Yew (US) — IV — 2025 full length

With its fourth album, Yew emerges once more from the scorched plains of Oklahoma, yet this time wielding a definite sharpened edge, an unrestrained ferocity that seethes through the marrow of the record. Where earlier offerings painted windswept horizons in sepia-toned melancholy, this fourth one unfurls as a storm on parched soil as if a vengeful spectre rises from the American soil, draped in black fire. Here, black metal does not whisper from the corners of Yew’s vast stylistic palette, it takes centre stage, harsh and incandescent, yet never eclipsing the spectral shadows of doom, folk, ambient, and americana that linger at its periphery.

The fusion feels neither arbitrary nor forced, but rather an exorcism of history and spirit where punk is also carved into the same blackened essence as the sorrowful acoustics of folk, doom’s cavernous weight bent into dialogue with the cold blaze of black metal tremolo. The production embodies this convergence of genres, harsh, suffocating, and immediate, but still haunted by spectral languid saccharine detours, leaving space for silences. One moment the listener is crushed beneath a barrage of violence, the next suspended in the aching quietude of a funeral parlour draped in black crepe.

This album is steeped in Victorian America’s mourning traditions, the sciences of spiritualism, and the eternal friction between liberty and death. The voice that emerges from within this work is neither solely human nor entirely otherworldly, howling with injustice, whispers of decay, and intones like an oracle peering into the abyss. Thematically, one might glimpse echoes of Black Candle Wax’s funereal mysticism or Volahn’s nuclear vision of power, yet Yew remains profoundly singular.

By the time the album descends into its near-pure doom and ambient closure, the listener has already been scorched and sanctified, carried across an inferno into a hushed afterworld. It is a procession through violence and lamentation, culminating in a twilight where sound dissolves into silence, as if the record itself had been buried beneath its own weight.



Band: Yew
Album: IV
Year: 2025
Label: Independent
Genre: Raw Black Metal / Americana / Folk / Ambient
Country: United States


https://subsolevanitas.bandcamp.com/a...
http://cargocollective.com/vincentciarlo
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Tracklist:
1. The Mantel: Prolegomena 00:00
2. Moldering Portraits In Sepia 04:59
3. The Gyre; or, The Dual Nature of Existence 10:13
4. Thou, A Husk of Your Former Self 14:40
5. Ectenic Emanations & Mesmeric Entrancement 19:44
6. The American Inferno; or, An Opera of Violence 21:53
7. In Memoriam: The Discarnate Interment of the West 26:20
8. A Seance of Violent Manifestations & Grim Revelations 29:32
9. A Vigil In Black Crepe; The Advent of Endless Mourning 34:30
10. Cowered 'Neath the Vault of Heaven 39:06
11. In Death 43:24








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