Deerhunter are back, and they immediately offer a much-needed reprieve from the current bad times. “Come down from that cloud, and cast your fears aside,” Bradford Cox coos innocently to open “Death in Midsummer.” It’s the first single (and opening track) from the shape-shifting noise-rock explorers’ upcoming album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, which will follow 2015’s slick, dreamy Fading Frontier. As Cox taps at a harpsichord and his ever-cryptic lyrics move once again into religious imagery (“May God’s will be done… and let the devil be cast out”), the song could almost be mistaken for a moment from a humble cassette the Atlanta band sold only at shows earlier this year, Double Dream of Spring.
Sure, “Death in Midsummer” eventually bulks up into a more familiar Deerhunter anthem that’s easy to imagine billowing over sunburnt festival grounds, but this initial sense of human scale, of a comfort with turning inward, feels like the point. Cox isn’t the type of singer to play up the “cloud” connection (as in cloud computing), but his other lyrics here pull off a tricky feat, addressing contemporary digital malaise through vintage analogue images: people working “their lives away” for agriculture and industry, paying off debts but running out of time to enjoy what they’ve bought. There’s even a gnarled, crowd-pleasing guitar solo soaked in a froth of synths. But what Deerhunter achieve here, and appear to advise for the rest of us, isn’t so much lighter-waving transcendence as actually observing our own day-to-day existence. “Walk around, and you’ll see what fades,” Cox concludes. The autumn leaves are falling, and that isn’t the only deterioration he’s right about.
