The year is 2013. I’m working at a charter school in my first real Adult Job™, complete with health insurance and a 401(k). My wife and I are new homeowners, and I am feeling like a real grown-up. In my free periods, I would read reviews and lists and retrospectives looking for new (to me) music. Much of the music I was listening to in those days was either avant-garde or classic 90s indie rock—y’know, grown-up stuff.

I certainly was not listening to metal. I used to listen to metal back in high school, but I fancied myself too mature to care about such aggressive and juvenile pursuits.

But then, every “mature” music publication I followed started raving about an album called Sunbather from a band called Deafheaven. It was plastered all over the homepages of Pitchfork, NME, and even NPR. As soon as I saw the words “black metal” in the review, I closed the review and kept scrolling. But I couldn’t escape the hype—even as much as I wanted to. I eventually returned to the review I had closed, but this time I noticed some more descriptions that caught my eye. Shoegaze and post-rock were mentioned, referencing bands like Explosions in the Sky, Slowdive, and My Bloody Valentine. I decided to give it a begrudging listen.

It wasn’t necessarily an immediate shift. There was plenty to bristle at: the vocals were entirely screamed, the drums frequently employed blast beats. But there was something in the way the record used those harsh elements alongside cinematic tonal shifts and atmospheric guitar work that piqued my interest. I kept coming back to it. Where most of the metal I had been exposed to at that point had been almost wholly aggressive, Deafheaven used these aggressive elements to portray a wide spectrum of moods—even moods like hope and joy, which seemed to be less present the heavier a band got.

It was the first time I felt like I could describe a piece of heavy music as “gorgeous.” It offered perhaps one of the most significant shifts in my sonic vocabulary. Metal didn’t need to be dark and dour: it could be so much more than that. I became obsessed with the record, even playing it for a class. Eventually, that obsession outgrew Sunbather’s own ability to satisfy it. It shifted my sensibilities several degrees heavier. I was consumed by a need for more music that was both heavy and beautiful—a need that would lead me to bands like Alcest, Lantlos, Russian Circles, Isis, and so much more.

Judging by the trends in heavy music in the last decade, I wasn’t alone in that desire. Deafheaven didn’t create the amalgamation of black metal, shoegaze, and post rock known as blackgaze (Alcest deserves that credit). But Sunbather was the subgenre’s Nevermind moment. It exploded in popularity, bringing listeners and imitators alike. Even beyond the shameless copycats (cough cough, Ghost Bath, cough cough), it seems to have had an indelible influence on the course of heavy music. Ten years later, the lines between shoegaze, post rock, and metal have only gotten blurrier, with swarms of bands making their home in the sonic space between them. Heavy metal in general seems far less opposed to softer influences, even as Hipsterdom has become more receptive of metal bands (who would have expected a black metal band to get a spot at Lollapalooza before Sunbather?).

Ten years on, Sunbather still sounds as fresh as the first time I heard it. And despite its influence and imitators, nothing quite sounds like it. Even Deafheaven themselves seem to have tried hard to avoid making too similar a record, pressing into more traditional metal sounds or straight shoegaze on later releases. Even if they were to have tried to write Sunbather again, it would have been impossible to recreate this magic. From the jubilant blast beats that open the record to the paranoid warped piano of “Windows” to the anthemic wall of sound that closes “The Pecan Tree,” Sunbather is as singular as it is universal. It’s as close to a mainstream black metal record as we’re likely to get, and as much as it’s been dismissed by black metal purists or dismissed as overhyped, its legacy is set in stone. If history remains kind it will be remembered not just as one of the greatest metal records of all time, but as one of the greatest records, period.

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