Three thousand seven hundred and twenty copies in the first week. Number 130 on the Billboard 200, the American album chart, and number two on its Heatseekers list for artists who have never been on it before. Ninety two out of a hundred on Metacritic, which made it the best reviewed record released anywhere in 2013, in any genre, by any artist.
None of those figures is large by the standards of the music industry. Every one of them was large enough to start the longest running argument black metal has had with itself since the church fires, and the argument has now outlasted the record by more than a decade.
What the record was
Formed in San Francisco in February 2010 around George Clarke and Kerry McCoy, Deafheaven had one album behind them, Roads to Judah, put out by Deathwish in April 2011 and heard by very few people. Sunbather was cut in six days in January 2013 at Atomic Garden in East Palo Alto with Jack Shirley at the desk, released on 11 June, and wrapped in a sleeve designed by Nick Steinhardt with no photograph, no logo anybody could fail to read and no black on it at all. Steinhardt has said the pink and orange were meant to be the colour seen through closed eyelids in strong sunlight, and the block lettering was lifted in spirit from a Pulp record. A genre that had spent twenty years insisting on winter was handed a photograph of the inside of an eyelid.
Clarke's account of what the songs are about has never wavered and is worth repeating because so much of the row proceeded without it. He was twenty two, without qualifications and without money, and the record came out of watching a woman sunbathe on a lawn in a neighbourhood he could not afford to live in. That is a record about class and envy written by somebody with a direct interest in both, which is not the summary the argument settled on.
The charge sheet, taken seriously
The objection was not one objection. It was four, and they are worth separating, because three of them are answerable and one of them is not.
The first was musical. Blast beats and tremolo picking arranged into consonant harmony, with the drums doing black metal work under chords that are not black metal chords, is a real departure and the people who noticed it were not imagining things. The second was about lineage: the band came out of American hardcore and post rock, not out of the tape trading network, and had no demo circulated by post, no split with anybody the audience recognised and no visible debt to the second wave beyond technique. The third was about the press. A record with these sales figures received more national coverage in six months than most of the genre's founding documents have received in thirty years, and the resentment that produced was about attention rather than about music.
Three of the four objections were arguments. The fourth was a dress code.
The fourth was the appearance of the thing. No corpse paint, no leather, no forest, no inverted anything, a singer in a plain shirt with his hair combed, and a sleeve the colour of a bathroom tile. The word that got attached to all of that in 2013 was hipster, used as a verdict rather than as a description, and it did the work that a real argument would have had to do. It is also the only part of the charge sheet that cannot be answered, because it was never a claim about the music in the first place.
What the band actually said
The most quoted position in the whole row belongs to the band, and it is a refusal to accept the title they were being accused of usurping.
If I want to write a riff that has a blast beat behind it but it has a major chord, we'll do that if it works.
Kerry McCoy, interviewed by Rob Laing, MusicRadar, 7 March 2016
In the same conversation McCoy said plainly that the band do not call themselves a black metal band because they are not one, that they are influenced by it and have neither its ethos nor its aesthetic, and that what he objects to is the wish to enforce rules. That was three years into the argument and it changed nothing, because by then the argument had stopped being about Deafheaven. Both sides were using a band from San Francisco to settle a question about ownership.
The question underneath
Black metal is the only extreme genre that has ever tried to police entry, and it has tried because it was built to. The second wave was a closed circle by design, with a membership, a rule about who could be trusted and a willingness to act on it. That produced the records and it also produced everything else, and both are described in USBM and Cascadia and in the chapters before it. A genre with that history does not develop a relaxed attitude to newcomers by accident.
So the real question was never whether Sunbather is a black metal album. It is whether a genre gets to decide who is allowed to use its methods, and the honest answer is that no genre has ever managed it, including this one. The bands who set the rules in 1993 were themselves accused of stealing from Bathory and Celtic Frost by people who had been there first. Every scene that has tried to hold a door shut has lost, and lost quickly, and usually to somebody who was not trying to get in.
There is a second answer, less comfortable, which is that some of the anger was about money and attention rather than about riffs. A band from a wealthy American city, on a label with distribution, reviewed by newspapers, playing to audiences who owned no other record in the genre, took the coverage that thirty years of underground work had not attracted. That is a legitimate grievance about how the press works. It is not an argument about a record, and the two got welded together until neither could be discussed on its own.
How it ended
It ended the way these things end, which is that the band kept working and the argument ran out of fuel. New Bermuda, out on Anti- on 2 October 2015, was heavier and faster than its predecessor, sold seven and a half thousand copies in its first week and reached number 63 on the American chart. Ordinary Corrupt Human Love followed in July 2018 with the Grammy nomination attached to it. Infinite Granite, released by Sargent House in 2021, removed the screaming almost entirely and left the band without the one element anybody had ever objected to, which is either a surrender or a demonstration that they had never been playing for the referees. Lonely People with Power, out on Roadrunner on 28 March 2025, put the screaming back.
The verdict that holds up is narrow. Sunbather is a good record with two thin passages and a structural habit it repeats too often, and it is nowhere near the best album released under the black metal heading in 2013. It is also the reason a large number of people found the rest of the genre, and the number of records sold in this music because of it considerably exceeds the number sold in spite of it. Both of those are true and neither is an argument for the other. Scenes with a live entry fight are healthier than scenes without one, and the ones that have never had a fight are the ones nobody is trying to join. The southern half of the continent had that fight over politics and geography rather than over a sleeve, and that story is in mexican and Latin American Black Metal.
