For a short time it didn’t look like a new YOB record would ever see the light of day. Last year, Mike Scheidt, the leading light in the triumvirate, needed to undergo surgery for an acute intestinal disease. For six grueling hours under the knife his life was literally hanging by a thread. Luckily for him, his loved ones and all of us fans, he managed to pull through and make a full recovery so we can all enjoy his music for hopefully many years to come still.

Our Raw Heart is their eighth full length release after 2014’s critically acclaimed Clearing the Path to Ascend, not that their other albums have ever met anything but praise from the doom community. What usually draws people to their unique brand of psychedelic heaviness, is this threesome’s ability to make you lose yourself completely in their hypnotic dirges. Listening to their quantum mysticism is an almost transcendental experience, if you are daring and open minded enough to allow the music to envelop you. While the sheer pressure of YOB’s guitar sound can still grind a whole mountain into brilliant diamonds, you’ll also get hear Mike at his most vulnerable in the clean vocals that are positioned halfway through the songs on the endearingly fragile Beauty in Falling Leaves.

The new opus leaves behind some of the speedier moments from its predecessor in favor of a soothing sensitivity that is exemplified on the aforementioned track and also on title song, which could be described as this album’s Marrow, which is arguably one of the finest songs they had ever written. Life led them down a new path where you’ll encounter old friends and new acquaintances. There’s no telling what the universe has in store for them in the future.

Release date: June 8  2018
Label: Relapse Records
Tracklist:
1. Ablaze
2. The Screen
3. In Reverie
4. Lungs Reach
5. Beauty in Falling Leaves
6. Original Face
7. Our Raw Heart