2025

We worship power. It stirs an irresistible kind of excitement, magnetic in its promises, exacting in its costs. Power also speaks in iconography and scale. It is transformational, a way to construct monuments that reinforce codes and laws—a worldview for some and a prison for others. It can be a mirror through which we see ourselves, what we dream and aspire to be, the paths we hope to avoid. Power is the thread that runs through our desires and fears. It connects the ways we live, rendering us naked, our deepest truths revealed in unflinching clarity. The use of power, or the lack of it, displays how far we have come and how far we have to go, stretching the limits of our lifetimes. It pulls us in strange directions—sometimes through force, other times through an invisible lead. At its core, power is a deeply human expression of the control we seek. It is a language we use to build the miraculous and to erase the inconvenient. Power is personal, political, and above all, pervasive in the ways we live.

Lonely People With Power is the sixth Deafheaven album but it is the first since 2013’s Sunbather where the group is singularly focused on a specific theme. Building upon the black metal by-way-of shoegaze art rock of their varied discography, Deafheaven present power as a complete mapping of our humanity. Throughout the album’s runtime, Deafheaven examine a kind of emotional vacancy that is required in wielding power, shedding light on its intoxicating heights and excruciating lows. If Sunbather’s rigid take on metallic post-rock felt like drifting through a disintegrating dream, Lonely People With Power feels like spiraling in a waking nightmare. The results are as arresting as they are unsettling. Lonely People With Power is a punishing record, one that requires its audience to grapple with the design of its portraits, cautioning that what we worship could operate as the seed of our decay.

The album starts by centering power around its abuses, through a lens of dominance and might. “Doberman” and “Magnolia” are two galloping, thrash-inspired, whipsaws. Thunderous riffs from Kerry McCoy and Shiv Mehra intertwine with new weight from producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen, while George Clark’s signature rasp shakes their foundations. Beginning the album with these black-tinged burners is a deliberate and intentional choice. “Doberman” presents that complete surrender to the police state as all but inevitable—with subtlety of a body slam (”All hail now the panopticon / See all around me / All of my failure / Trapped under this dominion…”). “Magnolia” forces us to hold the weight of guilt, exploring failure and shame in the face of unstoppable truths (”Show me now everything that I offer / I saw my own father lay the ground beneath me / I owned everything thought to be / I was everything taught to me…”). Here, history and family serve as a cage. “Magnolia’s” relentless cyclone finds a nameless narrator crushed in front of an open casket, without the means to change the loss before them, witness to a private oblivion (”All the tapes and all of the letters / At Heaven's gate standing with the guards / My love is endless / Everything of you is me, every step is toward the grave / Could it be flesh and blood were all we gave?”). Both songs present power as ruthless and complete, how our bones are brittle in the face of forces that endure long after we’re gone. Deafheaven examine the natural world’s supreme laws throughout the album but “Doberman” and “Magnolia” begin this prosecution with grisly and weaponized precision.

While Lonely People With Power begins with metal-leaning touch points, the album is varied. Deafheaven's fluid detours on 2021’s Infinite Granite have expanded their sound, providing a unique blueprint through which to explore power’s more seductive qualities. “The Garden Route” builds from gossamer passages and ghostly whispers into a roaring rebuke. The song rests in a place of expansive longing (”Drinking silver from a dim spring of mercury / On the outskirts of a desert / The lifeless slither / Still we seek, thirsting and wandering…”) while gazing at the promise of escape (”Now, now I run from all my truth / Away with you…”). Like a restless tide, “The Garden Route” presents Deafheaven’s evolution from genre-defying upstarts to master craftsman, personifying escape through possession. “Body Behavior” is another sharp iteration of their sound. Over Chris Johnson’s motorik bass line, Deafheaven contort their aggression into something pulsing and impending, exploring the ways in which we socialize the objectification of women (”Don't I owe them everything for all I've come to know? / Seeing what I'm taught to see, taking to it slow / Buried in the home…”). The results are darker, subversive. There is something sinister about the bid for connection in “Body Behavior” that leaves the more experienced shadow, and the story’s victim, emotionally destitute. Ultimately, post-punk offshoots like these enrich Deafheaven’s sound while supporting the album’s central concept—that falling into the desire for control is as effective as domination in the right hands.

Power, for Deafheaven, is inextricably linked to dehumanization, a loss of humanity too great to bear that it must be experienced in the approximate. This abstraction arrives in the form of the “Incidental” tryptic on Lonely People With Power, a song suite that blends spoken word, electronic noise, and oppressive production, exploring how control begets a suffocation of the self. “Incidental I” is barely a song, employing a kind of vocoded anguish that smothers any kind of warmth. By contrast, “Incidental II” features a chilling overture by Jae Matthews, offering safety as disassociation in the presence of someone else (”When you say ‘Baby, come to me’ / Who am I? / One who cannot see / I think I might be hiding from myself / It's so good to be alone, alone with someone else…”). As the group leans into synthesizer stabs, there is a kind of gratitude for this doom, for someone else to take the burden of control. The final entry is “Incidental III,” a continued unraveling in an echo chamber as Interpol’s Paul Banks laments whether vulnerability can be an agent for change. Here, Banks inquires in brisk monotone about youth, companionship, and the enduring ache of sorrow set against the Ventura strip and swelling strings: “When the hour was lonely / It was the way that she touched me / Her arm on the window / And the way she said ‘baby…’" All three “Incidental” interludes consider disconnection as predicates for power, both in the separation from our selves and in the infantilization of the others through the destruction of their agency.

