Can I interest you in some pure, uncut black metal? At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, the new EP that Deafheaven surprise-released last week, greets us with a towering ice shelf of blastbeats, atmospheric tremolo picking, and, in an unprecedented move for Deafheaven, choral synths perched boldly high in the mix. Were it not for that last element, the opening seconds of “Hunter” would sound at home on any Deafheaven album besides 2021’s shoegaze-by-numbers outlier, Infinite Granite. Those gothic, imperious synths, though, are as alien to the band’s existing palette as they are foundational to a specific era and subset of black metal. Whether canny homage or sincere artistic choice, this fresh accessory complements the band’s darkest offering to date, preserving their commitment to bold melodic splashes while allowing the guitars and bass to supply the rhythmic churn this heavier material demands.
In the past, Deafheaven swore allegiance to their noisy, lo-fi Californian forbears Weakling and Leviathan, as well as the moody 2000s European bands that reimagined black metal as a vehicle for heart rather than hate, like Alcest and ColdWorld—all of whom departed sufficiently from the genre’s roots to garner derision from traditionalists. At Work in the Fields of the Bomb has a full-bodied sheen that separates it from the truest (or, in the parlance, “trvest”) early-’90s Norwegian black metal, but it sounds a hell of a lot like the stuff that directly followed those dimly lit, mythologized teenage recordings.
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In three tracks—two tentpoles separated by an ambient interlude—the EP blatantly evokes a period in the mid-’90s when, across Europe, guys in corpse paint started playing around with Korg workstations. “Symphonic black metal” eventually became a much cheesier enterprise, but the ur-texts of the genre married raw furor and cold, artificial grandiosity in a way that remains revolutionary. On At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, I hear the theatrical spite of Greek bands like Rotting Christ and Necromantia, the harrowing atmosphere of Austria’s Abigor, and above all, the austere frostiness of In the Nightside Eclipse, the 1994 debut by Norwegian OGs Emperor.
