PREMIERE: Yellow Eyes Achieves Black Metal Perfection on "The Mangrove, the Preserver"

Photo courtesy of Gilead Media

One of the most glaring faults with the music media's current year-end list model is that pretty much every publciation of note (ahem) gets its list done and dusted before the year actually ends, and a lot of albums miss out on getting that listicle shine. Yellow Eyes has long been one of my favorite NYC bands, and that they chose to release their (perfect, amazing, out-of-control awesome) new album midway through December just means that some people will need to reshuffle their lists. I already knew that this would end up being one of the year's best black metal releases (and really, one of the best overall metal albums); the Yellow Eyes dudes have consistently kept outdoing themselves with each album or EP they put out, and now that they've finally started playing out more and have gotten their touring sea legs, the band sounds even more confident in their considerable collective abilities.

The new album, Sick With Bloom, follows in the atmospheric, complex footsteps of last year's pair of EPs and their previous full-length. There are no big stylistic departures, though the production does sound quite a bit warmer and more compact than in the past (the two brothers that form the band's core recorded, mixed, and mastered the album themselves), and M. Rekevics (of Fell Voices, Vanum, Vorde) is now holding court on the drums. Field recordings taken outside the brothers' cabin upstate add a certain wildness to the proceedings, and the natural world makes its presence known in the song titles and lyrics, too—perhaps as a way of drowning out the urban blight and overcrowding that their creators deal with at home in Brooklyn.

We're streaming a new song, The Mangrove, the Preserver," below, and the band's statement on the song is just as cryptic as their intent. "The Mangrove, the Preserver" pictures the water table as a huge, dense lung that breathes in and processes the materials of the world. We are standing on it. We smell the mud. And at the end of our lives, we will fall through, like dust through the rafters."

Listen here, and preorder Sick With Bloom from Gilead Media here—it's out December 11, which conveniently coincides with their album release show at the Acheron (details below).

If you live in or around New York City, allow me to suggest that you come see Yellow Eyes in the flesh next week, when they'll be playing an album release show at the Acheron in Brooklyn alongside Anicon, Vilkacis, and Ozama.

It's gonna be lit—or at least, as lit as a black metal show can get (which is EXTREMELY).

Kim Kelly has been a Yellow Eyes stan since way back she's on Twitter.