It’s another overcast afternoon in the Willamette Valley, and Mike Scheidt is talking about growing up in Springfield, Oregon, and discovering heavy metal, punk rock, and the very real tension between those two scenes.
“I was 13, getting into it all at once, but I also loved new wave because I wasn’t a jock. I was more of a sensitive person,” says Scheidt, the songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist for Eugene metal giants Yob. “So Depeche Mode made sense to me, but so did Black Sabbath and Black Flag. I liked all those different things and I felt caught in the middle. The fact that there is more openness around it [now], that’s a lot closer to where my heart’s always been.”
For Scheidt, discussing the divide between metal and punk is a nice diversion from the topic everyone’s been asking about: his life-threatening bout with diverticulitis (inflammation of the digestive tract; Scheidt’s intestine was perforated) in early 2017, and how that experience informed Yob’s monumental new album Our Raw Heart.