Ten years of Deafheaven’s Sunbather
Revisiting the black metal/indie rock mashup that lit the blogosphere on fire
Deafheaven’s magnum opus Sunbather dropped 10 years ago this week, setting both music press and metal message boards ablaze with its unique blend of black metal, emo and indie rock.
The record was inescapable if you were into heavy music in 2013. I remember really wanting to like it. This came out on Deathwish Inc, one of my favourite labels at that moment. It was the first time I ever really found black metal palatable, probably because of Deafheaven’s sonic similarities to the faster and more intense end of the screamo spectrum. Ultimately, though, I felt the songs were too long, dense and self-indulgent. I gave up trying to establish the meaningful connection so many of my peers had with this record.
I wasn’t the only person who felt Sunbather was too full of itself. Black metal purists saw an album from their favourite genre, released on a hardcore label, sporting a pink cover, and getting jizzed on by music press. They instinctively puked in their mouths. It was instantly classified as “poser shit” and “fake metal”.
I wonder how much of that blowback was due to the colourful album art. I don’t mean that in any metaphoric or hyperbolic sense. Black metal superfans are not well adjusted people. I bet a large number of them literally looked at the cover of the album and decided “I don’t like this”.
The record’s reception in the metal community might have been totally different if the artwork was a greyscale photo of two dudes standing in a foggy forest with their backs to the camera. Mainstream music journalists certainly would have been less interested, which may have turned down the hate from metal contrarians.
Still, Sunbather takes more risks on record than the average genre purist is used to. I wouldn’t describe the music as black metal — more like shoegaze or emo with blast beats and trem picking. I guess those elements make it metal, but the scales are soft and sad, not satanic. I remember showing my normie friend the song “Violet” off Deafheaven’s previous LP Roads to Judah, and as the intro reached its crescendo — bursting into blasts — he said “it sounds like Explosions in the Sky, except for whatever the fuck is going on now.”
That’s a great indicator of why this record had such crossover appeal; it captured a lot of the zeitgeist at the time and channeled it through a ferocious and novel lens. It’s a really smart combination in retrospect. Take the soaring dynamics of post rock, shoegaze’s impenetrable din and screamo’s fast, manic intensity. Put that in a blender and what comes out is essentially black metal.
Sunbather was custom fit for the 2013 music landscape, speaking as much to the Topshelf/No Sleep skramz revival kid and the Williamsburg hipster as it did to the craft-beer-drinking denim vest dad. The only people who didn’t like it were dyed-in-the-wool metalheads.
I don’t think, after doing some research on the making of this record, winning the Tr00 Kvlt crowd was ever the goal. This album has blasts and screaming but the melodies are too syrupy.
Deafheaven talked about “pop-driven” songwriting in interviews leading up to this release. I don’t really hear those sensibilities, unless we’re calling My Bloody Valentine pop. Still, the intent of second wave black metal was to create the antithesis of accessibility. Sunbather, from its bright pink cover to the naturally hummable hooks nestled between the mountains of noise, rejects the core premise of bands like Burzum and Darkthrone. Though at the end of the day, it’s just as self indulgent.
I’m in more of a headspace to enjoy Sunbather’s ambition a decade later, having heard MBV stare at their shoes on Loveless and Emperor play “black metal art, exclusively” on Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk. I don’t know if I like it more than I did, though.
I want to. I love how some black metal fans still blow a gasket at the mere mention of this record (that just goes to show you the mental maturity of the people we’re talking about), but ultimately, I like my black metal to sound as if it was made by murderous autists in Scandinavian bedrooms. This sounds like it was made by cool guys strung out in a San Francisco apartment. It’s just a different sensibility. The multiple ten-plus minute tracks don’t help it go down easy either.
This record’s cool factor was off the charts when it dropped, and the novelty hasn’t worn off. The skillful synthesis of seemingly disparate genres is impressive, if not entirely to my taste. I’m sure this spawned a wave of imitators, but none of them have been important enough to reach my radar. Deafheaven weren’t the first in their lane — Alcest did it before them — but this record’s impact outside of extreme music puts it in a league of its own.
You’ll see numerous people testify in Reddit threads commemorating this anniversary that Sunbather was “the first record [they] liked with screaming vocals”. I also have a feeling that, along with Title Fight’s Floral Green, it ushered a wave of shoegaze fever into DIY music, but that’s an essay for a different time. Sunbather is a singular record— probably one of a kind in many collections — but its ambition and reception make it well worth revisiting a decade later.