Anna Blumenthal: Yob is probably the only doom band that’s getting covered in The Times and the New Yorker. What do you think it might be about Yob that’s capturing the attention of all these publications that never covered doom?

Mike Scheidt: I have no idea. There’s lots of bands out there that are working really hard and doing all the stuff that we’re doing. I think maybe we have a different focus, as far as lyrical content and our approach to how we want to be in the world. We’re a positive band and we want to be that way. I hate when I say this - I hate comparing. It’s hard in music to not have comparative statements, but at the same time, I hate ‘em in the sense that I don’t like to juxtapose what we do as somehow against anything else.

To me, nothing we do is at the expense of any other valid expression. And we enjoy those expressions too. We have all the same records in our collection, whether it be Corrupted or Burning Witch or Meth Drinker. It’s just that our focus is a different one and maybe that’s where somebody might resonate more with where we’re coming from, because it’s maybe different, though I know lots of bands that I think operate in a similar way. I’ve been asked this question before and I end up going around in circles and coming back to, “I really don’t know.” We keep our head down and be ourselves as much as possible, and I think any band or artist that does that, they become their own trip, and I think that has something to do with it.

AB: What you’re doing is amazing, so I’m sure that’s a big part of it, but it is so unusual to get covered in The New York Times and The New Yorker. I think it’s really impressive that the mainstream press is taking notice.

MS: You know, I don’t swim in those waters. I read those publications but I’m usually more focused on the political side of what they’re covering, and it’s not even in my mind that our music could be on the radar of something like that, so when it happens, we’re underwhelmed, because we don’t understand. Everyone’s like, “This is a really big deal!” We’re like, “Is it?” And not like, “Is it really?” More like, “Is it?” The tonality of the “Is it?” is different. Does it mean something? I don’t know.

AB: I think it’s awesome.

MS: Thank you. It’s an honor for sure. We’re honored. And it is cool. Just surreal and weird.

AB: Most of your songs are upwards of ten or even twenty minutes. Can you talk a little about your approach to composing? Do you set out to write long songs or does it sort of take a long time to get everything across you want to do in a song?

MS: The songs dictate themselves, really. I’ve never tried or attempted or meant to write big huge things. If you take your favorite record at 45 and then play it at 33, it’s gonna take longer to get there, so there’s a certain amount that’s just math and physics - playing slower makes things longer.

But I do think of music in terms of movements and having those movements have dynamic shifts, and developing an idea that then leads to the next dynamic that then gets into the next dynamic, and I love what I consider to be classic songwriting, of which I don’t pretend to be good at, but I love it. Big jam passages or drone passages or things where we’re wanting the tone of our amps to carry it, that’s not how I focus it. I want to have good tone but I want the tone to serve the song, I don’t want the tone to be the song.

We have seven new songs we’re working on. At this moment it could probably evolve, but the longest song is fourteen minutes and the shortest one is six and a half, and it totally feels complete. And if anything, I’ve tried to write shorter songs and have failed. They end up being intros or sounding incomplete. This came out as this little piece of music that has probably more changes in it than any song we’ve ever written.

AB: When did you start getting into effects?

MS: Aside from just distortion pedals, I remember things like flangers and chorus pedals always kinda flying around with my friends. I started getting a lot more involved in effects pedals when I started working on Yob. I knew I wanted to have a distortion effect and a syrupy effect and then a wah pedal, because at that time I was super into the early second wave of heavy doom music, and so I was using chorus pedals and delay pedals for vocals. Guitar ones. And I’d yet to find vocal-specific ones, and so I’d have to get 1/4 inch to XLR impedance switchers that I could use as pedals, but they’re very noisy.

The more that we played with other bands that were starting to get really far out, spaced out trippy songs and effects, like Sons Of Otis, I started getting more into effects. It’s been a very slow process. I spent a lot of years using pretty minimal effects, but I also found that older effects, as great as they sounded, also had artifacts that were difficult to deal with - they were noisy and had grounding issues and things like that - and so now, here we are in 2017, where so much of that has been dialed in and figured out. This might be truly the golden age of effects pedals. It probably is. And there’s so many cool ideas out there, I find myself wanting to experiment more and more.