Review
There’s a sense of electricity humming beneath every passage in "Lonely People With Power," the way city lights linger for insomniacs skulking in predawn hours. Deafheaven channel the volatile spirit of their earliest work and lace it with the shimmer and fog of their recent explorations, never falling fully into chaos nor serenity. Tracks like "Magnolia" carry a visceral charge, unapologetic in their ferocity, only to dissolve into the reflective territories mapped by the connective tissue between "Incidental I" and "Doberman." As George Clarke voices the weight of isolation and inheritance, it’s clear: this is Deafheaven standing on the knife-edge between what has been and what must inevitably come.
The album’s instrumentation veers between density and reprieve, much like Rilke’s idea that “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,” each chromatic riff and soaring melody bruised with meaning. Deafheaven distill every contradiction they’ve ever held—rawness and refinement, hope and nihilism—into a single body of work that neither pleads for acceptance nor recoils from scrutiny. There’s no recourse to the past’s recklessness or the future’s comforts; instead, these twelve songs chart an uneasy middle, tracing the invisible lines between wanting power and fearing its price. The result is an hour where every note feels hard-won, echoing long after the room goes quiet. - Soren
