Will and Sam Skarstad developed their obsession with music the natural way: They were born into it.
Raised by a composer mother and luthier father, the brothers grew up familiar with the inner mechanics of music and the precarious balancing act that comes with leading a creative life. “I remember hearing piano chords all the time—big, chunky, bold chords. I would sit under the piano and just hear that forever,†Sam says. But the route the brothers took to founding iconoclastic black metal group Yellow Eyes was anything but predetermined. It was full of detours, paths not taken, and solitary sojourns. But in the end, this garden of forking paths—sometimes intersecting, other times diverging wildly—completed its circuit, and the Skarstad brothers joined forces to blaze a trail as one of the most forward-thinking bands not only in the black metal underground, but in extreme music in general. Over the course of their 12-year existence, Yellow Eyes has hacked and slashed at black metal’s chain-link armor, re-fashioning it in their own image.
The siblings grew up in close quarters, sharing a room for the first half of their lives. As Will, two years Sam’s senior, charged headlong into an intense fascination with heavy metal, Sam became infatuated with the Beach Boys. They would spend countless hours in that shared bedroom arguing over music, art, and aesthetics. “It became this point of antagonism between us,†says Sam. “I think for him it was a way of testing me—or maybe a way to assert dominance. Like, ‘How loud can I play music at all hours, and how much can I argue that this is better than anything that you’re listening to?’ But I was releasing albums at 15 years old. So around town, I became known as the one who did music.â€
While Sam was busy burning CD-Rs of his songs, Will began dabbling with guitar, but kept it mostly a private affair. The arguing, however, continued. “I thought it would be impossible that we would start a band together,†Sam says. “It’s not like we weren’t friends, but we had a lot of differing opinions and were always trying to stake out our own territory.†After high school, the brothers went their separate ways. Sam headed to college upstate, while Will wandered further afield, first living in Madagascar for six months before heading north to Norway. “Our father is Norwegian, so we would go there for Christmas and do school projects about the Vikings,†Will says. Living and working at a dairy farm, Will used the solitude to devote himself to his main interest: heavy metal. “I was there in the winter, and it was dark all the time,†he says. “Everything smelled like cowshit. I would walk into Oslo and go to CD stores and load up my head, my mind and my body full of metal. I would wake up super early, walk through the snow with my boots on and my headphones cranked.â€
Sam, however, was still a metal skeptic. “I had to be won over,†he says. “I became a devotee over many albums and many hours. It’s a bit like faith. It’s almost like: Through the difficulty came a transcendence.†The brothers’ paths first started to converge when they found themselves living in Prague. Sam had found some success with his synth-pop duo Snakes Say Hisss, playing Brooklyn DIY mecca Death By Audio and performing with the likes of Andrew W.K. and Tim Harrington from Les Savy Fav. Even Damon Dash was a fan. But after a few years, he felt compelled to move on, and moved to Prague to teach English. Will picked up a job working at a hostel, and the pair settled into a version of expat life that left plenty of time to explore the underground music scene. “We got to know Prague really well,†says Will. “We’d see black metal flyers for shows on the outskirts of town at the last tram stops. So we started doing that.â€
“We were partners in crime, going on these crazy adventures,†Sam says, recalling mind-blowing metal shows located in remote settings. At the same time, his metal education was accelerating at a rapid clip. “We befriended this metal freak, a true collector,†he says. “His entire room was just stacks of CDs. We would go to his house and drink a million beers, and he’d play us deep cuts of all this crazy stuff. He’d say, ‘This one sounds like a buzzsaw in your ears with 10,000 flies pressing into it,’ and I’m just like, ‘Give it to me, baby.’â€
After a year in Prague, however, the shine started to wear off. “We were having a good time, but it got bleak,†Will says. “Winter rolled through these misty, strange nights in the Czech Republic and I’m like, ‘What are we doing?’†The pair returned to the U.S., but their circumstances didn’t improve right away. “It was maybe the darkest time in my life,†Sam says. “I didn’t know how to move to the next step. Suddenly, the idea of a band felt like a portal—the golden door. In hindsight, it’s absolutely the truth. This is the purpose of bands: If you don’t know what to do and you’re completely frozen, you start a band, because it’s the one way that you can be in touch with the infinite and move your life forward.â€
