A Year of Blind Spots: Sunbather

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Sunbather

Deafheaven

2013

It was noted in one of various things that I've read about this album that Sunbather is The Metal Album for some otherwise metal-averse music enjoyers. I hate to be a cliché, but after this week, Sunbather will more than likely be The Metal Album for me.

For a while, anyway. Then eventually I'll start branching out and attempting to listen to other American black metal albums, to see if any of them hit in the same way. I try not to learn more than one album per year from any given artist, but I would assume in about five years I will be familiar with Deafheaven's entire discography, based on what I thought of this, their sophomore album. I'll subgenre-hop for a bit too, trying out other metal albums more modern than the few classic proto-metal LPs that have been covered thus far in this column. Could be that one day, I'm well-versed in metal. If that day ever comes, before the earth burns into cinder, I will look back to this week and know that Sunbather is where it began.

If you're just joining us, you might be a little confused. Let's start from the beginning. Hi, my name is Joe, and I am the editor-in-chief of a blog called Puke on Your Birthday. There are various columns that run throughout the week on this blog, some of them written by me. One of them is a column with the unfortunate misnomer of A Year of Blind Spots, in which, for the past four and a half years, I have explored hundreds of albums that I was not familiar with, but felt like I should be. You'll see, if you scroll through the archives, that there are not too many albums like Sunbather in this column. You'll also see, if you deign to read any of those attached blog posts, that the bulk of the work here consists of trying to figure out the basics of why that particular Blind Spot sounds the way it sounds, and why it's called what it's called based on what it sounds like. 

In this way, I have slowly stretched my understanding of what MUSIC is. Many Blind Spots are something new that I know, but many others are something so new that I don't really even know what it is (and when I say "new," I of course mean "new to me"). So that requires explaining (to myself, but publicly via the blog, in case anyone else might benefit from such an explanation). But it's a fucking process! I am slowly, slowly inching my way toward a true and total understanding of MUSIC. First, it was albums from artists who discography I was kinda familiar with already. Then it was artists whose hits I was kinda familiar with but nothing else. Then it was the standard-bearer artists from genres that I was kinda familiar with. Then it was shoring up all the so-called "classics" from the genres I was familiar with at that point. Now, in its fifth year, aYoBS is kinda all over the place, listening to albums that I'm told should be Blind Spots even though I don't even really know what they are going to entail until I sit down and listen to them. Sometimes, this means that I am hitting dead ends. Other times, it means that those aforementioned slow, slow inches toward true and total understanding become miles in a single instant.

Sunbather was released in 2013, and was hailed as an instant classic of its genre. It's been twelve years, and the reputation has only grown stronger. I'm not going to sit here and attempt to tell you about the ins and outs of this thing, because I'm not the right guy to do it. It's been here twelve years, and I've been here six days, and so let's just cool our fucking jets. I can't tell you about the fine details because I don't know them. When you're in the middle of an earthquake, you're not thinking about the Richter scale, you're thinking about how to get to the nearest fucking table to jump under for protection.

I can do my best to explain a couple basics, because, like I said, maybe you too are metal-averse but you are curious about why PoYB is singing high praises for a modern metal album all of a sudden. I was told this piece of crucial information, and you can stick it in your back pocket: "death metal" typically has low, guttural vocals (what I knew as a metal-averse shit-stirrer as "cookie monster vocals"), whereas black metal has high, screaming, gusts-of-wind-esque vocals (what I conversely knew as "pterodactyl vocals"). After one minute of Sunbather, you will know that this is a black metal album. I don't know if classification details (i.e. genre descriptions) are as helpful to you as they are to me, but there you go.

Further classification: this was the first prominent critical and commercial breakthrough of the subgenre known as "blackgaze." Readers on top of their shit will recognize the portmanteau of "black metal" and "shoegaze." I don't want to tear my hair out attempting to also explain shoegaze here (apparently you can just fuck right off to TikTok these days if you really wanna know about shoegaze). But here's how I see it (and certainly how it's been explained before, I told you, I'm not a trailblazer in discussing Sunbather): if you removed the (haunting, thrilling, essential) vocals from this Deafheaven record, you would have no idea that it was a metal album. I suppose you would hear a shoegaze album, if you aren't like me and are well-versed in shoegaze. You would hear a post-rock album, something that maybe you'd hear in a hypercharged hypothetical Season 13 episode of Friday Night Lights. You might—at least to my ears—hear something resembling the emo that I'm usually searching for (though, as we discussed in this column in the past month or so, what I'm most likely referring to is something that leans more toward post-hardcore). Still, okay: blackgaze. Black metal vocals, other technically non-metal stuff that has since been pulled into black metal's orbit because of Deafheaven and because of this album.

