YOB: Our Raw Heart (Custom Moonphase With Splatter)

Our Raw Heart is the eighth studio album by American doom metal band YOB. It was released June 8, 2018, by Relapse Records.

The album was produced by Billy Barnett. The album was inspired by a serious health issue suffered by singer and guitarist Mike Scheidt in early 2017, and most of the music was written while he was in a hospital bed. The album has been described as a cross between the band’s two previous studio albums, mixing the aggression of Atma (2011) with the psychedelic experimentation of Clearing the Path to Ascend (2014). AllMusic classified it as a doom metal album “possessed of hope”, with elements of sludge metal, stoner metal and post-metal psychedelia.

In an interview with Cvlt Nation last year, Mike Scheidt didn’t dwell overlong on the mammoth riffs or cosmic heft of his veteran doom metal band YOB. He talked about life and death. “Definitely a little bit of a perspective shift in my life,” he said of the six-hour surgery he underwent in early 2017 as treatment for acute diverticulitis, an intestinal disease he’d contracted. The surgery was supposed to last only three hours, and Scheidt awoke from his ordeal knowing he’d faced mortality. “Some things have come into real crystal clarity, and it’s positive. Yeah, it’s positive. Also, things I need to work on have become apparent to me, but not in a bad way. It’s seeing it as an opportunity.”

That opportunity has been realized in YOB’s new album, Our Raw Heart. It’s the eighth full-length by the Eugene, Ore.-based trio, and the group’s sprawling gravity and thunderous majesty have taken an introspective turn — but not in entirely death-obsessed way. When Scheidt, who sings and wields the guitar in YOB, utters the lines “Unknown by time / This ache of beyond / Shining” on Our Raw Heart‘s opening song, “Ablaze,” the magnetic pull of the hereafter is palpable. Choppy and churning, it’s a fraught voyage into the reaches of metaphysical uncertainty. Scheidt delivers poetic awe in melodic howls, summoning an atmosphere of spiritual surrender for the duration of the track’s 10-minute expanse.

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