Surprise! 18 months after putting out their heaviest album to date, Lonely People With Power, Deafheaven have returned with a two-track-and-one-interlude EP which fully embraces their black metal side. The Arthur Rizk-produced At Work In The Fields Of The Bomb has just been surprise-released via Roadrunner Records, leaving fans with plenty of questions: why no announcement beforehand? What do the songs mean? And is this a preview of where the band will go next?
Fortunately, a few days before release, Hammer was able to video-call singer George Clarke midway through Deafheaven’s North American tour supporting Mastodon and get some answers. Here’s everything you need to know about At Work….
Why did you want to surprise-release these songs?
“On our full-length records, we tend to have a longer roll-out. There is a lot of thought and artwork and things that I want to slowly present to our audience whenever we’re putting out a new album. It’s exciting to do singles and that kind of thing. With this, given that it’s effectively only two songs, we didn’t want to go through the whole rigamarole, especially because we knew we’d be on tour. We thought that the other exciting [possibility] was just to put it out, treat it like a pop or rap release.”
Kerry [McCoy, guitars] wrote the instrumentals and you wrote the lyrics while on tour. These songs are some of Deafheaven’s heaviest stuff ever…
“I think that that was always the idea from the outset. Kerry had these riffs and was like, ‘Why don’t we do something that, in our own way, is the most purely black metal thing we’ve ever done?’ He’s really been reignited by a lot of black metal and newer black metal. The aim wasn’t for this to be these big, progressive journeys that we sometimes do; the aim was to create songs that we felt were really ripping and high-energy.”
Why is it called At Work In The Fields Of The Bomb?
“It’s based on this book of photography by Robert Del Tredici, who basically went around the United States photographing sites where they built atomic weapons. He interviewed engineers and personnel at these facilities who, in their estimation, had very boring, banal jobs. He was examining how interesting it is: the gulf between the existential terror that these weapons pose and the people that quietly assemble them. Catastrophe is always built from these little nonchalant actions that lead to moments of destruction. I relate that to themes of self-sabotage and madness.”
Is that what the songs are about: self-sabotage and madness?
“I would say so. I think that two things I tend to write about are complacency and the irritability which comes from complacency, which I tend to suffer from sometimes. Sorry Laid The Hearth is to do with that, and Hunter is a strange love song to ambition: ambition as a destroyer of complacency.”
Lonely People With Power was arguably Deafheaven’s heaviest album, and now you’ve gone even heavier. Do you feel like this is a good preview of the next Deafheaven album?
“I’m not entirely sure. I do think it’ll be riffy. I think the LPs offer a chance to expand a little bit, and I’m hoping that we will retain a lot of the more beautiful passages that we tend to write. But, yeah, I see us staying in this world.”
At Work In The Fields Of The Bomb is out now via Roadrunner. Deafheaven are currently touring North America with Mastodon.
(LouderSound)
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