My Two Favorite Bands Released Albums Today
THIS IS MY BARBENHEIMER. On one side, a louche Dan Bejar stumbling underneath chandeliers. On the other, a wraithlike George Clarke shrieking in the eye of a hurricane.
Ask me to name my favorite band/artist and you’ll get a blank expression and a lot of blinking. If you pivoted and instead asked, “Are Deafheaven and Destroyer your two favorite currently active bands?” I don't think I could say no. I found both of them in college, on the backs of their generally recognized peaks: Destroyer’s Kaputt (2011) and Deafheaven’s Sunbather (2013). Many concerts, new albums, and revisitations of older albums later, my appreciation for both has only deepened.
The two have nothing in common, save for a Venn diagram of their fans with a section labeled "read too much Pitchfork between 2010-2013" in the middle. Destroyer, ostensibly a Dan Bejar solo project with a backing band that constantly rotated until Kaputt, make sophisti-pop with a dry, erudite sense of humor and rarely sound the same between albums. Deafheaven got their start mining the fertile, then-untilled field that lies between black metal and shoegaze, and ever since have continued to perfect the art of loud-but-pretty catharsis. Destroyer is the only artist whose lyrics matter more to me than the music; with Deafheaven, I usually make up my own words until I get my eyes on a lyrics sheet.
Every release since the early 2010s is an event for me. I remember exactly where each first listen of new Destroyer and Deafheaven albums took place. Imagine my glee when I learned that their release cycles were syncing up this time.
It is, however, a bit different for me now. This is the fourth Destroyer album and second Deafheaven album that I've received early (for completely legal journalism-related reasons!). As privileged as I feel to have been able to spend a couple of months with each 03/28/25 release, I can't help but envision how momentous this day would've been for me if my first listens came directly back-to-back.
With a dozen-ish plays of Destroyer's Dan's Boogie and Deafheaven's Lonely People With Power, as well as multiple rejected or ignored pitches to write about either album for other publications, under my belt, I present two brief essays/reviews, followed by a conclusion that will attempt to tie a bow on this unwieldy endeavor.
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I'm not cut out to review pop albums. The amount of vitriol directed at critics who dare to evaluate music made by artists with legions of stans is scary—they won't just cook up the foulest possible insults, they'll straight up doxx you. I've seen dozens of great writers driven to delete their social media accounts because of reviews that were largely positive but still found stans unable to differentiate between the words "bias" and "critique."
In the hours before Pitchfork published my review of Deafheaven's last album in August 2021, I was nervous. I didn't love Infinite Granite, and I thought the score (6.5) reflected my overall opinion: a mediocre album by a great band whose brilliance still occasionally shone through the cracks. If you're going to publicly pan something, you should either be a fan of the artist's previous work or at least an appreciator of their predominant genre(s). As a huge Deafheaven fan, all of my complaints and disappointment stemmed from love. Still though, having seen dedicated fanbases vivisect critics for far less vehement reviews, I started to wonder if I'd been too harsh.
And then: nothing really happened. I can't remember the exact responses I saw, but they didn't amount to much more than "6.5, what the fuck?" No one jumped into my DMs to harass me. The r/deafheaven subreddit was, surprisingly, largely on my side, save for one insightful user named ConstipatedCowboy who wrote: "Too bad they didn’t have Megan Thee Stallion and Lana Del Rey feature on a few tracks then it woulda been at least a 7.5 I mean 7.6."
My fear had been unwarranted. Maybe Deafheaven fans, who have historically seen the band attract so much hatred from "trve black metal" cultists, are less prone to knee-jerk reactions. Or maybe it's because Deafheaven, despite the critical adulation they've received, don't have enough fans to get higher than #63 on the Billboard 200. But if that stomach-churning apprehension is what happens to me when I raise a few tiny, respectful issues with a niche metal band, god forbid I ever give a Katy Perry album a 4.5.
