“Slow is fast,” says Mike Scheidt, singer, guitarist, and creative nucleus of the Oregon-based doom metal trio YOB. It’s a concept that speaks to both the immense propulsion of their megalithic compositions and the way their artistry has patiently unfurled across their 25-year tenure. Change and revelation take time. You can’t snap yourself into epiphany and you can’t force yourself into another shape. You have to trudge. It doesn’t mean you’re failing. You persevere through the muck or you stop and you sink. There is no third way.

YOB’s music spreads across a plain where vast weather systems converge. Since sharing their first demo in 2000, the band has slowly, graciously gathered a devoted audience into their planetary orbit. Together with bassist Aaron Rieseberg and drummer Dave French, Scheidt tethers pendulous riffs to sky-flung vocals, sinking deep into the trenches and then cresting through the clouds. From the stoner rock ripples of their 2002 debut Elaborations of Carbon through the cavernous echoes of 2018’s Our Raw Heart, YOB wield their totalizing gravity to bore into the light that hides in everything.

Scheidt was reared on punk and metal in the eighties and nineties: parallel outsider ecosystems that lent language and dimension to deep feelings of unbelonging. “Music became for me what I think it is for everybody: an anchor,” he says. “It’s something that soothes; it’s something that lets you feel the intensity of anger without the damage of anger.” He turned toward doom after seeing Cathedral perform in Portland in the early nineties. “I was hanging out in the back. Then Cathedral started playing and it took maybe ten minutes for me to go from the back of the room to wedging myself against the front of the stage,” Scheidt remembers. “It changed my life. Before then I was in punk bands. After that, I started to play slower and lower.”

Toward the end of the nineties, Scheidt started writing songs in the stoner doom tradition of Black Sabbath and Sleep. He dubbed his new project YOB and submitted its first demo to stonerrock.com, one of many online musical communities that sprung up during the explosion of home internet service at the end of the millennium. At the time, Scheidt was busy parenting his three young children and didn’t expect the recording to lead to much. “I just submitted the demo because I wanted to be a part of the community,” says Scheidt. “There was no idea of anything beyond that. Life was very busy and I had other priorities. Everything that came afterwards was surprise after surprise after surprise.”

A warm reception on stonerrock.com sparked label interest, and YOB officially debuted with Elaborations of Carbon, a refinement and expansion of the blues-based stoner rock of their demo. The psychedelic romps of Catharsis followed in 2003, while 2004’s The Illusion of Motion further deepened YOB’s absorbing weight. In 2005, The Unreal Never Lived nudged Scheidt’s devotional practices closer to the forefront of his lyrics. “I’m a longtime practitioner of Buddhism with a nod to Advaita Vedanta,” he says. “I’m a skeptical practitioner in the sense that certain beliefs are either things I don’t grab onto or I take a slow approach. But it was all very much an attempt to solve my own suffering and connect to a deeper world than the one I was raised to believe in.” The album’s title references a quote from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, a Hindu spiritual teacher whose work found a wide audience among Western seekers with the 1973 publication of the book I Am That: “The real does not die, the unreal never lived.”

“It’s just about getting to know reality as it is before you can think about it,” says Scheidt of his spiritual practice. “It’s already there. Whatever’s true is true right now, regardless of what we say or believe about it.”

Following two monthlong tours in the middle of the 2000s, YOB disbanded in 2005. News of their breakup drew the curiosity of new listeners, and their audience grew through word of mouth during four years of dormancy. By the time YOB regrouped in 2009, their records were selling better than ever, and they were playing to bigger and bigger rooms. A new chapter began with 2009’s The Great Cessation. YOB worked steadily, slowing the pace of their output and growing their audience organically with more extensive touring. Their 2011 album Atma — named after the concept of the truest, most expansive self in Hinduism and Buddhism — earned a nod on SPIN‘s top 50 albums of the year.

In early 2012, YOB opened for Tool on a string of East Coast shows, where they learned to fill arenas with their singular galactic sludge. Two years later, the 2014 album Clearing the Path to Ascend notched a new peak in the band’s snowballing acclaim. “I remember getting off a plane to play sold out shows at St. Vitus in Brooklyn, and my phone was blowing up that we had got metal record of the year in Rolling Stone,” says Scheidt. “I was like, what is all this about? It was something you can’t ask for. It was just there.”

Anyone who’s gone to a YOB concert knows the distinct quality of attention the band commands. To see them live is to surrender completely, awash in pulverizing sound. The sheer mass of the music dislodges consciousness from its habitual patterns; dissolve into YOB and you’ll find yourself rewritten upon surfacing.

“The crowd and the band are not two things,” says Scheidt. “Over time, playing live has become much less about escape for ourselves and much more about the community of people that have brought us there. Our intention is to offer a space where all of us together can come up for air from the daily struggle. Our music is medicine for us. If it’s that for anyone else, it’s an immense honor.”

Onstage, French, Rieseberg, and Scheidt continually reforge songs from deep in YOB’s catalog. Compositions evolve and grow along with the band, taking on lives of their own over time. “We’re a better band than when we started. We’re a clearer band. We’re much better at focusing within the relaxation that comes from deep water,” Scheidt continues. “Dave is a MacGuyver multi-instrumentalist and an immensely skilled human who seems to have a solution to any obstacle that arises. Aaron is a multi-instrumentalist as well. A deep student of the bass, he whips up thunder with ease, calling on decades of experience as an ever-reaching, forward-thinking musician. Anything I do is inseparable from the wisdom, knowledge, and skills of Aaron and Dave. Together, we are YOB.”

