Sunbather

Longing enters through the loudest door

Sunbather begins at a level many albums reserve for their ending. “Dream House” places tremolo-picked guitars, blast beats, and George Clarke’s high rasp in immediate competition for space. There is no gradual invitation into Deafheaven’s second album. The first task is to distinguish movement inside an already saturated field.

The familiar genre equation—black metal force plus shoegaze color—misses the album’s careful handling of distance. Clarke’s lyrics circle wealth, romantic attachment, family, and versions of a stable life that remain visible but unreachable. Kerry McCoy’s guitars often make that distance sound radiant. Open voicings and high melodic lines promise release while distortion keeps them physically out of reach.

The four long songs do not solve the conflict. They change how close the listener seems to stand. Three shorter pieces interrupt their scale, clear the rhythmic field, and make the next impact feel earned. Intensity becomes a location, not a verdict. The album keeps leaving it and returning with a different reason.

Bright harmony survives the blast

Deafheaven recorded the album with George Clarke, Kerry McCoy, and drummer Daniel Tracy. McCoy layered rhythm and lead parts, sometimes using a whammy bar to pull whole chords slightly out of tune. Jack Shirley recorded the sessions to two-inch tape before editing and mixing in Pro Tools. The process kept an abundant arrangement organized rather than turning analog and digital recording into opposing ideals.

The guitars can shimmer, bend, or gather into a broad major-colored field without losing their abrasive edge. Tracy gives those layers direction. His cymbal patterns mark the top of the sound, while the kick and snare identify whether a passage is driving, hovering, or preparing to break open. Brightness does not soften the attack. It gives the attack something emotionally unstable to carry.

Dream House: Release arrives before relief

“Dream House” moves through several recognizable phases without treating them as separate songs. Its opening rush has a strong forward pull, but the guitar figures rise across the beat instead of locking into a blunt riff. Clarke’s voice is another line of pressure, not a narrator positioned clearly in front of the band.

When the blast recedes, the guitars widen and the pulse becomes easier to feel. The change resembles release, yet it does not create calm. The closing vocal lines came from a private exchange that Clarke connected to love and death. Their return over the broad final progression makes intimacy sound overwhelming rather than secure. The section is memorable because the music opens before the feeling does.

Sunbather: Envy stretched across open chords

Clarke described the title image as an ideal of beauty and wealth that he could see but not inhabit. The title track turns that social distance into duration. Its guitar pattern is luminous enough to suggest arrival, while the screamed vocal and relentless drumming deny any stable possession of the scene.

The long form allows attraction to become irritation and then exhaustion. Deafheaven does not introduce a darker riff to expose brightness as false. The same open harmonic color persists under increasing pressure. Envy is heard as the inability to leave a beautiful image alone. By the time the track loosens its grip, the image has become a measure of everything the narrator lacks.

Four long songs need three smaller rooms

“Irresistible,” “Please Remember,” and “Windows” serve different purposes, but each alters the implied size of the album. Clean guitar, keyboard, noise, and recorded voices bring the listener closer to individual surfaces after the long tracks have made every gesture feel panoramic.

The sequence depends on those reductions. Without “Irresistible,” the entrance of the title track would be another immediate appeal to maximum scale. Without “Windows,” “The Pecan Tree” would follow the album’s longest piece before the ear had recovered enough to register a new attack. The interludes create thresholds rather than relief.

Please Remember: A voice interrupts the scale

On “Please Remember,” a spoken passage by Stéphane Paut enters with none of Clarke’s physical strain. The difference in delivery briefly restores the semantic surface that the screamed vocals often surrender. The voice sounds placed in a room rather than projected across a horizon.

Noise eventually crowds the speech, and the track moves toward a solitary guitar figure. The parts do not resolve into a compact composition. They interrupt one another, leaving a residue of unease before “Vertigo.” That rough handoff changes the listener’s footing; a smooth ambient bridge would merely promise that the next large build will be safe.

Daniel Tracy keeps the horizon moving

The guitars supply the album’s most immediate color, but its hour-long shape depends on Tracy. Blast beats can erase hierarchy when every accent arrives as part of the same rush. His ride and crash patterns outline phrases, fills announce structural hinges, and changes in kick-drum density tell the listener whether a guitar layer is pushing forward or spreading outward.

That control matters most in the long middle passages. McCoy can sustain a harmonic field while the drums change its purpose underneath. A figure first heard as atmosphere can become a lead when the snare pattern clears space around it. A broad climax can fall back into motion without requiring a completely new riff.

Clarke’s vocal offers less contrast. His high, torn register is essential to the album’s friction, but it gives confession, accusation, and memory a similar surface. The words reward reading, particularly when they make class desire or family damage specific. Inside the mix, however, shifts in lyrical perspective are harder to hear than shifts in drumming or guitar register. The arrangement often has to communicate changes that the voice cannot.

One climax begins to resemble another

Deafheaven’s large-scale method is persuasive enough to become predictable. A clean or reduced passage establishes room; guitars gather in rising layers; drums increase the rate of impact; a bright progression arrives at extreme volume. The emotional meaning can change, but the physical route sometimes does not.

Vertigo: Expansion reaches its limit

At more than fourteen minutes, “Vertigo” has the space to expose that limit. Its patient opening and gradual additions create real suspense. Tracy keeps revising the pulse, and McCoy’s layered parts move between wavering texture and defined melodic lines. When the full band arrives, the earlier restraint gives the impact a clear memory.

The later stages keep enlarging gestures that are already complete. Another rise in guitar register and another surge of percussion confirm magnitude rather than changing the track’s emotional position. The performance remains forceful, but scale starts to substitute for a new decision. Because the album has taught the listener how carefully a change in pressure can redirect meaning, repetition here is easier to notice.

The Pecan Tree closes without consolation

“The Pecan Tree” answers “Vertigo” by making its contrasts more severe. The opening attack is compact and hostile. A quieter middle section then lowers the voice and lets the guitars hold notes long enough for their edges to become audible. The final expansion draws those states together without pretending that brightness has repaired the damage.

Refusing consolation gives the ending its force. The wide guitar voicings can sound victorious, but Clarke’s delivery remains raw and the drums keep pressing rather than settling into a ceremonial half-time close. Desire has not reached its object. It has acquired a form large enough to be shared.

The familiar opposition between beauty and abrasion describes Sunbather’s surface; changes of distance give it shape. A long song turns an ideal over until attraction becomes pain. An interlude makes the room small enough to hear a single voice. A drummer changes what a sustained guitar field is doing without clearing it away. The album occasionally repeats its route to grandeur, and its vocal extremity narrows the words it wants to expose. At its best, maximum volume measures how far longing has to travel.