Deafheaven with Nothing & SPY- Open Season 2026

Since Sunbather in 2013, Deafheaven have occupied a space uniquely their own: black metal’s ferocity and shoegaze’s luminous beauty collapsed into something that feels genuinely cathartic rather than merely extreme. Formed in the Bay Area by vocalist George Clarke and guitarist Kerry McCoy, the band has spent fifteen years making heavy music that is as much about the weight of being human as it is about sonic force. Their emotional autobiography runs through every record: addiction, alienation, depression, family, the cycles we inherit and can’t seem to escape.

Their most recent album Lonely People With Power finds them at their most settled and assured. It’s a record about masculinity in its most personal and complicated forms: father, sons, inherited patterns, grief folded into the music until it becomes something that can only be called beautiful. As Clarke puts it, “Let’s just do us to the most us we can do it.”

Deafheaven play The Princess Theatre for Open Season, with shoegaze heavyweights Nothing and hardcore outfit SPY. For anyone ready to be levelled, then lifted.

Open Season is The Tivoli Group’s annual program of music, art and cultural events, transforming Brisbane into a winter playground for live performance each year. Open Season is independently owned and operated, and has funding assistance through the Live Music Office of the Australian Government and Arts Queensland.