longer tunes here -- like the spellbinding, epic "Winona" -- but like Clarke said, relatively speaking, Deafheaven have never been so to-the-point.

Such conciseness is one of Lonely People with Power’s greatest strengths. The dynamic structures and powerful climaxes Deafheaven are known for are still present, but the speed and ferocity perfectly match the band's return to heavy guitar tones, blood-pumping riffs, and pummeling drums. More than that, it offers Clarke a new way to frame his writing and build the album's thematic arc.

Much like the snapshot visual aesthetic that defined the album's release cycle, the lyricism of Lonely People with Power offers rich settings, an inescapable sense of turmoil, and poetic explorations of human interactions of various kinds. It's not as expressly political as the title might suggest, though that's only true in the sense that it doesn't name-drop politicians or offer thinly veiled allegories for the issues of today. Instead, it's an album obsessed with the inner workings of people, even (or, perhaps, especially) those who do terrible things.

"For us, everything kind of circles back to the internal. I think that Deafheaven is often a vessel [for me to] try to make sense of personal feelings. I think at the same time, it's just impossible to ignore a lot of today's reality... the sort of dreadful feeling," says Clarke. "It all feels bad, even if it's not a 'everyday bad.' I wanted to make a point of that without being super obvious... I tend to learn about the universal through personal things and understand the world at large through the minutia of my own everyday life. So, I did what I could to make a bridge there."

The songs are littered with sentiments that originate from Clarke's personal feelings and experiences but expand to apply to vastly different figures, from saints to sinners. If Lonely People with Power were to be reduced down to a single core idea, it's that so many of us feel that dread, that anxiety, that loneliness. Some just respond by seeking love, while others fall into hate, rebelling against whatever community happens to be in their crosshairs.

It's a little gloomy, a little humanistic, and very Deafheaven. As Clarke continues to explain the thought process behind the album's construction, both sonically and thematically, one phrase keeps popping up in one form or another: "What is Deafheaven? What does Deafheaven sound like? And what does that mean?" From fragments of their past work manifesting throughout Lonely People with Power to the universal-via-personal lyrical framing, it's clear that each aspect of their sixth studio album was intentionally and carefully designed to represent the band and their decade-and-a-half-long journey. In many ways, Lonely People with Power is the ultimate Deafheaven record.

"When we made the conscious decision to create a heavier album or to go back to more of a 'traditional Deafheaven sound,' we then had to answer the question of, well, 'What is the traditional Deafheaven sound and what does that mean?' For the first time, we looked across our own records for inspiration," he explains. "We took the strongest [of what we've done] and applied that here in a fresher way. More than the other albums, this one felt like it was confidently a Deafheaven record. This is what Deafheaven sounds like."

Sunbather will always be the innovative, much-memed classic, but Lonely People with Power may very well prove to give the beloved pink album a run for its money as the definitive Deafheaven project. Thanks to their consistently engaging live shows, the increased interest in heavy music across pop culture, and the praise the project has collected since its March release, it's certainly in a position to widen the band's reach across the metal scene.

Because Deafheaven know they're operating within somewhat of a niche lane. At the same time, as their career marches on and their profile continues to grow, they're particularly excited about the possibility of exposing listeners to something new -- and that starts with Lonely People with Power.

"That was a conversation that [guitarist] Kerry [McCoy] and I had when we signed with Roadrunner... We were talking about the idea of working with a bigger company that had a different audience than us and why we would want to do that," Clark says. "We kind of came to the idea of like, it is interesting and exciting at this point in our career to show people who have literally no idea of the genre and who have no idea of our history a new sound, potentially. Because I'm sure for everyone that listens to us, atmospheric black metal or Britpop and shoegaze-influenced black metal, these things aren't necessarily new ideas, they're not novel anymore... But on a grand scale, a lot of people don't know about it. And so, we were like, 'What if we put our best foot forward and created something that almost was a prime example for the genre itself to expose new listeners to?' Like, how exciting would that be, if we got people in the door with Lonely People with Power? Not only would they seek out our older material and have a better understanding of who we were, but they'd also listen to artists who are either our peers or people that we were heavily influenced by in creating the sound."

Which is all to say, with their legacy secured and the best heavy album of the year on their hands, Deafheaven have, in a sense, power. But it'll be a cold day in hell before they act lonely about it.

"That's the point, you know what I mean? In the grand scheme of things, it's not only doing it for yourself, but doing a service for the community that has fostered your art project 15 years."

So, now having spent 2025 planting their flag in the ground, declaring, "This is what Deafheaven sounds like," what's next for the blackgazers? Well, a whole lot it seems.

"All I wanna do is just keep my head down and tour, to have good shows and meet cool people and go to cool places. It's the same thing as it was from day one," Clarke says with conviction. "We will have new music next year, and we will be touring a lot. So, we're gonna be very, very busy. It will be busier than this year, which is a blessing."