It has been far too long since YOB last levelled a London stage. The Oregon trio’s return to the capital on this damp, grey October night felt both timely and triumphant. Marking 25 years of their sublime, transcendental heaviness, this is a victory lap for one of Doom’s most revered and emotionally resonant bands.
YOB – Crouch – Greet
EartH Hall, London – 19 October 2025
Words: Rhiannon Ellis
Photography: Ash Nash
From the moment the doors to Hackney’s EartH Hall opened, the atmosphere was alive with that rare kind of anticipation that precedes something genuinely momentous.
Fans did not just come to hear YOB but to be engulfed by them, to surrender to the shared, thunderous catharsis that only this band can summon.
YOB
Fresh from a triumphant headline slot at Desertfest Antwerp the evening before, YOB arrived in London with the calm authority of a band who have spent 25 years honing their craft. They know exactly what they are about to unleash.
As the house lights dimmed to a dusky glow, a hush swept across EartH Hall, a collective breath before impact. A single note rang out, thick as smoke, and the crowd erupted.
The first London has heard from YOB in three years. This is their first UK gig since playing at the Roundhouse for Desertfest 2022, and their largest headline gig in the capital, a world away from the sweat-slicked confines of The Black Heart, site of their last guerrilla set in 2018.
Under the soft mauve haze, the trio took their places, Aaron Rieseberg’s headstock reflecting the light like a signal flare as the opening notes of Prepare The Ground unfurled across the hall.
From the outset, their sound was immense. More than loud, it was alive, each riff unfolding with patient, deliberate intent. YOB’s power lies not in brute force but in the patient precision they harness to build the sonic cathedral that is their set. Each lick meticulously laid like one brick upon the other in their divine project.
Mike Scheidt, the beating raw heart and soul of YOB, stood at the microphone like a conduit, channelling the music through body and breath. His voice is equal parts anguish, gratitude and revelation, slicing through the wall of sound, alternating between guttural growls and aching, transcendent wails.
Rieseberg was pure kinetic energy. His basslines pulsing like a living current, coaxing the crowd into motion with nods and grins, anchoring the trio through dynamic shifts.
Behind them, Dave French’s drumming was elemental, thunderous, exacting and endlessly dynamic. Each cymbal shimmer was a flash of lightning in the growing storm that the three summoned.
Scheidt’s guitar tone, delivered through his gleaming Dunable Minotaur, was molten and luminous, proof that clarity and heaviness need not be opposing forces. It is the space between the notes, the way each riff breathes and decays, the spiritual patience behind the carnage. Each member playing with the kind of clarity and certainty that comes only from total immersion with one’s craft.
The set roved through YOB’s evolution with reverent deliberation. The crushing grandeur of Nothing To Win, its relentless churn channelling the existential struggle that defines Clearing The Path To Ascend. The riffs rolled forward like an advancing tide, overwhelming but deliberate, finding beauty in repetition.
From there, they dove back into Atma and the meditative sprawl that is Before We Dreamed Of Two, reaffirming their “slow is fast” philosophy.
When they launched into Doom #2, the room seemed to tilt on its axis. One of YOB’s oldest live staples, it still carries the same spiritual ache. By the time the closing one-two punch of Marrow and Quantum Mystic rolled in, YOB had crystallised their connection to the crowd, the entire room resonating together.
The crowd hung on every note. When Scheidt snarled and howled, the room sank forward. When he held a sustained note, the silence hung like bated breath. Marrow brought Scheidt’s delicate fingerpicking and defiantly trembling vocals into an overwhelming crescendo that left many visibly moved.
Scheidt stood radiant, exhausted but triumphant. “Thank you so much for hanging with us,” he beamed between songs. “We’re on two hours of sleep! It’s a tour, and it couldn’t be better.”
As the final notes reverberated through the hall, fans stood motionless, basking in an ecstatic afterglow. The only dampener being the massive merch queue that never quite seemed to subside, a testament to the devotion YOB inspire and a subtle reminder they could use a few more card machines.
When the amps finally fell silent, a strange calm lingered. YOB had done what they always do and taken heaviness and made it transcendent. For one night, EartH Hall had become a cathedral, its congregation united in feedback, fury, and awe.
Twenty-five years on, Yob remain not just a band, but a conduit for love itself.
