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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Deafheaven’s “New Bermuda”

Deafheaven

Though bands have been routinely fusing metal aesthetics with shoegaze dynamics and post-rock’s larger-than-life scope for decades, Deafheaven’s 2013 album, Sunbather, won considerable acclaim for how seamlessly it blended the three, simultaneously becoming the most lauded and despised metal album in recent memory upon its release, notably drawing the ire of both the Bay Area DIY scene—which had served as the group’s initial launching point—and the international metal community. New Bermuda finds Deafheaven as dynamic and wildly ambitious as ever, weaving gorgeous, almost pastoral instrumental passages in between some of the very heaviest music the band ever cut to tape, even as it wears its influences a bit too clearly on its sleeves, liberally cribbing from Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Sleep” for the opening guitar figure of “Come Back.” The end result, though, is a staggering masterpiece, one that’s quite possibly the finest American metal album since Neurosis’ Through Silver In Blood.

—Möhammad Choudhery