Yellow Eyes released a new album today, Confusion Gate, six years after their last metal record Rare Field Ceiling. Last decade, in the same amount of time, the New York black metal group dropped four LPs and two EPs, tinkering with their sound until they could sharpen it no more. Since Rare Field Ceiling, they toured regularly, played in other bands such as Sunrise Patriot Motion, and released Master’s Murmur, an “industrial folk prequel” to what would be Confusion Gate that they assembled in less than three weeks. Confusion Gate summarizes those years and incorporates them into the Yellow Eyes paradigm.
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Aside from Silence Threads the Evening’s Cloth to Hammer of Night, the band’s debut and sophomore records, Confusion Gate is the most they’ve progressed between albums. They connect what small unfinished business they had on Rare Field Ceiling with the oddity of Master’s Murmur, even reworking riffs and passages from the latter to fit their characteristic format. The album makes more sense as the follow-up to Rare Field Ceiling than it does to Master’s Murmur, retroactively explaining how the group reached Master’s Murmur by expanding its playbook.
This is to say that the symbolism and fantastical elements on Master’s Murmr grow legs on Confusion Gate. There are multiple acoustic interludes that dot the path to the gate and other folk inclusions, like Patrick Shiroishi’s saxophone features and medieval reed instruments, that stretch the scope beyond Yellow Eyes’ typically tight framing. Fortunately, Confusion Gate is much more what you’d expect Yellow Eyes to sound like than Master’s Murmur was, just with bells, whistles, and grey hairs. After surviving the intricate songwriting process, these garnishes were easy for Yellow Eyes to add because they had such faith in their compositions. “It’s unfailable. You just sit down and do whatever you feel like doing at that moment,” Sam Skarstad says.
Such spontaneity evolved during the gap between songwriting that Yellow Eyes filled with live performances to escalating crowd sizes. Across them, the band learned what garnered audience reactions, and it was little touches that they previously ignored. Rarely would they include pauses, slow tempos, or power chords, but through touring, they saw how effective these tools can be within the context of what Yellow Eyes is. Guitars continue to spin webs, though light breaks through more regularly. As “Suspension Moon” asserts, Confusion Gate supplies payoffs in a manner previous Yellow Eyes records didn’t concern themselves with.
Porouness is then one way to look at Confusion Gate, an attribute that supercedes its fantastical leaning. Formerly, Yellow Eyes were like a ball of yarn, condensed and knotty. They tasked you with unravelling those knots to get to the core. But, that ball didn’t roll far. It stayed in place. It had a large surface area, but a small total surface. Confusion Gate upends that. The knottiness is still there, in how tightly woven the guitar playing and Mike Rekevics’ percussive work are, but it’s now expansive. The group takes time to breathe and experiments with dynamic frequencies and volumes. It feels like Yellow Eyes, just aerated.
For as much as this was intentional, it also reflects the motif of aging that Confusion Gate orbits around. Yellow Eyes’ members are entering their 40s and fighting off what that entails. Everything requires more labor and sweat and a warm-up. One cannot dodge this reality (as much as Bryan Johnson would like to believe), and any attempts to do so are fueled by piss and vinegar. While the body ages, willpower holds. As such, Confusion Gate is grizzly compared to prior Yellow Eyes releases, especially in Will Skarstad’s vocals. He was, and still is, the most evident form of human expression amidst the band’s braided compositions. Though his role is the same, he’s changed as he’s aged. In one of the few alterations to the core sound that was not intentional, what was once bloodcurdling is now hardened and chewy. Hearing Will sound more haggard, in conjunction with the band’s newfound ability to chill out every once in a while, personifies Confusion Gate’s perspective on age. It doesn’t attempt to bottle the energy they had five years ago. Instead, it demonstrates the vigor they possess now. The window through which we gaze at them cannot shift backwards to Rare Field Ceiling; it frames the Skarstad brothers in media res.
