Deafheaven - Night People (feat. Chelsea Wolfe)

When Deafheaven released their second album, Sunbather, five years ago, it felt like a new opportunity for metal music to get inventive and break the vices that haven't let the genre evolve past the same formulas repeated once and again since the 80s. Sadly, (or fortunately, maybe, who knows), metal fans didn't really seemed interested in that sort of innovation and Deafheaven found themselves in a limbo were they were more appreciated by hipsters and they shared festival line-ups with MØ or Capital Cities rather than with more hardcore bands akin to their own style. It was undoubtedly a supreme album, but they were a band that caused too many troubles: for one, they were too experimental for metalheads, and for the other, you really can't say these are the kind of tracks that hipsters could consume on repeat. No matter how good critics have been with them, no big fame has come to them, or at least not in the measure that a band that is reinventing a big musical genre that has been comatose for the last two decades.

But faithful to themselves, Deafheaven isn't a band that keeps doing the same for much time, if people missed their chance to make them huge, it's their loss, they have already moved on to a new set of experimentations, and in their new album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (poetic title borrowed from novelist Graham Greene), the band offers new puzzles and new paths for keep rock music relevant. Not satisfied with twisting metal and post-rock, in their collaboration with Chelse Wolfe, they go for a goth ballad. George Clarke stops screaming and goes for a touching clean-voice duo with Wolfe, in something that we could have fantasized as the encounter of Nick Cave with Tori Amos.

For a band that has the word intensity attached to them indelibly, in this particular track their reach new dimensions for it, it's the kind of power of "tough" guys coming to terms with their sensitive side, embracing the fragility of their existence and finding their true selves by exploring sides of themselves that have been neglected. It's as if Wolfe was helping the band to keep subverting genres by confronting the toxic violent charge that heavy rock music is supposed to have (yes, it's one of the most androcentric genres in existence). A basic but beautiful piano and reverberating guitars that could have been taken from The XX are the tools they use for this gem, and they keep the poetry level high since the beginning with their "Biblical sky speckled with flame".

It's a haunting track full of subtle and elegant nuances that contrast heavily with what we could have expect from this band, but that at the same time is not really a big shock; with this big time experimenters we wouldn't mind if next album gets them approaching something as unthinkable as punk rock with vocoder because we are sure that they would also nail it.