MetalPost-rock
Roadrunner Records · 9 October 2026
The EP has three tracks and the third takes more than half of it: “Sorry Laid the Hearth” runs twelve minutes forty-seven, against seven sixteen for “Hunter” and two fifty-five for “Three Princes”. Twenty-three minutes in all, released by surprise on 9 October through Roadrunner with no campaign in front of it. Kerry McCoy had already said what it was: the heaviest thing they’ve ever put out and the closest to black metal they’ve ever come. “Hunter” proves it in the opening bars, with a tremolo and a vocal that point far more towards early-nineties northern Europe than towards the Californian lineage the band came up in.
The title and the idea come from Robert Del Tredici’s book of photographs of nuclear weapons plants: ordinary places, ordinary people, eight-hour shifts, and a bomb at the end of the chain. The EP works that gap, and the band finds the right shape for it on “Sorry Laid the Hearth”, which has room to move from violence to calm and back without the transitions sounding written; the twelve minutes don’t drag, because the piece never uses the same device twice. The short film that goes with “Hunter” is by singer George Clarke and director Nico Poalillo, shot by Janusz Kaminski.
“Three Princes”, two fifty-five, is caught between two monoliths and hasn’t time to be anything but a link: it starts, warms up, and ends. On a long record it would be a breath; on a three-track EP it becomes a third of the tracklist and a twelfth of the running time, and the proportion tells in the listening. What’s here, really, is one large piece, one medium one and a sketch, and it would work as well as a two-sided single, probably better.
“Lonely People with Power” (2025) was their first album for Roadrunner and had already turned the volume back up after the guitar-pop excursion of “Infinite Granite” (2021); this is the next step along that road, taken at short length and with the band out on tour with Mastodon and Alcest. Deafheaven have announced the heaviest record of their lives before and it hasn’t always held.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Roger Estivill