Yellow Eyes is back for the first time in nearly five years with something completely unexpected. Yellow Eyes is now streaming their surprise new album Master's Murmur, which forgoes their usual black metal sound in favor of more experimental, almost hallucinatory folk-inspired soundscapes. Yellow Eyes also points out that Master's Murmur is the first of two records, with the second planned for 2024.
"Largely devoid of traditional black metal instrumentation, and— though all members of the band contributed together in an intense, spontaneous month-long session— setting aside the obliterative maximalist group dynamics that have suffused every Yellow Eyes release to date, Master’s Murmur is a bold experiment, defiantly laying bare the hallucinatory mechanics of their songwriting in medieval sparseness and finding new avenues of bleak power in restraint and austerity," reads a description of the surprise release.
"At its heart, Master’s Murmur is deceptively lush—deceit, the guiding lantern of the weary traveler—expounding on the bounty and dissonance of careening Yellow Eyes melodies with an eerie, tactile warmth reminiscent of Dead Can Dance or Coil, laden with inventive contrasts and adorned with symphonic dungeon synth, bells, rippling curtains of heavy distortion, the bucolic sheen of 12-string guitar, and the gurgling of pastoral field recordings.
"As seen in the delusional arc of their previous full-length, Rare Field Ceiling, or the bitter ether of Immersion Trench Reverie, Yellow Eyes rise again as a cryptic trick of the light; a dark figure in the shade, laughing; a dawning sense of having been damned and left behind."
Get Master's Murmur here.