Little Rock, Arkansas’ Pallbearer are a doom metal quartet whose penchant for extreme, monstrously thick heaviness has drawn fans from across the globe. With a sound rooted in the slow, riff-centric traditions pioneered by Black Sabbath , the band’s approach is appended by a neo-psychedelic application of guitar harmony and later on, prog elements. It was initially showcased on a three-song demo that included a cover of the Billie Holiday standard “Gloomy Sunday.” They hardwired that guitar interplay into their core sound on their 2012 debut album Sorrow and Extinction. Live and on recordings, Pallbearer graft layers of impenetrably sludgy guitars onto an impossibly thick wall of oppressive, throbbing, bass-and-drum-kit bleakness that envelops the listener. 2014’s charting Foundations of Burden added a more glacial feel but retained the band’s textures and dynamics thanks in part to producer Billy Anderson’s mix. Their third full-length, 2017’s Heartless, marked their international breakthrough as it reached the top spot on several charts. The single “Atlantis” appeared in 2019.

Pallbearer’s original lineup came together out of the local metal scene in 2008, with Brett Campbell (guitars/vocals), Devin Holt (guitars), and Joseph D. Rowland (bass); their drum chair remained in flux until 2012 when Mark Lierly joined the band. After woodshedding for two years, developing a sound as bleak and oppressive as it was melodically expansive, Pallbearer issued a widely acclaimed self-titled demo in 2010 using drummer Zach Stine. In addition to the near iconic, ear-shattering cover of “Gloomy Sunday,” the set included the originals “The Legend” and “Devoid of Redemption.” These two songs in particular — along with the band’s burgeoning live reputation, drew the interest of record label Profound Lore . They signed Pallbearer and released their 2012 debut album Sorrow and Extinction. They also contributed two tracks to a split-label showcase with YOB , Atlas Moth , Loss , and Wolvhammer . Stine left the band in 2011 and was replaced with Chuck Schaff as Pallbearer undertook a world tour.

Before re-entering the studio, the band replaced Schaaf with Lierly in the drum chair. He made his recording debut with the group on 2014’s Foundations of Burden. Produced and mixed by Billy Anderson ( Neurosis , Swans , Sleep ), the record was greeted with enthusiasm from both the metal and mainstream rock press. Commercially, it registered well inside the front half of the Top 200, but also placed on half-a-dozen other charts.

The band toured internationally for the next year-and-a-half, playing headline and support shows in clubs, theaters, and at large festivals. The three-track Fear & Fury EP followed in 2016. With a more hook-laden — but no less heavy — sound, it revealed the band’s musical progression. They spent the remainder of the summer recording their third full-length studio date. Self-produced and recorded to analog tape at Fellowship Hall Sound in Little Rock, it was mixed by Joe Barresi ( Queens of the Stone Age , Tool , Melvins , Soundgarden ). Prefaced by the release of singles “Thorns” and “I Saw the End,” Pallbearer released the full-length Heartless through Profound Lore in March of 2017. It was initially greeted with a little consternation by some early fans (read “purists”) who didn’t enjoy its more polished and textured production and proggish melodic and instrumental interludes. Pallbearer expected this and took it in stride as they went out on tour. What they didn’t expect, however, was to be embraced by rock and indie audiences. The album got international airplay, topped the Heatseekers chart, and placed inside the Top Ten at Hard Rock albums and in the Top Three at streaming. The band’s nearly two-year-long tour saw them headlining most of the festivals they played, and netting record sales.

While on the road, they issued a pair of singles in 2018. April saw the digital only release of “Dropout,” a brand-new song, cut for the Adult Swim Singles Program. In September, Pallbearer released their cover of Pink Floyd ‘s “Run Like Hell” to streaming. The band spent the front half of 2019 on the road playing in Europe, South America, and the United States. They issued a two- sided digital single in June: “Atlantis” b/w a live version of “Thorns.” They spent the remainder of 2019 and early 2020 in intermittent recording sessions at West Texas studio Sonic Ranch with Randall Dunn ( Sunn O))) , Earth , Johan Johannson). In July they announced the imminent release of fourth album, Forgotten Days with a Ben Meredith-directed video for its title track. The full-length was released in October. ~ Gregory Heaney & Thom Jurek, Rovi

Gnaw is an experimental drone / noise band from New York City, New York, United States formed in 2006 by Alan Dubin.

Gnaw is a New York City noise/metal band created by Alan Dubin after the dissolution of Khanate and consisting of guitarist Brian Beatrice, multi-instrumentalist Carter Thornton, drummer Eric Neuser and sound designer Jun Mizumachi. In addition to the traditional 4 piece rock format and string and wind instruments, Gnaw utilizes found sound, home made instruments, tweaked oscillators, synthesis and manipulated recordings. The Wire magazine called Gnaw “a terrifying rock sextet whose blackened vision has enough dark energy to blot out the sun” and described Gnaw’s debut album, This Face, to be “unsettling but vital listening”.

About their sophomore album, released by Seventh Rule Recordings, Cvlt Nation claims, “Few bands have managed to pull off such a seamless and triumphant splicing of doom metal, noise and industrial as GNAW have managed to do with this album, and in this extremely unique, surreal and particular world the band dwells in, Horrible Chamber represents hands down industrial doom’s finest hour of 2013.”