“Revelator is chock full of riffs. The chorus is just like, ‘What if a war metal band had Portishead chords?’”: Deafheaven’s Shiv Mehra and Kerry McCoy on atonality vs the ethereal, pedalboard thrill-seeking and their return to super-heavy guitars
Lonely People with Power takes Deafheaven back to the frontiers of black metal and shoegaze, and once more torching the rulebook of genre orthodoxy in search of sonic enlightenment
![A black-and-white portrait of Deafheaven's Shiv Mehra [left] and Kerry McCoy playing guitar in close-up.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/g7ES9cMBnW4L769Nr2W5q7-1920-80.jpg.webp)
Before Deafheaven released Infinite Granite in 2021, the metal world seemed to have the band pegged for its shoegaze-obsessed black metal sound. But the group’s fifth album was a major detour that left fans divided.
Produced by longtime Beck collaborator Justin Meldal-Johnsen and rife with dreamy, layered guitar and synth textures, mid-tempo beats – and notably, George Clarke’s actual singing voice instead of his usual skin-peeling demonic shriek – Infinite Granite crushed fans’ expectations like a slab of Precambrian rock.
So, when Magnolia, the first single from 2025’s Lonely People with Power, hit streaming services in January, fans cautiously heralded a return to form, hoping album six held more blast beats than indie rock. That’s also what guitarists Kerry McCoy and Shiv Mehra were thinking as they toured the previous record.
“There would be parts of me that would be like, ‘This is cool, but once it gets to Honeycomb [from 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love], this place is going to light up,’ thinking they’re just being patient,” McCoy says. “But then we’re in Korea and it’s 5,000 people in the rain jumping along to Great Mass of Color.”
“We ended up missing some of those other elements,” Mehra says. “Lonely People with Power doesn’t lose any of our new palette, but we brought back some of the heaters.”
Lonely People with Power isn’t merely a return to the band’s previously established sound. It’s a culmination of the stylistic detours and identities Deafheaven has cultivated over its 15-year history. Sections of Heathen and Amethyst share the most DNA with Infinite Granite, while the emotional chasms of Winona and The Marvelous Orange Tree harken to the critically acclaimed Sunbather from 2013.
Guitar players will no doubt gravitate to the chunky, palm-muted riffs at the core of songs like Magnolia and Revelator, which inevitably give way to the interlaced guitar harmonies of McCoy and Mehra overlaid to brutal beats.
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“Revelator is chock full of riffs,” McCoy says. “The chorus is just like, ‘What if a war metal band had Portishead chords?’”
Ahead of the release of Lonely People with Power, the guitarists sat down to talk tones, creative chording and the return of huge riffs to the Deafheaven oeuvre.
Infinite Granite was a deliberate shift in sound. What was the thought going into this record?
I feel like the power was missing, and we wanted to bring that back but not lose some of the more avant-garde writing style
Shiv Mehra
McCoy: “Infinite Granite is a time capsule of us at that moment, [being] worn down with the idea of black metal and long songs and blast beats and pretty, delayed guitar parts. Lonely People with Power, to me, is a timestamp of us having had a whole cycle of playing Infinite songs and learning how to do that.
“There was a rediscovering of, yeah, I kind of miss playing fucking ass-beaters and blast beats and headbangy stuff, and I miss the energy as much as I love the highfalutin indie rock things. There was a part of me that was like, this is who we really are.”
Mehra: “It’s also linked to the time period that we’re in, because Infinite Granite was Covid times, and we had a lot of time to experiment and broaden our palette of writing and singing and trying this whole thing out. But I feel like the power was missing, and we wanted to bring that back but not lose some of the more avant-garde writing style. We go into these chord journeys that are super fun and hooky, but then also brutal riffs.”
How did these songs come together structurally, and particularly with the guitars?
Mehra: “With a shit-ton of rough demos until we finally put the puzzle pieces together the way we wanted it to happen.”
McCoy: “Shiv and I can kind of read each other’s minds at this point. The riff from Magnolia, originally that riff was an Isis kind of post-metal clean guitar riff that had a different scale behind it. It was very dirgy and off-time. And then when we got in the practice space with Dan [Tracy, drummer], I remember being like, yeah, it’s this, but shouldn’t it…? And he finished my sentence – like, ‘Yeah, it should be more Scandinavian.’ And that’s what I was just thinking.”
Mehra: “We’ve gotten into these jazz chords that we try to bring into a metal format. We wouldn’t necessarily know the name of the chord, but we both know it.”
McCoy: “I think one of the beautiful things about this band is that there is no creative boss; it’s the input of five people giving direction. For instance, Shiv has this chord progression [on Amethyst] that could technically be an inverted fifth-minor thing.
“There’s no root note, but the root note is implied. And we send it to Chris [Johnson, bassist], who doesn’t know what the chords are, and he adds a bassline that implies a different series of root notes. That is where so much of the magic comes from.”
What did you like about working with Justin Meldal-Johnsen the last time, and how did that carry over to this record?
Mehra: “We see things a little differently, and he helps us put riffs into a bigger-picture idea.
