Deafheaven: "Brought to the Water" (via SoundCloud)

“I mean, let’s talk about it.”

Deafheaven frontman George Clarke sounds like man in need of some serious unburdening. It’s no wonder: In the last two years, his band has been lambasted by the notoriously cloistered metal community, routinely derided as frauds, poseurs, and hipster rich kids. All of it is a result of the exposure that came with their 2013 album Sunbather, a total gamechanger that brought black metal perilously close to mainstream acceptance by merging it with shoegaze beauty, post-rock expanse, and, to the chagrin of many, a pretty face. The album left such a big impact that directly ripping it off can now double as a career-stoking publicity stunt: The California quintet are none too pleased with a new band called Ghost Bath that named their recent album Moonlover and its lead single “Happyhouse”—a title suspiciously similar to Deafheaven’s own “Dreamhouse”. “They stole everything about their whole shit from us,” says guitarist Kerry McCoy, grousing about the downside of disruption in a copy-and-paste culture.

Deafheaven’s mere presence here at L.A.’s Hyperion Public could potentially constitute a “gotcha” moment for metal watch dogs: We’re two and a half hours into a light dinner and some heavy drinking at the country-chic gastropub in Silver Lake, where our server is mustachioed and wearing suspenders. Clarke frankly doesn’t look out of place, downing scotch and sporting a fresh, band-collar button down—a haute couture version of his typical, all-black stage attire. McCoy, who tends to be Deafheaven’s anchor in the metal world, is staying true in a Metallica Master of Puppets T-shirt; he shows up late and proceeds to rapidly consume four whiskey-and-beer combinations. McCoy doesn’t believe the accusations that have been aimed at Deafheaven are worth dignifying with a response, but Clarke is game, if only in hope that he can offer some final words and move on.

Because Deafheaven are ready to be done with Sunbather; Clarke describes next month’s follow-up, New Bermuda, as the polar opposite in every way. And while there are similarities between the two LPs—the churning chords of the new song “Luna” hearken back to “Dreamhouse”, for example—the differences are indeed striking. The languorous drone of “Baby Blue” makes good on the band’s purported influences of slowcore heavies like Low and Red House Painters; drummer Dan Tracy is no longer relied upon to play just blast beats. They refer to “Come Back” as “death metal Wilco” due to its prominent slide guitars. “Gifts for the Earth”, meanwhile, begins with a down-stroked riff Interpol could love and ends with a regal procession that resembles Oasis’ “Champagne Supernova”. (McCoy proudly notes that New Bermuda is set to drop on the 20th anniversary of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?)

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While Sunbather was split between epics and interludes, New Bermuda sounds more relentless and intense even before taking into account Clarke’s newly harrowing narrative: “Not even in dreams could I imagine my escape,” he sings at a key moment. While Sunbather was often described as shoegaze or indie rock as a way of foregrounding its basic appeal, its lyrical themes actually involved classic hip-hop tropes: lower-class kids visualizing success as a self-fulfilling prophecy. That album’s eponymous central character embodied the crass ways of signifying a good life: the beautiful woman, the house, the ability to do fuck all in the afternoon. Rather than being an indictment of the American Dream, though, Clarke actually wanted all of those things when he wrote those songs.

“This new album is more rooted in the reality of being a 26-year-old adult with adult fears—I’m not a shitty kid living on a living room floor...” Clarke starts, before McCoy finishes the thought, “... wishing that I was rich.”

Considering their trajectory, it’s probably no surprise that Deafheaven’s favorite MC is Drake—another guy who’s upended a genre amidst accusations of not being real or hard enough. (McCoy recently dropped $300 at the rapper’s OVO Store on a phone case and two shirts.) But despite actually starting from the bottom, Deafheaven became wrongly stereotyped as privileged hipsters the usual way, through insecurity and projection. Sunbather encompassed a vast emotional scale—drugs, the pathology passed through generations, depression, ecstasy, along with what their new label boss, Anti- owner Brett Gurewitz, describes as a “profound yearning” akin to U2 or Sigur Ros. The album was clearly about being poor and fatherless and without hope—it’s final lyrics are “I am my father’s son/ I am no one/ I cannot love/ It’s in my blood”—and just about every major event in Deafheaven’s early career was the result of ingenuity and blind luck in the face of financial desperation.