Deafheaven - "Black Brick"

I certainly wasn’t expecting this new song from the San Francisco (well, now Los Angeles-based) blackgaze giants when it came out last week, and I certainly wasn’t expecting anything new from them so soon after last year’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love.

This song, however, is a B-side that didn’t make it into that album, and in some ways I understand why the band left it off. It’s a vastly different piece stylistically, far faster and heavier than anything else on that album. But on the other hand, that album was so oddly sequenced and kind of disjointed, that this song probably could have been thrown in there somewhere to boost its versatility, the album’s energy, and lessen its appearance as a Sunbather sequel attempt.

Nevertheless, it’s here now, this is the context the band decided was best for it, so I would love to get into it because it’s a real ripper of a tune and I have been listening to it quite a lot. More reminiscent of the more overtly crushing and riff-driven aspects of New Bermuda than of Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, “Black Brick” is an unrelenting barrage of pulverizing instrumentation all the way through. Not that Deafheaven ever needed to, but after the blistering heaviness that came with a lot of what was on New Bermuda more or less saw the “kvlty” gatecreepers quiet their moaning about the band’s presence in acceptance or reluctance, this song shows that New Bermuda’s motive had less to do with silencing the band’s childish detractors and more to do with the band’s genuine passion for black metal at its heaviest.

The poetic facet of the song finds George Clarke delving into his usual vivid crypticism, seemingly channeling the ritualistic aspect of the more traditional black metal the band leaned toward on this song. Though rather than a summoning of the devil, George seems to be penning a meditation on submission to defeat and a retreat into the recesses of the speaker’s world, the trench depicted in the cover art. That may not be it at all, but it sure isn’t the bright sunshine and blooming flowers of “Canary Yellow” or “Honeycomb”, so its absence from the album during whose sessions it was written makes sense.

Instrumentally, the song hits the ground running with George Clarke’s aggressive screams and Daniel Tracy’s vigorous percussive sprints backed by filthy palm muted grooves from Shiv Mehra and tasteful dissonant guitar lead furnishings from Kerry McCoy. The song begins as a rather familiar tritone-laden black metal blazer, but it’s the switch to an old-school palm-muted thrash rhythm that really takes the band back to New Bermuda. The band eventually make their way to ambient black metal territory more reminiscent of their contemporaries or perhaps Roads to Judah than their recent output to close the song out.

Once again, Deafheaven seem keen to keep their audience on its collective toes and jolt away from any outside perception of their artistic trajectory. It’s anyone’s guess what Deafheaven will do next, but my hope is that they reinject some of the firepower from songs like “Come Back”, “Brought to the Water”, “From the Kettle onto the Coil”, and now “Black Brick” into their sound, because they surely do well with the dynamic mix of heavy metallic instrumentation and the more shoegazy elements for which they became famous and ostracized.