While listening to Deafheaven's new Lonely People With Power on my way home from work earlier this week, I finally solidified my rubric for grading their albums. I call it The Christ Pose Index. The more times I am inspired to hit the Christo Redentor while listening to a Deafheaven album, the better the album (bonus points if that impulse persists in public, as it did the other night). I've never stood with arms wide open on a coastal mountain overlooking Rio de Janeiro, but that's how I feel when Deafheaven are peaking in my headphones. The pose can be menacing, welcoming, blissful, devastated—just about every emotion that Deafheaven are skilled at conjuring up.
Lonely People With Power has a fuckton of Christ Pose Moments. I want to live forever in the moment during lead single "Magnolia" when the time signature switches from a galloping 5/4 to a more pummeling 4/4 and the chorus kicks in. When guitarist Kerry McCoy starts tremolo picking at the end of "Heathen," crucify me, brother. When the death metal'd out "Revelator" kicks back in after an abrupt, tranquil interlude, I'm Stapped up! When the band ratchets up cavernous tension for the first 2.5 minutes of "Winona" and then finally releases it, maybe I've fallen to my knees, but those arms are still outstretched like I'm crying in the rain in a '90s R&B video.
I hadn't yet cracked the complexities of The Christ Pose Index when reviewing Infinite Granite, but you could reduce the 908 words I wrote on the subject to "Not enough moments that inspire sacrilegious poses" and you wouldn't lose much insight. Deafheaven got softer on that album, but I didn't miss the heaviness as much as I missed unpredictability and emotional heft. I came to this band for the big feelings that bloomed in their music, and the by-numbers shoegaze they pivoted to on Infinite Granite was too anodyne and placid to give me that. Beautiful stuff, but not mountain-moving like their best work.
Despite the prevalence of moments that remind me why I first fell in love with Sunbather, Lonely People With Power is far deeper than a cheap ploy at recapturing the magic that Infinite Granite didn't offer. It's weirder and knottier than Deafheaven's first three albums. It pulls inspiration from their entire 14-year career—even Infinite Granite's softest moments—but it reminds me most of 2018's Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, which introduced a gothier and less immediately accessible tinge to their sound. That year's tour openers were the darkwave duo Drab Majesty and the noise-fucked industrial act Uniform, and while it made for a diverse bill, it also made sense.
Since day one, Deafheaven have made awesome, unexpected choices when choosing tourmates. I've seen them play with dark ambient musicians (Aun), corpse-paint-clad goth metal bands (Tribulation), neo-soul-tinged black metal bands (Zeal & Ardor), Southern sludge/"dad metal" bands (Baroness), post-hardcore contemporaries (Touché Amore), and a synthy dance act (Mary Jane Dunphe). Lonely People With Power is as much of an adventurous accumulation of influences as much as it is a sweeping summation of Deafheaven's existing ouvré, and regardless of its score on The Christ Pose Index, that's really why I love it.
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In 2012, Farrah Abraham, star of the MTV reality series 16 and Pregnant, released an album called My Teenage Dream Ended. The untrained singer recorded her vocals to an unadorned click track, and a producer later went in and reverse-engineered songs out of the voice memos. The uncanny disconnect of it all cemented the album as an outsider-art classic.
Destroyer is a well-respected, long-tenured indie rock project, but for the last decade they’ve operated with a similar workflow. When I interviewed frontman Dan Bejar in 2017 for a now-defunct "marijuana culture" website owned by Snoop Dogg, I began the phone call with a few questions about the musical composition of his then-new album, Ken. I was already nervous, given my existing fandom and Bejar's blasé on-record persona, and he gave curt answers. After my third or fourth stab at this line of questioning, Bejar mercifully told me that his longtime producer John Collins handled the instrumental nuts-and-bolts, so he had little insight to offer me. I pivoted to questions about lyrics, and Bejar became an effusive, hilarious conversationalist. My second interview with him, from early 2020, stands as one of my favorite pieces I've ever written.
Bejar began recording as Destroyer in Vancouver the mid-'90s. In '97, he joined local indie rock supergroup The New Pornographers, and until 2017 he retained his unique role as the otherwise absent weirdo poet who popped up on two or three songs per album. In the 2000s, the Pornos were bigger than Destroyer, but by the time he left the band, he'd arguably eclipsed them with an acclaimed string of Destroyer albums. The notoriety peaked with Kaputt, but I'd argue that it began on 2006's Rubies and persists to this day.
