Each new Deafheaven album has seemed to react against the last, changing moods and textures without ever sacrificing their heaviness. Infinite Granite might be their most startling gesture yet: though elements can be traced back to 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, it takes those elements and expands them to album length. Infinite Granite, really, is not a metal album. It’s the album where the shoegaze entirely supplants the black metal in their blackgaze equation. For almost the whole record, George Clarke sings clean – there are, literally, seconds of growling on the album; on Villain, for example – and the guitars eschew the violence of metal for something just as intense and crushing in its own way, but dazzling and beautiful and – yes, this is shoegaze, so we’re dropping the e-bomb – ethereal.