It is precisely this disconnection from ourselves that allow the horrors to persist. “Revelator” emerges as the most wicked song in the Deafheaven catalog. Glass shattering gives way to an orgy of violence; frenetic guitar lines and pummeling blast beats lay waste. Nothing is spared. It is a harrowing account of total decimation, a spiritual cousin to the group’s 2019 gutter-thrash single “Black Brick.” Clark’s howl jettisons listeners into a ravenous maw: “I'm bringing them bile / I'm clearing desires / Coins on their eyes / I'm clipping the flowers / Of spiritless leaders / Oh, they tremble in towers / Lonely people with power / Devoured by God…” For Deafheaven, those on the throne represent the highest order of evil, self-made deities with an endless hunger. All others appear expendable. By the time the group reaches “Revelator’s” demonic coda, Deafheaven’s cruel rapture reminds us that power eats the weak and the weak are without the inherited purity of salvation (”Everybody's praying / To not have it be them / To ascend, to evade / What else could come?”). Here, power is institutionalized, a divine mandate to remake this world or burn it down trying. On these terms, “Revelator” represents the ugliest display of arrogance, a nadir in the darkest dungeon.

Lonely People With Power spends most of its time chronicling a spiritual decay but there are moments where Deafheaven tap into a kind of doomed aliveness. “Winona” is a meditation caught between an enormous jet engine and falling stars. It is the kind of place where Clark faces the price power requires, the cost of one’s devotion: “The howling energy / Is a shining vacancy / Thinking I'd survive / With everything I was gaining / Behind the curtain I was sinking / With everything I'm supposed to be / I'm waiting for the fall…” Where most of the album concerns itself anguish , there is a clear-eyed melancholy that wraps “Winona,” the wisdom that comes from scaling the mountain, savoring the view, and knowing the descent is imminent. On the album’s centerpiece, “Amethyst,” the group provides an arresting summation, building off a dramatic “Stairway to Heaven”-like beginning into a sweeping death waltz as Clark’s throat-shredding voice serves as the eye of a crystalline storm. Here, Deafheaven lay out the complexities of power and how it charts the course of our lives through desperation: the distance that evolves in relationship, loyalty and loss, the fascist oppression of the state as it pulls people apart, blood spilled in hotels, and the cold fear of holding each other through mutually-assured destruction. The image comes into tragic focus, much like the story that’s suggested on the album’s cover. On “Amethyst,” the act of unraveling is made real and presence becomes radical in the face of oblivion: “I loved you then, I love you now / I forgave you, I was proud / To live in your shadow / In the comfort of your breeze…”

Deafheaven conclude the album with “The Marvelous Orange Tree,” a sprawling statement that walks listeners through the garden and towards a final resting place, set against a dissolving sunset. The song’s title references Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin’s 19th century magic act “L'oranger merveilleux,” in which the illusionist conjures the miraculous through a mechanical tree that blossoms and “grows” real oranges, culminating in two mechanical butterflies and producing a previously vanished ring from one of the split oranges. Both the illusion and the song operate as deft sleight of hand, marrying fact with fiction and capturing something otherworldly. While Lonely People With Power wades through the rot invited by our desire for control, “The Marvelous Orange Tree” posits that there is something human about carrying this sickness and choosing to relinquish it—that we are made real and whole by recognizing the flaws of our flesh and the consequences of our actions. As the sweeping and majestic wall of noise slowly fades to black, we are left to hold several truths in tension: that there are laws of power that we will never possess or conquer, that a kind of mastery and ownership of our life exists as we let go of carrying that which poisons us. Put another way—the price of possession is always too high. The song ends with the following couplet: “With my endless illness / Walking into blackness…” Death is the conclusion on Lonely People With Power but its conclusion is also a miracle, just like Robert-Houdin's “L'oranger merveilleux.” For in surrendering the control we worship we can erase the loneliness we carry. This yielding, paradoxically, reveals a different kind of power—one we can use to connect, to feel, and to love in a more profound way.

In addition to Lonely People With Power, here are my other favorite releases from 2025:

• Agriculture | The Spiritual Sound (The Flenser)
• The Armed | The Future is Here and Everything Needs to be Destroyed (Sargent House)
• Big Thief | Double Infinity (4AD)
• Blood Orange | Essex Honey (RCA)
• Bon Iver | Sable, Fable (Jagjaguwar)
• Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo | In the Earth Again (Computer Students / Modular)
• Clipse | Let God Sort Em Out (Roc Nation)
• Cloakroom | Last Leg of the Human Table (Closed Casket Activities)
• Deafheaven | Lonely People With Power (Roadrunner)
• Deftones | Private Music (Reprise / Warner)
• Dijon | Baby (Warner)
• FKA Twigs | Eusexua (Young / Atlantic)
• Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist | Alfredo 2 (ESGN Records / Virgin)
• Greet Death | Die in Love (Deathwish Inc.)
• Haim | I Quit (Columbia / Polydor)
• Hayley Williams | Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party (Post Atlantic Records)
• Indigo De Souza | Precipice (Loma Vista)
• Julien Baker & Torres | Send a Prayer My Way (Matador)
• Lady Gaga | Mayhem (Interscope)
• Lord Huron | The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1 (Mercury)
• Laura Jane Grace in the Trauma Tropes | Adventure Club (Polyvinyl)
• The Necks | Disquiet (Northern Spy Records)
• Nine Inch Nails | TRON: Ares (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (Interscope / Walt Disney / The Null Corporation)
• Rosalía | LUX (Columbia)
• Scowl | Are We All Angels (Dead Oceans)
• Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory | Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory (Jagjaguwar)
• Sudan Archives | The BPM (Stones Throw)
• Tobacco City | Horses (Scissor Tail Records)
• Turnstile | Never Enough (Roadrunner)
• Tyler, the Creator | Don't Tap the Glass (Columbia)