Bejar's informal but often impenetrable lyrics define Destroyer—you'd never mistake him for another vocalist or songwriter—but what's kept the band interesting into their fourth decade is a sense of musical unpredictability between albums. With Collins at the helm, they've done orchestral ‘70s pomp (Poison Season), Ian McCulloch solo-album unease (Ken), nocturnal synth-rock (Have We Met), and wildly untethered maximalism (Labyrinthitis). Both of these guys have done everything in their power to make me mistrust them—see the song my wife once described as a "theme to a Donny Osmond variety show"—but despite their unorthodox collaborative process, they never fail to tickle my fancy.
Alas, I've finally caught a whiff of awkwardness in their creative gap on Dan’s Boogie. The bones aren’t unrecognizable—neither Bejar’s vibrantly detached poetry nor Collins’ showy flourishes are as drastic as past Destroyer departures—but for once, it feels like the tempo is the only thing binding them together. In a recent Stereogum interview, Bejar describes the album as a "mash-up" of the grandiose Poison Season and the lo-fi but oddly stately Your Blues. That tracks, and I love both of those albums, but Dan’s Boogie doesn't quite click for me.
Track one, "The Same Thing as Nothing at All," is a fitting introduction. It's so huge, so regal, full of big drums, synths, and piano glissandos, that it almost dwarfs Bejar's characteristically drab, impish performance. It sounds like the Titanic orchestra playing a grand waltz while a loony drunk in the corner mumbles to himself about icebergs.
The pomp persists. I think "The Ignoramus of Love," with its lush-but-understated piano, strings, and guitar, would be a moving ballad akin to Poison Season's "Bangkok" were it not for the constant thumping of blown-out drums that seem completely detached from the rest of the song. "Sun Meet Snow," with its chintzier instrumentation, is closer to Your Blues until a final third that throws an unholy miasma of sound at the wall.
It's hard for me to pin any of my disappointment on Bejar, who at this point seems incapable of writing boring, unmemorable lyrics. With different arrangements, I think every song on Dan's Boogie could be great. John Collins is so integral to all the Destroyer music I love—a mastermind nearly as important as Bejar who never gets a fraction of the credit—so I hate to single him out like this, but I think he's simply doing too much on this album. These songs that Bejar wrote are, deep down, fairly depressing meditations on aging, and I struggle to understand the decision to make them even more Gilded Age than Poison Season.
My opinion about Dan's Boogie's songwriting/composition disconnect was already cemented before I read the aforementioned Stereogum interview yesterday, but in it, I learned something about my favorite track that further reinforced it. On "Cataract Time," counter to the standard Destroyer process, the music came before the lyrics. "I had this little keyboard riff, and a really basic chord progression, and I just opened up," Bejar said, revealing that his performance was essentially a freestyle. It's by far the longest song on the album, but it's gentle, uncluttered, and most importantly, emotionally moving.
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In my 2021 Deafheaven review, I wrote: "If Infinite Granite was a debut by a band with no backstory, it’d be impressive as hell." I feel the exact same about Dan's Boogie. There's still a ton of shit that I never hear anywhere else in music, and Bejar's batshit poetry alone is good for at least a two-point score bump on the 10-point scale. If Dan's Boogie (with a different singer) showed up in my inbox as "The debut from Chicago's new avant-garde pop zoomers," I'd shower it with praise. But you grade your heroes on a harsher scale. You have to.
Deafheaven and Destroyer occupy a rarified echelon in my life because they're bands with iconic sounds that have consistently proven themselves capable of mutations that cover new ground. More often than not, this accentuates their existing strengths, adding new wrinkles to already dazzling toolkits. But sometimes, as on Infinite Granite and Dan's Boogie, I'm turned off by the new shit. The beautiful thing is that this doesn't piss me off. Because of their deep wells of existing music that I love, and the goodwill they've built up in the past decade-plus, I honestly welcome the albums I view as minor missteps. A better album is usually just a few years away. A band is only cooked once they blatantly try to replicate their hits.