Will had been woodshedding in his New York City apartment, cycling through endless permutations of riffs and drilling down on dissonant clusters of bent notes on an unplugged electric guitar. (It’s slightly shocking, yet somehow fitting, that most Yellow Eyes songs are sketched out via the dry sound of an unamplified electric guitar.) “Will starts cracking the whip,†Sam recalls of the band’s genesis. “He writes a bunch of riffs on these long demos…â€
Will finishes the thought: â€â€¦stream-of-consciousness playing. It’s better to have one person go nuts first, and then the second person goes nuts, then you go nuts together. You have to be alone going crazy sometimes to get to the real magic.â€
It helps that the Skarstad brothers complement each other in precise, perfect ways. Will is the heavy metal expert and ace guitar player, erecting imposing edifices of riff architecture. Valuing dramatic urgency over the need to be heavy, Will substitutes palm-muted riffs with hair-raising motifs that bring to mind Bernard Herrmann’s unnerving string arrangements. While also playing guitar, Sam’s most important role is the orchestration of Yellow Eyes’s overall sonic aesthetic. A soundtrack and commercial composer by day, Sam has learned how to arrange, engineer, and fine-tune the sonic spectrum to his specifications. With the exception of the band’s debut, Sam has recorded all of Yellow Eyes’ releases, allowing the brothers complete control over their music.
Growing up in a musical family prepared the brothers for the difficulties that would come with pursuing their passion. Talking about their mother—a composer who has worked in styles ranging from musical theater to atonal avant-garde—Sam says, “I remember hearing her writing, playing the same passage again and again and again. We already implicitly knew how hard it was to write music, but [also] that composition wasn’t something to be afraid of.â€
There is a long tradition of corpse-painted black metal bands posing in the forest for press photos, howling at the moon. Yellow Eyes, on the other hand, literally record their albums in a cabin in the woods. After laying down 2012 debut Silence Threads The Evening’s Cloth in less than two hours at a Brooklyn pay-to-play recording studio, they decided that a remote family cabin in Connecticut—in the dead of winter, no less—would make for a better setting. So they strapped amps, drums, and their gear to sleds and trudged over hills blanketed with snow to the cabin. There, they spent a week crafting 2013’s Hammer Of Night, an important document in the Yellow Eyes catalog.
Freed from the confines of an anonymous studio, on Hammer Of Night the band soaks in their surroundings, letting the atmosphere permeate the recording. This predilection for texture was always a priority, but on Hammer elements that had been lurking on the edges emerged from the shadows into the firelight.
Cassette
Two years later, they released Sick With Bloom, their first album with drummer Mike Rekevics and another early peak—the relentless riffs of album closer “Ice In The Spring†seeming to redouble in force each time they circle back around. That track in particular spotlights one of the most confounding aspects of Yellow Eyes: Their ability to be simultaneously frightening and beautiful. After seven minutes of crushing sound, the song ends with a forlorn melody played on a lute-like instrument as a chorus of nocturnal insects serenades the stars.
Lyrically, Yellow Eyes write paeans to solitary spaces—the tundra expanse, the deep woods, the empty desert—where the elements can be punishing or serene, like the music itself. Will sings with a ghostly shriek, putting voice to Sam’s lyrics, which read like Romantic poetry as inner monologue. Yellow Eyes isn’t calling out to the heavens for vengeance upon their enemies; their longing for a world shorn of the bullshit trappings of modern life.
Cassette, T-Shirt/Apparel
Bassist Alexander DeMaria joined for 2017’s Immersion Trench Reverie, on which Yellow Eyes is, once again, in total control of their powers. “Old Alpine Pang†and “Velvet on the Horns†twist dissonant riffs into sky-climbing birds of prey, terrible in their beauty. “Jubilat†unfolds like a grand tapestry until it wraps you in its cold embrace.
The last “proper†Yellow Eyes album was 2019’s Rare Field Ceiling, a high point that arrived after years of rigorous refinement. From storming opener “Warmth Trance Reversal†to the psychedelia-laced “Nutrient Painting,†Yellow Eyes continued developing new perspectives on black metal—even employing a straightforward rock beat to launch the epic title track, before the brothers unleash some of their most intricate playing to date. Parts of “Light Delusion Curtain†recall post-hardcore standard-bearers Bitch Magnet, until a brief disco beat surfaces, leading the way to an eerie conclusion played on a broken piano that was rotting away in one corner of the cabin—literally. “It was lying in a compost heap somewhere,†Sam says.