The two explained Confusion Gate in great detail to us last week, covering its composition, lore, and their commitment to honest expression.
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You had a string where every two years you were putting something out. Now, aside from Master’s Murmur, it’s the opposite. You had five years with only one record. Did having more space between releases change how you wrote for Yellow Eyes?
Sam Skarstad: I’m not sure I’ve thought about it in these terms, but Sick with Bloom felt like a reinvention at the time. We had a new lineup and we were figuring out something new. Immersion Trench Reverie felt like a sequel. It was like digging even deeper into this idea of this new paradigm. Rare Field Cieling was, almost like, how far can you get to the edges of this universe, and maybe even break through into another side. And by the time that was over, we dedicated so much time to touring, we were playing so many shows, having a good time, riding on the album, that it felt like the next album could not be a continuation of those three. It wouldn’t have made sense to do another one directly after that. It was like something needed to feel new and we needed to find a new paradigm.
Will Skarstad: Master’s Murmur brought back the recklessness in the writing process. It was the most fun thing we’d ever done together, the most together we’d ever made a record, and the quickest we’d ever done it. We were just in the zone. We were pulling from the well of riffs and the ideas that were for Confusion Gate, and we knew we were pulling them for Master’s Murmur. We weren’t burning them only there. We knew that we’d use a lot of these ideas for the second album.
Sam: We didn’t know it at the time, but we needed Master’s Murmur. This is a critique of the way we work, but it’s also essential to the way we do it; it needs to feel essential when we’re putting something out. I envy the bands who write a lot and put out a lot of records. I aspire to put out more and to do it quicker. And I know we could do it faster, but something about the way we write is that the full band songs take time because it’s not simple making these songs. You think you have a song, and it takes you a month to realize you don’t have a song. And then you work on it again, and you think you’ve got it. And it takes you two months to realize that you don’t have it yet. Through this constant reinvention of the songs and thinking about them, it’s some weird combination of impulsive and fermentation. It’s impulsivity mixed with the slow kind of fermentation, just how we write these songs. They need the time because you have to listen to them in 100 different contexts to see if it’s flowing or not.
And what I realized, literally weeks after saying this album is finished, is finally, I could listen to it with a neutral ear. What I enjoyed about it is the flow. It’s this feeling that you’re in a river and you’re being taken by this hand and guided through this forest. The flow, turns out, is the thing that I enjoy about it later when I’m neutral again. But when we’re writing it, it’s just like you’re bashing your head against the wall. You’re bleeding from the ears. You hate everything. You know, it’s tough. It can be really tough because we’re putting a really high premium on what’s wrong. We’re trying to make it feel right to us at the time and it’s exhausting.
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What’s interesting is that Confusion Gate is almost a key to Master’s Murmur, because when Master’s Murmur came out, a lot of people felt it was different. But with Confusion Gate, you can hear how they’re related. Confusion Gate feels like you took what was in Master’s Murmur and asked how you can apply it to what you do as Yellow Eyes, as you’re known.
Will: I like to think of it as Master’s Murmur could be covering Confusion Gate, but in the opposite way. It’s like if we had done the acoustic versions first. But, we knew that that was our trick. We knew that these are full songs to come later. We just hadn’t written them yet.
Sam: But we had written some of it. We had a couple songs in the coffers and we turned them into crazy, warped versions of themselves. We had this idea while we were doing Master’s Murmur. We put out the warped versions first, then we put out the actual thing later, but I think we maybe jumped the gun on imagining that we’d be finished with that quickly. You don’t need to hear number one, though. Confusion Gate is not a sequel.
Since you’re talking about the timeline of the recording and writing, how did you keep the same mindset and idea for Confusion Gate as you did for Master’s Murmur?
Sam: It took some time to figure out the way to properly sustain the mood, so to speak, or to take the songs and make them feel right over full songs. They were full band songs.
