How to sound like Deafheaven
Deafheaven is black metal blast beats under a beautiful shoegaze wall. Build the shimmer with Adrift and the tremolo-picked fuzz with Drown.
People ask me how a band can scream like they are being dragged to hell and still make you cry. That contradiction is the whole trick, and it is more approachable than it looks. Here is how I think about building it in the box.
A short history of the Deafheaven sound
Deafheaven came out of San Francisco, and by the time "Sunbather" landed in 2013 they had done something that made a lot of people uncomfortable and a lot of other people very happy. They took the machinery of black metal, the blast beats, the tremolo picking, the raw screamed vocals, and they poured it into the warm bright architecture of shoegaze and post-rock. That pink album cover was not an accident. The whole point was that black metal, a genre built on cold and darkness, could be aimed at something euphoric instead.
What you get is major-key melancholy at enormous volume. The riffs are fast and relentless, but the harmony underneath is bright, almost hymn-like, and the vocals sit up top like weather rather than like a lead singer. It splits the difference between something that wants to hurt you and something that wants to lift you off the ground. That tension is the sound. If you keep it in mind the rest of the choices make sense.
The players and their gear
I have not been in a room with this band's rigs, so I will keep this to what is documented and what your ears can confirm off the records. The guitars are the engine. They are high-gain and fast, picked in a rapid tremolo motion so a single note becomes a shimmering blur, and then layered several times until the wall stops sounding like a guitar and starts sounding like a choir made of distortion. The individual pick attacks smear together. That smear is what you are chasing.
Underneath that, the drums are doing blast beats, that fast alternating snare and kick pattern that gives black metal its forward panic. The screamed vocals are mixed as texture, not as the focal point. They are usually pushed back and soaked in reverb so they read as another layer in the wall rather than a person in front of the band. On top of everything there is a huge amount of reverb and shimmer, the kind of tail that never quite ends, which is what glues the harsh and the pretty together.
On specific amps and pedals I will hedge, because bands change gear and I would rather not invent a signal chain I cannot confirm. The honest summary is bright high-gain guitars, layered, into a lot of reverb, with the harshness kept and the note attack thrown away. You do not need their exact boxes to get there.
How to get it: the Siesta plugin chain
The blackgaze chain, in the box
- Tremolo-pick a bright progression. Play a clean guitar and pick one note per beat as fast as you can hold, on a major-key progression that feels bittersweet rather than dark. Track it two to four times and pan the layers wide. This is the harmony that carries the whole thing.
- Fuzz it with Drown. Bring up Murk and Depth until the tremolo picking turns into one continuous roar. This is your black-metal engine, the harsh saturated bed that the shimmer will sit on top of.
- Drown it in Adrift. Roll up Heat and Melt so the wall blooms into that euphoric shimmer. This is the shoegaze half of the equation, the reverb-fed wash that makes the harshness beautiful instead of just loud.
- Bury the screamed vocal in the wall. Send the vocal into the same reverb space and pull its level down until it reads as texture. It should feel like the scream is coming from inside the guitars, not from a singer standing in front of them.
Adrift builds the wall in one plugin
It puts the reverb before the fuzz for you, so the wash blooms instead of sitting behind the note, and it drowns the pick attack automatically. Heat sets how hard the reverb feeds the saturation, Melt sets how far the whole thing dissolves. Load it on a clean guitar, roll them up, and you are inside the wall in about ten seconds. Mac, Windows and Linux, offline license.
Get Adrift · $39 →Dialing it in
- Commit to the tremolo picking. The wall lives or dies on how steady and how fast you pick. If the individual notes are still audible as separate hits, pick faster or layer another take. The blur is the sound, and no plugin can fake a wristy performance you did not play.
- Keep the key bright. This is the counterintuitive part. Write the progression major or modal-major, the kind of chords that would sound hopeful on an acoustic. The darkness comes entirely from the distortion and the screaming, so the harmony is free to be gorgeous.
- Let the reverb sit in front of the fuzz. Reverb after distortion sounds like a wet metal tone. Reverb feeding into distortion is the blackgaze move, because the tail itself gets saturated and turns into a glowing cloud. Adrift does this ordering for you, but if you build the chain by hand, mind the order.
- Mix the scream as weather. Resist the urge to feature the vocal. Push it back, drench it, and let it blend into the top of the wall. The emotional hit comes from not being able to quite make out the words.
If you like this collision of harsh and pretty, it is worth studying the bands that got there from the other direction, starting soft and adding weight. I wrote up the Deftones guide for exactly that, and a lot of the reverb and layering thinking carries straight over into blackgaze.
The last thing I will say is that this sound rewards restraint in the arrangement even while it goes maximal in the texture. One wall, one scream, one bright progression, held long enough to hypnotize. You do not need ten guitar parts and every plugin you own. You need a good progression, a steady picking hand, fuzz, and a reverb that blooms. Get those four right and the rest is just how loud you are brave enough to turn it up.