T-Shirt/Apparel, Cassette
With their trademark interludes and the brothers’ keen attention to sequencing, a Yellow Eyes record is more of a journey than a collection of songs. The listener can feel transported—either geographically, or in time. On Rare Field Ceiling, Yellow Eyes finally achieved the widescreen effect that Sam had been chasing. Album closer “Maritime Flare†encapsulates what makes Yellow Eyes such a creative force—and it wasn’t fully realized until Will found himself in Krasnoyarsk Krai, in Siberia, visiting his wife’s family. He’d brought his Zoom recorder along, intending to capture interesting sounds along the journey—especially “singers in the tundra.†His mother-in-law took him to a village where a group of older women were game to sing him some traditional songs. According to Will, it didn’t get off to a promising start. “It was angled for this American tourist,†he recalls. “They would say, ‘This song is about love,’ and then ‘This song is about money,’ and they were just horrible songs. The performance was over, and I’ve got nothing. So I ask through a translator, ‘Do you know any sad songs?’ And two of the women come back and ask me, ‘Why do you want to hear sad songs?’ They thought it was weird. But they were like, ‘We know one sad song,’ and then they sang the entire thing. I immediately emailed it to Sam.â€
T-Shirt/Apparel, Cassette
After Rare Field Ceiling, four years went by. Yellow Eyes became a fixture on the European festival scene, and the members of the band busied themselves with an array of musical projects. Will released an album under his solo guise Ustalost (recorded by Sam in the cabin at Yelping Hill); DeMaria worked on his art, which involves constructing original experimental musical instruments; and Rekevics is in two of New York City’s best rock bands—the decadent Weegee and the sharpie-inspired Loosey. In 2021, the Skarstads formed Sunrise Patriot Motion, blending their love of metal with gothic post-punk. The group’s debut album received a rapturous response, culminating in a Roadburn appearance this past year.
Cassette, T-Shirt/Shirt
Then came the hidden reverse of Master’s Murmur. When the brothers realized they had a slate of impending European shows but no merch left in the coffers, they decided to put together a new tape—maybe a couple new songs they were working on. The only problem was that they were flying out to play in less than a month. So over the course of a few weekends, all four members converged on Sam’s home studio north of the city. On Master’s Murmur, the band turns the amps down, turns the synths on, and creates an intimate, crepuscular space. With moments that conjure the likes of Current 93, Coil, and Dead Can Dance, Master’s Murmur was not only a surprise album drop for Yellow Eyes devotees, it also forced some of metal’s most dedicated fans to slow their heartbeats and surrender to the beckoning void. The fact that it appeared without warning just a few days before Halloween 2023 was the black icing on a pitch-black cake.
In context, the sonic shift makes sense. Sam thrives on contrasts—between his work as a commercial composer and an avant-garde metal producer; between Yellow Eyes’s status as one of North America’s most innovative black metal bands and the desire to break free from genre constrictions. “I’m a bit of an addict for heavy contrasts,†he says. “I’ll take a hit wherever I can get it. To me, the dream is to write the most reviled jingle on planet Earth, while simultaneously writing the most difficult, gloomy underground thing possible. The distance between the two, it creates some kind of energy.â€
In addition to writing and playing music, Will also took another path into the family business: Repairing and restoring violins with his father, who started the business 45 years ago. The contrast between tradition and innovation also spurs his creativity. “The violin shop was in our house when we grew up,†he says. “We were surrounded by wood chips, with customers walking through the door. I was just fixing someone’s violin 10 minutes before we started this interview. I have a 9-to-5 job working with my hands, but it’s conducive to the band lifestyle.â€
The brothers are intent on completing the next Yellow Eyes album at their own pace, beholden to nothing other than their own personal obsessions. “It’s a pretty miserable existence to be in the grips of that obsession…,†Sam begins, before Will completes the thought:
â€â€¦and I’m extremely excited to get back into that mode.â€