Will: Yeah, full band songs are way harder than the atmospheric, ambient thing. Although we are Yellow Eyes, and we can have three or four riffs that go together in the right way, the two of us together can feel like it’s not a Yellow Eyes song, and we can’t figure it out for the life of us. In some cases, it was like, maybe two months before we could even figure out why. This happens every time. This is not unique. But the second one song locks in, then we know we figured it out again and we can figure out the rest of them. But that takes so much energy for us.
Sam: I wish we could write simpler songs and have them hang together, but for whatever reason, maybe it’s because of the way we make demos, but when we do a simple song, both of us would lose sleep that night because it’s not right.
Is it a perfectionist thing where you see small mistakes, or is it more that you know it’s good, but it doesn’t quite feel like Yellow Eyes?
Sam: There’s a perfectionist aspect that comes in more in the finishing stages than when it’s composition stages, because they’re very different parts of the brain. In composition stages, it’s more like we both have this almost mystical shared idea about what it has to be.
Will: I’d say we both have a good idea about that. It could not be perfect, but we know it does what it needs to do there. And we can revisit it if it stands out later as not working or whatever.
Sam: It’s more like the ideal of what we know it can be is not being fulfilled. Why not? We don’t know. And because it’s not a formula, I’m not going to say that every band fails at this, but we fail at this all the time. There is no formula. You try to do the formula and it doesn’t work the second time. So, you’re a wizard in the tower saying, “But I put in all the same ingredients and I heated the cauldron to the same temperature.” Sorry, it didn’t work this time. Why not? I don’t know. Musicians everywhere have the same issue. Why doesn’t it work the second time? Well, you have to write a new song this time. You have to come up with an entirely new idea this time. I’ll die not knowing the answer to that one. But it’s a question of using that part of you that’s like, “Why not? Why isn’t this beautiful?”
Will: You go home at the end of the night and try to convince yourself that it’s good enough. Maybe that’s our strength. We always come back and it’s like, we were kidding ourselves. It wasn’t right.
What drove your interest towards the fantasy and folk aspects of Confusion Gate?
Sam: Recording Master’s Murmur was effortless. It was three weeks of work, start to finish, from nothing on the page to posting it to Bandcamp. It was the fastest we’ve ever worked on anything. It was so natural. I was writing lyrics on the fly. We were just laying down vocals in the room. It was so easy and fun, and it was very clear that this was a paradigm that worked. We were all feeling it, obviously. It felt like this mythological, medieval atmosphere. It just felt right. We all knew that it was the right direction.
There was a moment during the recording of this one before any of the extras had been recorded. We weren’t thinking much about it. I didn’t have lyrics, really. It was kind of moving from demos into reality, just riffs and drum parts. We’re sitting in the country, in Connecticut, where we record, on this old couch in the sun, drinking a beer in the middle of a take, and it just occurred to me. I pulled out my phone, and I was like, “Listen to this beautiful piece, guys.” And I played them this Renaissance piece that was a court piece of the Medicis. We’re sitting there in the sun listening to it and we all agreed that it was the kind of music that we should be listening to in the sun, drinking a beer, in the forest. It felt like the medieval good, like a horse is about to ride out of the woods. We’re like, “What if Confusion Gate had this arrival feeling, like an entrance into a court feeling, with medieval flutes and horns?” Within five minutes, we’re looking up shawms and where to buy them.
Will: We hit up a couple people to play it, and they all said, “No,” and “It’s very difficult to play.”
Sam: Even people who play woodwinds are like, don’t even try. It’s not going to work. I was like, “Okay, well, I’m ordering.” I ordered this shawm and it turned out to be amazing.
Sam grabs the shawm from offscreen and plays it as Will plugs his ears. The shawm is so loud it cuts out their computer’s microphone.
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In the album’s press kit, you speak about how Confusion Gate goes from the lowlands to the mountain summit. There’s also talk about time being the third adversary. What is the major story or theme behind all that?