Here's where I pause. I've said the basics. Now where to go from here beyond actually imploring you to listen to the damn thing. I don't know. I hesitate because, in this specific blog column at least, I typically don't attempt to contextualize my enjoyment of the album (or lack thereof) within the emotions that I experienced in my day-to-day life during the week of initial exploration. What I mean is, I don't want you to think that I was moved immensely by the soaring theatrics of this black metal album because I 1) had a shitty week and needed something powerful to counteract it, or 2) had a beautiful week and was for once able to see that beauty refracted through an album from a genre that I previously had very little interest in. I don't think either of those things were true. I listened to this album during slow parts of my week. I went on a walk and listened to it, for instance. I gave it my full attention. It was the center of every minute that it was on. It demanded attention. Who gives a fucking how I'm feeling, for fuck's sake. Leave that shit to Record Club.

This album is important to me because it's a powerful statement, both in the scope of my life as a musiophile so far, but also in a vacuum. Listen to the quarter-hour of "Vertigo" and tell me I'm wrong in this regard. It's so fucking much. It's so fucking good. Here's something I was thinking about this week. I feel like a trepidation I have regarding metal—based on nothing except bullshit speculation—is that there will be too many lulls in the music, that the description of "atmospheric" is liberally applied because there are mostly slow moments and then the sparse loud moments stand out in contrast to that, which all sounds like not really my thing. But here's where Deafheaven confounds my expectations: I'd still apply "atmospheric" as a descriptor, but only because the music is just so goddamn much, so many sounds piled on top of one another, that it honestly sounds like the cacophony of the upper atmosphere. Imagine the sound you'd hear in a commercial plane if suddenly all the windows disappeared. That's atmosphere, baby.

Also: this doesn't have to be a perfect album for it to be The Metal Album for me. It's only The Metal Album because it's the first of its kind living within my brain. I can name its flaws, certainly. There are four songs here that take up the majority of the album's runtime, and they are all instant classics; there are three songs on here that are more or less interludes. The "interlude" of "Windows" is four and a half minutes long, consisting of a sample of a preacher yelling about hell and a recording of guitarist Kerry McCoy attempting to buy oxycontin from a drug dealer. Is this necessary? Absolutely not. Unless you are completely bought into the lyrical themes of the album. Which I am not, because I don't even know what the lyrics are. How the fuck could you, with the vocals how they are? How could you possibly know, unless you are either staring at a lyric sheet or are vocalist George Clarke himself?

I don't want to go so far as to say that Clarke's vocals are what makes this album the incredible work of art that it is, but if someone else were to say it, I wouldn't put up too much of a fuss. They really are otherworldly. The screams, oh god, the screams. They are beautiful. They are sad and powerful and they feel like they mean something. I wouldn't be able to tell you why I think that, it's a feeling that's innate. It means something important. I'm told that the lyrics themselves are powerful, about growing up lacking, poverty and broken homes, and addiction of course. I am glad to know this but only as a confirmation of what I already knew in my soul—this is some powerful shit. It doesn't feel like laughable tough-guy devil-worshipping bullshit that a lot of metal music plays around with or even lampoons. This feels real. It feels urgent. The screams are coming from somewhere deep, and they have made an impact on me.

One more definition: this is a crossover album, meaning that it is firmly rooted in one genre, and yet connected with audiences who are not necessarily of the scene for that genre. Specifically, metalheads were perturbed when "Sunbather bros" started showing up to Deafheaven concerts because they learned about it from an 8.9/10 and BNM'd Pitchfork review. Had I been tuned into the indie rock scene in 2013 instead of taking a bit of a lull in between graduating college and finding my footing in all aspects of life, I could've been one of those bros. And that's... embarrassing, I guess, but also, who cares. Especially now, here in 2025, when genre means less than ever.

It means "less" because artists can use whatever sounds they choose to use without the amount of judgement that you might have found even ten years ago. But genre also at the same time means "more" to me, if only because these types of guideposts are essential in my own path toward true and total understanding of MUSIC. I care less about how Deafheaven was defying genre conventions by putting out an album with a pink cover, because twelve years later, that sort of defiance has become the norm. It's the story. It's what I need right now when I'm confronted with a metal album such as this, because it defies too everything I personally know about MUSIC so far. I love a metal album, The Metal Album for me. This is the beginning.