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Oxbow is all band, and if you were looking for four musicians more serious about
playing the music they play, you couldn't find any. Serious. Pretentious. Portentous. It is
not easy music to play. Unfortunately this means that in concert the most important thing
for us is the playing of that music. Not the fact that you want to show your friends how
funny it is to piss off the Negro with the knife on stage in his underwear by screaming
shit at him that would get you largely the same treatment streetside sans the amps, the
speakers, and all the rest. In any case, because disrespect seems to beget disrespect, if
you don't want to hear the music and you don't want us to play the music we're being
paid to play, well, it seems that leaves very little doubt as to what you really want: to
get to know us better. Closer. More intimately. And you will.

There was an evolution to this position. It occurred one night when a "friend" taunted
us the whole show. Because he was a "friend," we gave him a pass. But after the show
it felt so bad, like we had failed as musicians and artists, that we decided to NEVER,
EVER again ignore the reality of the moment. To never ignore the hereness and the
nowness of this Zen two-step between you and us. And so it goes: We're engaged
in the collective creation of a piece of art. It's as egalitarian as it gets. Everyone participates.
For good or ill.

But the most important thing to note here is when playing a show, we'd always rather
just finish playing the show than fight. (That is the collective WE.) And when fighting a
fight we'd always rather just finish fighting the fight than play the show.

From behind their computer screens, these keyboard-critics find that Deafheaven sully the genre’s sanctity by making it more palatable—by taking a purposefully unapproachable form of music and making it accessible, by commodifying an underground art, by making it inclusive rather than exclusive, by swapping out its mystique for a clearly-defined face, by effectively complicating it.