Deafheaven

As 2012 came to a close, George Clarke and Kerry McCoy were living off of food stamps in a small apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco with six other roommates. They slept in closets and partitioned corners, licking their wounds after a year of touring with their band Deafheaven. While their debut album Roads To Judah was met with high praise, there wasn’t a large audience for their signature hybrid of black metal, shoegaze, and post-rock. Consequently, the band amassed a mountain of debt on the road and lost 3/5ths of their members to the financial security of full-time employment.

In the rare moments of solitude within those cramped quarters of the Mission apartment, Clarke and McCoy began piecing together musical fragments that would become their sophomore album Sunbather, an album thematically fixated on the un-punk dream of climbing out of poverty and living among the leisure class. Despite the underground’s aversion to such open pining for comfort, stability, and luxury, Sunbather was a massive critical success and an unexpected crossover hit.

With their new bandmates Dan Tracy (drums), Stephen Lee Clark (bass), and Shiv Mehra (guitar), Deafheaven began selling out clubs and landing high profile festival slots across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. No one could have anticipated a band that drew from equal parts Weakling and My Bloody Valentine ascending to such heights, and that incomprehensibility added to the band’s singularity and allure.

(Promoted by Old Empire & Tidal Concerts)

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