Sam: I spend a lot of time not thinking about how much sense this will make to other people, meaning that I find that the only formula that works for me in this realm of concept and lyrics, the glue– the dark matter that holds these albums together in a conceptual way–is to get lost in it and to treat it like a dream. I don’t care if it’s coherent to others. That’s the only way it works for me. I don’t like the idea of it making too much sense or needing to make too much sense to other people. That being said, I’m not trying to make it obtuse. It’s more like I find myself getting a little impatient with the idea that it has to make more sense. I don’t think about it a lot. It’s more like it’s just gotta feel right. And it feels right for an album like this to just have this strange urgency to it.
The vision I was having throughout was a figure on the slope. I often feel like it’s something that comes from the intensity of writing the music, in that, as we’re sitting there writing the music, Will and I are spending hours and hours and hours staying up late every night until two in the morning just thinking about these puzzle pieces of melody. During this whole time, there’s a little back burner on the stove of my mind that’s like, what does this little strange crevice area of this riff make me think of? I grab onto the first thing that comes to mind. It’s one of those little tricks of the trade. Just don’t let it go. You grab the bird and you hold onto it and you don’t let it go. What is the thing that you’re thinking of?
And right away, it was like I felt this idea that this Master’s Murmur idea was always the same from the beginning. This threatening figure, a strange afterlife figure, and this other jester female figure, almost like a Medusa figure, in the same setting. And you’re being toyed with by them and being compelled to march on. That was something I was thinking of even during Master’s Murmur. I don’t even remember why I first started thinking of it, but I was thinking of the idea of deception, deceptive light, and will-o’-the-wisp sort of ideas. This idea of travelers getting lost is in all areas of literature and culture. Every culture has a story about a traveler getting lost and tricked by a deceiving light. And I was fascinated by this. I put a bunch of that into Master’s Murmur.
On Confusion Gate, I wanted to follow it to its conclusion. Asking, “What if you arrived at the deceptive light?” And in the end, it was puffing that full of strange images. I just thought, it’s working for me. Literally, until this moment, I haven’t talked about it to a lot of people.
Will: It’s also symbolic. It’s about us. We’re all getting older and trudging up the mountain towards our demise. And there’s a lot of symbolism that can be drawn from it. How did seven years go by since our last proper metal record, Rare Field Ceiling? We’re older now, I got a grey beard, the vocals are gruff. Yet, in many ways, this record is us at our most furious and violent. It’s like we’re fighting. We’re trying to not climb the mountain, but we all are. This is a time capsule of us doing our very, very best with all of our strength and all of our power to stop it.
Sam: The thing that you said before about fantasy. Why fantasy? There’s something about the idea of getting older I’ve been thinking about for a few years that I’ve struggled with. And I got a kid, not that that’s the chief thing here, but it’s taken up most of my waking hours. It became urgently important to make sure that I was continuing this beautiful thing that I love, which is playing in a band, making music, and going on tour.
One of my favorite lines from Master’s Murmur that I still think about is, and I’m not even sure I was thinking of it exactly in this way at the time, but it’s on “Tremble Blue Morning.” “Keep in the dark/ If day blooms within/ Then I beg you resist/ Tremble blue morning/ Keep in the mist.” I remember thinking it’s sort of like Castle in the Mist fantasy. Like, there’s a castle in the mist. Stay there. Make sure that you’re not exiting the mist. Stay there. Don’t let life ruin you, essentially, and make sure that you keep this beautiful thing alive. And Confusion Gate felt like an extension of that. Like, fantasy has a purpose. It’s to thread your life with something else than life.
Will: And it does. I think maybe this is our most violent and aggressive because it has become so as you get older, for whatever reason, I can’t figure out why it’s so hard to keep in the mist. It gets harder. It’s an absurd thing that we’re doing. The amount of hours that we put into this record, it’s insane to think about. It’s probably it’s like a thousand hours or something.
