Rock has almost vanished as a mainstream cultural force, and many of the acts that flirt with actual relevance are so craven or boring that it doesn’t take much cynicism to root for the genre to hurry up and die. And yet, the state of the current rock landscape, defined as it is by decadeslong decline and the critical (and, sadly, consumer) elevation of what’s little better than musical Ambien, only heightens the accomplishments of the bands that have somehow thrived through it all.
Music fans are about to hear a long-awaited new album from one of the few American outfits that’s remained interesting and meaningful during rock’s long twilight, a group that’s released multiple albums regarded as modern classics and that has never stagnated at any point in its now 18-year history. Atlanta’s Deerhunter is our country’s greatest rock band that isn’t a nostalgia act. “Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?,” their first full-length since 2015’s “Fading Frontier,” comes out Jan. 19.
At first blush, Deerhunter seems an unlikely standard-bearer for American rock. Its frontman is the 36-year-old Bradford Cox, an awkward genius with Marfan syndrome who claimed to be a virgin into his mid-30s. In a 2012 show in Minneapolis, Cox, who has an infamously confrontational stage persona, called a heckler’s bluff and led his side project Atlas Sound on an hourlong cover of “My Sharona.” (Find it on YouTube — it’s awesome.)
Deerhunter makes significant demands on its listeners. The band’s most critically lauded album, 2010’s “Halcyon Digest,” is a meditative psychosexual odyssey that Pitchfork called “one of the great documents of the queer experience” (as well as the third-best album of the first 15 years of the 21st century). Even if they are America’s greatest rock band, Deerhunter often feels too dark or strange or parochial to ever really claim the title.
Of course, these traits are the source of the band’s power — and of their art form’s power. Rock and its progenitors were once a vehicle through which outsiders gave immensity and urgency to their own psychic and social particularities (a role hip-hop now largely fills). From Robert Johnson to Iggy Pop to Michael Stipe, the greats could all face outward and inward simultaneously. Their worlds were too vast — and, as it turned out, too familiar — for an exclusionary broader culture to ignore, and their music made listeners confront the meaning of things they’d always mistakenly believed to be outside themselves.
Deerhunter belongs to this tradition. “Revival,” the pulsating first single on “Halcyon Digest” and a masterpiece of psychedelic pop, is about God or a male lover or both, and it evokes that tenuous boundary between lust and belief in which navigation is intrinsic to human existence. “Helicopter,” an achingly beautiful marvel of patience and pacing, is technically about the disappearance of a young Russian gay porn actor in the mid-2000s — but one needn’t have seen any porn, gay or otherwise, to be thunderstruck at Cox’s opening invitation to “take my hand and pray with me.” As usual, Pitchfork was only half right: The album is, in fact, a document of how the queer experience encapsulates everything and everyone, which is something close to the purpose of rock and anything else worthy of being called art.
Granted, one of the other purposes of rock is to create a sense of aesthetic enjoyment in listeners. Deerhunter is great because their music succeeds in being both heavy and fun. The band first burst onto the scene with two highly regarded 2007 releases. The full-length “Cryptograms” was an exuberant blast into outer space, fueled by the effects-heavy wizardry of guitarist and co-songwriter Lockett Pundt. The title track of that year’s “Fluorescent Grey” EP, dense with portentous downbeats and layers of whooshing guitar, is a gothic punk banger about a decaying corpse.
From early on, it was clear that Deerhunter could cover an astoundingly wide emotional spectrum and had a talent for going existential without being insufferable. There was nothing maudlin or treacly on 2008’s “Microcastle,” a bluesy genre-bender with one foot in the arena and one in the garage. “Nothing Ever Happened” is still the greatest song ever written about millennial ennui, with filthy basslines and Pundt’s soaring guitar solos clashing against themes of thwarted ambition. “Snakeskin,” a groovy standout from 2015’s “Fading Frontier” that begins with the jolting line, “I was born already nailed to the cross,” occupies a perfect middle ground between disco and psychedelia without sounding like either.
Deerhunter isn’t an explicitly religious band in the mold of U2 or Spiritualized, but they gaze skyward nevertheless. “Finding ancient language in the blood/ Fading a little more each day … And if you memorize the words/ They will show you the way,” Cox sings in “Neon Junkyard,” a jangly reckoning with the inner torment of belief from 2013. “Fixed on the living dead/Motionless he rests,” Cox sings over heavenly whorls of bass and synthesizer in “Ad Astra” on “Fading Frontier,” before calling out to “the one from above/ That will heal us with a touch.” The next track, album closer “Carrion,” is a disillusioning plunge from the sublime and vaguely Christological heights of the preceding number. The record ends with the all-too-earthly question, “What’s wrong with me?”
Ambivalence and belief can never escape one another, and like the rest of us, Deerhunter isn’t done reckoning with the dread possibility of a higher power. Cox sings of “a voice that called to me … a light that burned me” in “Death in Midsummer,” the anthemic first single off of this month’s “Why Hasn’t Everything Disappeared?” But religion is arguably a subset of an even larger theme for the band, a quintessentially American trope echoing through Moby Dick and Invisible Man and “The Big Lebowski” and beyond: The redemptive or destructive search for a transcendence that we never have any guarantee of finding.
In a country as obsessed with its own sense of destiny as our own, that “we” really does mean “everyone,” America is ever on the path to either redemption or destruction, and Deerhunter wanders a similar road. Cox fantasizes about both total isolation and total freedom; at times, he has sung about “finding the fluorescence in the junk,” being “guided by strange lights,” and “chasing the fading frontier.” The new album promises to continue this ecstatic and disquieting journey. Along the way, listeners will hopefully join in the belated discovery that Deerhunter is one of the few truly generational rock bands we have right now.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet Magazine.
