It was 2003, so we’re talking At The Drive-In, The Misfits, AFI, Dead Kennedys – like the ’90s hardcore-y stuff. A friend from school played drums, one of my stop-motion movie friends got a bass, and we started a band and all simultaneously got into the aggressive music that teenagers were into at the time. įrom there, I was just learning power chords and figuring out tablature on : Jimi Hendrix’s version of the National Anthem “Learn to Fly” by the Foo Fighters stuff like that. So I asked for either a camcorder or the Squier Strat Pack from Fender, and I believe my parents saw that the Strat was cheaper than a camcorder, so I got that instead. It was my birthday or Christmas, and I had gotten really into making stop-motion animation videos with my friend. I would just sort of pick it up every now and then, and eventually learned how to play “A Horse With No Name” by America.īut the big push happened when I was in seventh grade. He showed me a couple of things, and I was like, “This is kind of fun,” you know? Something to do, like when you can’t skateboard. Sheldon played guitar, and he gave my dad his old one because my dad wanted to play Bob Dylan songs. My parents had just got divorced and my dad had a friend named Sheldon who was staying on the couch. Read through for an in-depth exploration of Deafheaven’s origins and what influences Kerry’s guitar sound, plus watch this exclusive video of Kerry demonstrating his signature GUITAR RIG 6 presets at the Gibson Showroom in Hollywood, California. We sat down with Deafheaven guitarist and founding member Kerry McCoy to talk about his early influences and the band’s synergistic approach to songwriting. One need look no further than the band’s latest release – the monumentally atmospheric and relentlessly dynamic Infinite Granite – to witness the colossal and untamed beauty that’s possible in a post-genre world. Over the last decade, the band has churned out five albums of bewilderingly cathartic music, a crushingly heavy amalgam of beauty and ferocity that largely defies categorization.

Within months of playing their first show, Deafheaven had landed a record deal with legendary indie Deathwish, Inc., who quickly released their debut studio album to critical acclaim from Pitchfork, Decibel, and NPR. But the group’s potent blend of crushingly heavy riffs and ethereal melodies (dubbed “blackgaze” for its melding of black metal and shoegaze sounds) was still largely unknown in America, and the subsequent response was both immediate and profound. Deafheaven first broke on the San Francisco scene in 2010 with little more than an untitled demo tape recorded on borrowed equipment and an acoustic guitar.

Guitar rig presets shoegaze