Deafheaven(USA)

Since Sunbather in 2013, Deafheaven have occupied a space uniquely their own: black metal's ferocity and shoegaze's luminous beauty collapsed into something that feels genuinely cathartic rather than merely extreme. Formed in the Bay Area by vocalist George Clarke and guitarist Kerry McCoy, the band has spent fifteen years making heavy music that is as much about the weight of being human as it is about sonic force. Their emotional autobiography runs through every record: addiction, alienation, depression, family, the cycles we inherit and can't seem to escape.

Their most recent album Lonely People With Power finds them at their most settled and assured. It's a record about masculinity in its most personal and complicated forms: fathers and sons, inherited patterns, grief folded into the music until it becomes something that can only be called beautiful. As Clarke puts it, the goal was simply, "Let's just do us to the most us we can do it."

Deafheaven play The Princess Theatre for Open Season, supported by Philadelphia shoegaze heavyweights Nothing and San Francisco hardcore outfit SPY. For anyone ready to be levelled, then lifted.

Open Season is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland's Strategic Partnerships Fund, and by the Australian Government through the Office for the Arts Revive Live program.