Style: Progressive black metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Blut Aus Nord, Urfaust, Advent Sorrow
Country: United States
Release date: 31 October 2025

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US black metal has its share of hermit outposts, from the low-fi rawness of the 90s to the forward-thinking post-black sound of modern acts. But few bands feel as uniquely situated as Yellow Eyes. Over fifteen years and seven full-length records—as well as an extensive web of side projects involving the band’s members—they’ve honed a sound that’s discordant, unsettling, and not quite of this world. Confusion Gate is the latest offering in that ongoing exploration. 

Though the album opens in warmer climes with the chirping of crickets and birds, the stillness is soon rent by a cacophonous clamour of bells and blast beats, like some involuntary summons pulling the listener towards higher elevations. It’s here, among the wintry drifts, that Confusion Gate reveals its true character: cold, ethereal, and impossibly vast.

In this harsh landscape, tidy, melodically straightforward riffs, like the one just past the three-minute mark in “Suspension Moon”, tuck themselves into crevices in the songs. These structures are deceptively simple in isolation, but soon dwarfed once the frame widens to reveal the immense, endless space of Confusion Gate. Guitarists Will and Sam Skarstad—brothers, whose interplay is one of Yellow Eyes’ core pillars—twist around each other in lines that oscillate between friendliness and hostility. Notes collide at oblique angles, chords crash into stifling dissonance, and an inescapable crush hangs over the music like atmospheric pressure. Across this inhospitable expanse, Will Skarstad’s harsh vocals pierce through in wraith-like shrieks and gasps, less a narrative voice than a spectral presence. Similarly ghostly vestiges of spoken word hover in the album’s peripheral vision, shading the album’s interludes and softer moments. Rounding out the stark terrain are folkloric medieval instrumentations and Yellow Eyes’ longstanding fondness for field sounds: the clamour of the bells, recorders, the bleating of sheep woven through interludes like “iii. The Entrance.” 

While eminently enjoyable as a standalone effort, Confusion Gate’s listening experience is enriched by its sister album, 2023 LP Master’s Murmur. Many of the same melodies, motifs, and lyrics are present, re-moulded from the soft dungeon synth and ambient influences of Master’s Murmur into the jagged-edged harshness of Confusion Gate. For instance, the title track from the 2023 LP is a mesmeric, spaced-out progression of lugubrious tonal modulations. Meanwhile, corresponding track “I Fear the Master’s Murmur” from Confusion Gate is pressed forward by the rabid urgency of Michael Rekevics’ drumming and tightly braided guitar riffs from the brothers Skarstad, shaping the melodies of the original track into a heavier, more angular silhouette.

These prevailing black metal transfigurations make Confusion Gate’s few prettier moments land with disarming innocence. Every so often, a fragment surfaces that feels childlike in its simplicity: the dungeon synths at the end of “Beat the Frozen Horse,” the gently plucked strings that open “I Fear the Master’s Murmur,” or the delicate gossamer thread of saxophone that drifts through the beginning of “The Thought of Death.” These bright glimmers don’t dispel the album’s darkness so much as accentuate it, offering brief moments of gentle reprieve before the surrounding dissonance folds back in.

Confusion Gate’s unsettling power is anchored in the liminal otherworldliness that Yellow Eyes embody. The shadowy figure lurking on the cover, the album’s mysteriously oblique Bandcamp description, the fragmentary poeticism of the vocals (unfortunately mostly unintelligible without a lyric sheet), the half-remembered melodic phrases from Master’s Murmur that emerge and then dissolve again: it all creates a sense of slipping between states, as if the tracks are transmissions across a wide, haunted distance.

In the end, Confusion Gate never fully settles, constantly suspended between beauty and menace. The listener is never allowed a firm foothold, nor a clear view of the figure on the mountain’s crest, only fleeting glimpses before the inscrutable, serrated dissonance reasserts itself. But such is the mastery of Yellow Eyes: they have crafted a record replete with cryptic secrets and hidden passages, that rewards immersion and repeated listening. Confusion Gate itself is a shifting landscape, the summit always just out of reach.

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Recommended tracks: The Thought of Death, I Fear the Master’s Murmur
You may also like: Sunrise Patriot Motion, Scarcity, Krallice, Vanum, Ustalost, Falls of Rauros
Final verdict: 8.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Instagram

Label: Gilead Media

Yellow Eyes is:
– Will Skarstad (vocals, guitar)
– Sam Skarstad (guitar, additional instrumentation)
– Alex DeMaria (bass)
– Michael Rekevics (drums)
With guests:
– Patrick Shiroishi (saxophone)
– Natasha Vasilyeva (vocals)
– Ralph Schmidt (vocals)