McCoy: “Part of it is that Justin is not a metal guy. I wanted to work with him because I love M83, especially the classic era, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, and to me, the feeling on that record is not dissimilar from Deafheaven. There are these grand soundscapes filled with big, widescreen feelings and it triggers emotions, and the chords are very dense, but little changes can hit you right in the heartstrings. That’s what we do, as well.
“He does things because he wants to and because he considers them interesting, and neither of us are trying to hold back anything. So, when there was this interesting pushback where he would be like, ‘This double-kick part in Doberman, why is he doing this little ride bell pattern? Isn’t that kind of busy for the speed of the song?’ And I’d be like, ‘No, it’s a callback to this band from Germany that we all like, and it’s a reference for the heads.’ We would push back on each other.”
Mehra: “On Infinite, we were in a new synth world with him, but this time it’s a more guitar-oriented record, so it was also nice to just hone in on guitars with him. His tone-listening ear is impeccable to the point where he’ll hear the slightest of sourness on a note or a tuning. So we keep learning from him.
“Last time he was maybe a little more involved in our song structures, whereas this time, like Kerry said, we had a bit more of push and pull where we took a little more control of our structures, and he was more overarching on tones. But he did give us grand ideas, like the break in Revelator.”
McCoy: “The point of it was to play less.”
There’s still a lot of the ethereal stuff – that’s part of your signature – but Lonely People also has really tight riffs, which is a much different kind of game. How did that impact the tones you were going for?
McCoy: “I was referencing a lot of Godspeed [You! Black Emperor] at some point, and so I would play him something and he’d be like, 'Oh, that sounds like this ancient Silvertone I have. Let’s try that with this kind of mic.' Or a [Fender] Princeton, or a weird Yamaha thing for the cleans. For the heavy stuff, honestly, it’s 80 percent EVH 5150s. You can’t beat it. We tried a bunch of different stuff and just kept coming back to it.”
Mehra: “We use Traynors as the Marshall-y sound. We had a stack of choices, but the majority of it was really EVHs.”
McCoy: “And then to add clarity, a little bit more of the articulation of the chords, let’s add a brighter Traynor, which has a hint of gain on it, and blend it.”
Are you using in-the-box processing or pedals for all the delays and shimmering tones?
Mehra: “Lots and lots of pedals. I feel like we used less than on Infinite, which was so psychedelic and shoegazey, but we did use a lot of cool pedals this time.”
The funniest part is when you see George's face when we play this tone and he’s like, ‘That’s the one’
McCoy: “Every once in a while on the record, probably on Winona, I would say there was like, ‘Ooh, maybe this should have been wetter. Let’s throw that into a FabFilter reverb,’ or something like that.”
Mehra: “We used the [Hologram] Microcosm, and just basic delay like the [Empress Effects] Echosystem.”
McCoy: “I feel like we used the Red Panda a little bit for some glitchy, weird shit.”
Mehra: “Justin’s house is like a candy shop for musicians. And I brought my [Chase Bliss] Gen[eration] Loss pedal, which has been my favorite pedal.”
McCoy: “There’s a bunch of Chase Bliss stuff on there.”
Mehra: “We just got these [Line 6] Helixes for live, and we ended up using the verb for The Marvelous Orange Tree.”
McCoy: “I’ve been playing guitar for 25 years, but if you had told me 10, 15 years ago, one day your entire live rig will be a Line 6 multi-effects pedal, that’s fucking crazy. But there were a few times on the record I was like, I don’t know, the Helix is kind of getting it done here. [Laughs] I mean, the proof’s in the pudding.”
Mehra: “We encounter so many issues on the road with tubes, or something’s going wrong with cables, so we’re just streamlining. And the funniest part is when you see George [Clarke, vocalist]’s face when we play this tone and he’s like, ‘That’s the one.’
McCoy: “When you have a non-guitar-player be like, ‘Oh yeah, that hits,’ you’re like, damn, this is literally just – well, alright.”
How did you challenge yourselves on this record?
McCoy: “I don’t deliberately challenge myself. I can beat myself up at times. I’ll be like, man, we’re doing this fucking chord progression again. You get in those grooves. Amethyst is a great example, and I would say Revelator and Body Behavior are especially good examples where it’s like, ‘fuck that time signature up,’ or ‘get atonal on the scale. Add this weird chord, make this a little dissonant.’ Not everything has to be saccharine.”
Mehra: “With chords we’ve done too many times in a certain way, we just want to try and push it a little bit. I don’t think it’s intentional. It’s just the way we write music. We’re not listening to the same stuff we did 10 years ago.”
McCoy: “On something like Body Behavior, the verse on that where it’s just like, it’s that note, [you] resist the urge to add something over it. It’s this one note for this long, and that’s it. And that’s all they get.”
- Lonely People with Power is out now via Roadrunner.
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
Jim Beaugez has written about music for Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Guitar World, Guitar Player and many other publications. He created My Life in Five Riffs, a multimedia documentary series for Guitar Player that traces contemporary artists back to their sources of inspiration, and previously spent a decade in the musical instruments industry.
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