Greet
The evening began with Greet, the Leeds-based solo project behind I Know How To Die, and a harmonium-fuelled drone that filled the cavernous EartH Hall like incense.
This latest offering from Matthew Broadley, drummer of Dawn Ray’d, feels both like a spiritual continuation and a radical departure. The same dark, Doom-inspired heaviness, this time drawing from emotional depths of grief and the unforgiving beauty of Yorkshire’s dales through traditional folk-inspired sound.
As the early arrivals shuffled in from the miserable October night, they were welcomed by the warm, ethereal glow of Broadley’s harmonium setup: a shrouded plinth adorned with a wreath and a wicker mask, beckoning them closer, signalling the beginning of something eldritch.
Broadley’s performance veered on liturgical. A man delivering a message he alone could carry, one dirge at a time, equal parts lament and invocation. Songs The Seer and The Leather Knight felt like hushed confessions broadcast into the void, each word cutting through the harmonium’s drone with disarming sincerity.
Between songs, the illusion of silence was broken only by the hiss of beer cans and the murmurs of latecomers, curious but unsure what they had stumbled into.
Broadley remained unmoved, bathed in the warm glow of his altar-like pedestal, the light breaking through thin incense smoke like a distant lighthouse lamp, at once warning and welcoming, urging listeners inward.
Greet’s cyclical soundscape bordered on trance-like psychedelia of Jefferson Airplane. At times, evoking Lankum at their most otherworldly, or The Sea Nymphs’ On Dry Land, if it had been recorded amid the standing stones of a mist-shrouded Yorkshire moor.
Watching from the sidelines, YOB’s Mike Scheidt nodded along in quiet appreciation.
As the final sustained note dissolved into the air, it left behind an atmosphere of reverent stillness, the kind that catches in your throat. It was a bold, beautifully strange opening to the night: less warm-up act, more a ritual prelude, setting emotional foundations for the night ahead and making the evening feel curated rather than merely programmed.
Crouch
Where Greet’s set had been a séance, Crouch arrived like an exorcism. The Belgian trio wasted no time in transforming EartH Hall from meditative calm to full-blown tectonic upheaval.
Comprised of Wim Sreppoc and Levy Seynaeve of Wiegedood, joined by Jasper Hollevoet of Ventilateur (who released a phenomenal album earlier this year), Crouch share lineage with their Black Metal counterparts but channel their intensity into something heavier, earthbound, and more primal. If Wiegedood’s music soars skywards, Crouch are here to drag you deep into the soil.
The set erupted without ceremony. Godby, their explosive opener, immediately set the tone with a dense percussive mass of distortion that threatened to send low-end vibrations ripping through the floorboards.
Seynaeve carved jagged riffs that cut through the crowd, while Sreppoc’s drumming hammered with an organic precision. Hollevoet’s bass tone was immense: low-slung, elastic, and unrelenting, each slide vibrating like a seismic wave emanating from the stage itself.
Their sound was a storm of Sludge, Hardcore, and Doom, as much reminiscent of Floor’s rumbling grooves as Conan’s caveman stomp.
Bathed in blood-red light, the trio locked into the relentless, hypnotic rhythm of Geneva. Heads in the crowd banged in unison, slow and deliberate, caught in the gravitational pull of the band’s pummelling grooves and near chest-collapsing heaviness. Sreppoc, drenched in sweat, maintained a stoic, pounding beat that seemed to toy with time itself. 
Closing with Yellow Eyes and Lhotse, Crouch pushed everything to breaking point. Yellow Eyes surged with a bouncy, almost Hardcore swing, eliciting an exhilarated howl from one particularly enthusiastic audience member.
Before the set collapsed into the monolithic weight of Lhotse, a final act of controlled devastation. The set lumbered to its conclusion like a runaway juggernaut coaxed, reluctantly, to a halt, exhausted but unrelenting.
As the last riff faded, there was a moment of stunned silence before the cheering hit from an impressed, if slightly shell-shocked crowd. Crouch may share members with Wiegedood, but this project is in itself an entirely different beast.
Where the former channels anguish into velocity, Crouch turns it into gravity. An inescapable, suffocating, rhythmic force of nature. Their set was a perfect escalation, dragging the audience kicking and screaming from ritual introspection into pure, physical surrender.
