This February 19th at Max Watts an aged 3-peice from Oregon named YOB tour Australia!!!! Struth you massive ripper fuck yes me and my stupid earplugs are going and we are VERY VERY exited as I have been writing to them for years begging they tour down under. In a lazy holiday spirit this issue is simply a paste of the 2017 New Yorker article on their mighty Clearing The Path To Ascend LP.

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"The following article got me into YOB; their philosophical and heavy as a dried elephants dung wall of sound I like to refer as Thinking Man's Doom Metal, oh yeah and wait to crank up Mike's guitar, OMFG his tone, OMG those weird chords and notes that make you want to give up playing guitar because you have no idea what he is doing and become his BFF so you can humbly ask how the Houses Of The Holy he is making those sounds. Oh yeah and the drums and bass are triple heavy as fuck times a really, colossally heavy fuck - you kind of peel them off your nether regions after listening. Alrighty then time to de-tune your urethra and read on citizens." - The First President of the Republic of Ashtraya, 7:05pm, Jan 8 2026

YOB’S DOOM METAL GETS BRIGHTER

By Benjamin Shapiro
[Originally appeared way back in 2017 in The New Yorker, June 16 issue]

// YOB with singer songwriter guitarist Mike in the middle //

Mike Scheidt is the guitarist and vocalist behind YOB, which practices an extreme style of rock called doom metal. The music is bleak and slow, and tends to follow a format codified on early Black Sabbath records: spiritualist-satanic homilies sung over pitched-down guitar riffs played at a trudge. Most bands don’t stray far from the script, for fear of the dreaded “false metal” tag. But the genre’s strict posturing suggests that feelings of actual doom are not necessarily required.

The pain that Scheidt brings to his performance, however, extends far beyond mere aesthetics. He is disarmingly open about his personal problems, which include a history of clinical depression and struggles with eating disorders. He is also intensely thoughtful—a friend referred to him as “a Zen yogi-master type”—and offers an intellectual, vulnerary take on a genre that often borders on juvenilia. At forty-six, Scheidt is husky and covered in tattoos, with a flower-power haircut and circular John Lennon glasses. He is a regular meditator, and the opener of YOB’s excellent album “Clearing the Path to Ascend,” from 2014, is punctuated by recordings of the British philosopher Alan Watts. YOB songs, which often exceed fifteen minutes, are contemplative incantations similar to chakra-alignment music. But Scheidt, for all his solemnity, is a crusher of a guitarist, a vocal force, and a gripping songwriter, touching on themes of depression, spirituality, and transcendence.

This past January, while grocery shopping not far from his home, in Eugene, Oregon, Scheidt was struck with a violent pain down his left side that froze him in the aisle. “It was the kind of pain that stopped my mind—that touched on a mortal sense of fear,” he told me recently. The cause turned out to be a severe case of acute diverticulitis, an intestinal disease. He was rushed to the hospital, where he underwent surgery a few days later, and YOB’s tour was postponed indefinitely. With the help of his fans, who banded together to raise nearly thirty thousand dollars to help with his medical bills, he can work again, and has set upon making up for lost time, and gigs.

YOB returns to New York for a three-night stand at Saint Vitus, the Greenpoint metal bar, June 23-25. Attendees can expect a group with a reinvigorated sense of purpose. “We all feel the same way,” Scheidt told me, describing “this heightened feeling of love for each other and our music—that we’re intact after all of this.” His recovery has brought on smaller changes as well. “I’m wearing less black,” he said—a bold move for a metalhead. “I’m attracted to color.”

By Benjamin Shapiro
[The New Yorker, 2017 June 16 issue]