Sam: Funny thing is, this album was supposed to be our album that we could play and have a good time playing for the next few years as we get older. It was supposed to be the one that we could take on the road and have a nice, easy time playing, and it would still be compelling in some way. Something happened, though, where it’s like the fastest Mike (Rekevics) has ever had to play.
Will, I wanted to ask you about your vocals because they’re a lot throatier here. I didn’t know if the vocal change was because your higher-pitched screeches are hard to do or because it suited the theme.
Will: I think of myself more in this band as a riff writer and guitar player. Vocals are just the thing that happen because they have to. They happened in that way for a long time. I don’t think it’ll come as much of a surprise to anybody who’s seen us play live, because oftentimes we would start a set with vocals performed in one way and just getting haggard by the end. It’s just honest. It’s just the only way I can honestly approach it. That’s just how they are. It’s as simple as that. I wouldn’t consider myself a professional vocalist. It’s what it is.
Sam: A core tenet of the band, unspoken, maybe, but it feels like it’s a tenet, is to not try to hide anything. It is what it is. If you want to follow a band heading into a different decade of their lives, they are gonna sound a little bit different. Some of my favorite bands have put out records later that were my favorite because they were strange and haggard. They weren’t trying to hide that it was strange and haggard.
Will: I wish that we were good enough that we had the choice. We take so much time writing. There’s so much meticulous, microscopic stuff inside of that. Everything else is pedal to the metal, go as fast and as hard as we can. It’s funny. It’s a balance of aggression and this meticulous, careful, detailed picking through all the little things. So I think it’s the combination of those two things that makes this band what it is. In terms of drum and vocal performance, all this stuff is just as real, hard, and pure as it can be to us.
Sam: Some things need to be a microscope and some things just need to be a camera
Will: It’s what we’re saying earlier. Once we have those songs and the riffs locked in, you could throw anything at it, and hopefully it’ll hold up, because we know that the structure is built soundly.
Sam: Then, when we’re actually recording it, just let it be what it is. Leave the mistakes in. Let it get destroyed.
Will: I think that’s where our version of aggression comes from. We’re absolutely honest about it. This is the hardest we can go. Mike’s coming out of the drums recording bloodied and bruised and blood blistered. I’m coming out of the vocals and can’t talk for a week. I’m broken. I pulled a muscle in my face while I was doing it. For better or for worse, this is literally the best we can do. It’s like the hardest we can go.
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When Master’s Murmur came out, I remember some people were pretty mixed on it because it wasn’t black metal. They didn’t connect with how it was going. Did that affect your vision for Confusion Gate?
Will: I would say we knew that when we were putting that out that people would not necessarily follow along with it. We knew what we made and we loved it. That was the most fun we’ve ever had making anything as a band. So isn’t that the point anyway?
Sam: We knew that we’d alienate about half of the fans.
Will: We also knew that that was not the new direction of the band. We were trying to push out new music because we didn’t have a record out in forever and we were going on this tour and we thought we should make new music. We were going to do an EP, and we just started having so much fun with it that it just got longer and longer and longer, and then, we had a record. We just tapped into that vein. Master’s Murmur was never intended to be the new direction of the band. We knew it was its own thing.
And then I will say in terms of the response, we finished it and we uploaded it to the internet the next day. We gave no writers any time to prepare anything. But then we very quickly went on tour. We could see the comments online. A few people were like, “What is this?” Some people loved it, some people didn’t. But on tour, it was interesting because a lot of people were hyped about it.
Sam: It’s kind of a rare position to be in where you don’t get any feedback from the Internet at all. You only get it from people in dark clubs in Germany.
Will: We actually had a lot of people who were like, “I wasn’t even into you until you released that. And now, I’m in.”
Sam: I don’t have any evidence for this, and this interview will come out after the fact, but I have a feeling there’s going to be some people who are like, “What happened to the idea of Master’s Murmur deconstructing metal into its component parts? Why did you add distortion again?”
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Confusion Gate is out now via Gilead Media.
