Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth—and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t spent enough time listening to Deerhoof—the furiously inventive quartet treats each of their new albums as an opportunity for creative rebirth. And yet somehow, they’re also profoundly reliable, a strange but true descriptor for a band so creatively restless. You never know what a new Deerhoof album might sound like, except that it will always sound like Deerhoof. 

 

They are defined by such paradoxes, as Noble and Godlike in Ruin reaffirms. Their latest album is either a portrait of a world descending into monstrous hate, dehumanization, and dollar signs, or a haunting self-portrait of band-as monster: an intelligent, sensitive, hybrid creature, singing tirelessly of love, but increasingly alienated from that world. 

 

The music is joyful and foreboding, cybernetic and deeply human, all at once. Strings that evoke avant-garde chamber music and classic horror-film soundtracks bounce off guitar and bass lines that chug on impervious to the creeping dread. The drums are sometimes filtered to sound almost electronic, but no computer could come up with rhythms so funky and dynamic, with each minute variation from one snare hit to the next
conveying worlds of possibility. 

 

Fronting it all is Satomi Matsuzaki’s inimitable alto. A voice of solitude, whose plainspoken calm can seem strangely outside of the band’s maelstrom, even as she contributes to it with her jaggedly precise bass parts. As a first-generation immigrant to the US, she’s never tried to disguise her Japanese accent, or her deadpan, karaokeesque delivery. On Noble and Godlike in Ruin, her sense of remove feels alternately like an expression of loneliness and like a cool provocation to systems of oppression and control. “Kindness is all I needed from you,” she sings on the epic album closer “Immigrant Songs.” “But you think we’re in your house.” Not long after, the song detonates, its tightly wound art-pop giving way to several minutes of howling noise.

 

Though the subject matter may be bleak—how could it not be?—the songs carry an implicit note of defiant optimism in their refusal to bow to convention or received wisdom. There’s that famous Dylan Thomas line about raging against the dying of the light: Noble and Godlike in Ruin feels a little like that. The world may be going down, but Deerhoof is going down swinging.