Interview: Jeff Young of Weald & Woe
“Abbath is not a serious dude. He’s the closest thing we have to the Chevy Chase of black metal.” –Jeff
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jeff Young to talk about his band Weald & Woe, his musical influences, and to talk about the concept/subgenre that is “castle black metal.” Read more below!
RT: I always like to start interviews by asking: what got you into metal in general? Nobody really gets this far into the heavy metal world on accident, so what was your pipeline like?
Jeff: When I was fairly young—6th grade or so—I was really into Blink-182 and bands like Newfound Glory and Mest, MxPx, stuff like that. I remember thinking that was really aggressive, heavy music, which I guess it is for someone with a 6th grade reading level. I remember my mom took me to see Blink-182, which was my first rock concert, and it was the Take Off Your Pants and Jacket tour. At the start of the show before they came out on stage, they had a curtain on stage, the intro track started playing, and then there was this loud cannon blast and the curtain dropped and they had “FUCK” in giant flaming letters on stage. I was like “This is THE coolest shit that I have EVER seen in my entire life!”
RT: “It doesn’t get more transgressive than this! Certainly it cannot!”
Jeff: Exactly. That was back in August of 2001, but I remember thinking “I have a new goal in life.” I was going to play linebacker in the NFL, but I decided no, fuck that, I’m going to learn to play an instrument.
RT: And there’s so much more money in black metal than there is in the NFL, I hear.
Jeff: Right, absolutely. So after that my parents bought me a bass guitar and I started learning bass because there was a kid down the street who was already playing guitar. They thought “Well, we don’t need two guitar players on the street, so you should learn to play bass because not enough people play bass.” Through this neighbor who lived down the street I got into bands like Korn, Staind, Godsmack, a bunch of that nu-metal type of stuff. Bass is kind of a cool thing in a lot of nu-metal, so I kept learning bass. But really it was Limp Bizkit and nu-metal that were my introduction to metal and then I followed the obvious course of getting into Metallica. Fortunately I got into Metallica when St. Anger came out, so it only got better from there. My Metallica trajectory was completely upwards. Once Metallica hit me and I saw a picture of James Hetfield holding the white “Eet Fuk” Gibson explorer I was like “OK, new plan, going to be a guitar player.” So basically from that point on I just holed myself up in my bedroom with my guitar and Guitar Pro and learned a bunch of tabs. I mostly taught myself to play guitar by imitating metal guitarists that I liked. So unfortunately “Limp Bizkit” is the answer to this question in a roundabout way. I unapologetically still enjoy Limp Bizkit. There’s some bops on there for sure.
RT: So how did you decide on “castle black metal,” as they call it, as your sound and as you want Weald & Woe to sound like?
Jeff: I got into black metal kind of late. I was like 24 or 25 and I stumbled across the second Obsequiae album, Aria of Vernal Tombs when it came out in 2015. I think I found it through Pitchfork or Stereogum or one of those kinds of websites. They’d done a review of it where they said something like “This is the coolest medieval thing you’ve never heard of,” and they were right. I’d never heard of it. I checked it out because I really liked the artwork and I was like “No for real, this might be my favorite thing I’ve ever heard ever.” It was so moving to me. It didn’t sound like music I had ever heard. I didn’t know the guitar could sound like that and I didn’t know that metal could sound like that. At that point in life I was a few years removed from college, where I had done some music stuff. In high school I studied music and music theory, and I’ve had a longstanding appreciation for Baroque music. I love choral music, and there’s especially something about choral sacred music that’s just amazing. I don’t think there’s a sound more beautiful than the human voice. I can’t sing, but I’m envious of those who can. There was something about Aria of Vernal Tombs that sounded like metal being played in a cathedral. It was the coolest shit I’d ever heard. At that time I wasn’t actively playing in metal bands—that wasn’t for a couple of years—but I listened to it, had it on vinyl, but there weren’t really any aspirations to do that. I was very much focused on this power metal thing I was working on. But around 2018 I started writing black metal stuff because I was really inspired by At the Heart of Winter by Immortal and I thought “Shit, this is three guys, I bet I could do something like this,” so I dicked around in my apartment and came up with an EP’s worth of material that became the Eternal Grave EP. That came out in 2018 and the very next year, Obsequiae dropped The Palms of Sorrowed Kings and my mind was blown all over again.
I was sucked back into that idea of metal in a cathedral. At that point I was actively composing and playing in Weald & Woe and I realized that this was the thing that speaks to me. I had kind of gotten bored of doing the Immortal thing, so I took it upon myself to figure out how to do what Obsequiae were doing. At the time I hadn’t cracked what was happening in terms of arrangement and the harmonies, so that became a goal. A lot of it came from learning their stuff by ear—how to stack the harmonies, how to use polyphony, different guitar parts at the same time, stuff like that. That’s how I figured out what I wanted Weald & Woe to be resemblant of in some way. I never wanted to sound exactly like Obsequiae, but I wanted pieces of that. I wanted sprinkles of that style of harmony and of the through-composition that he uses a lot where he doesn’t have a traditional “A-B-A-B-C” section. He tends to just wander his way through a composition from start to end without a lot of repeating sections. So once I figured out how that guitar stuff was working, I felt like I’d kind of cracked it. That’s probably a little bit emblematic on our first album, The Fate of Kings and Men. It wasn’t perfect, but I also didn’t want to be really heavy-handed with it. But yeah, when The Psalms of Sorrowed Kings came out, I realized that that was what really speaks to me. That’s what really moves me when I pick up a guitar. I wasn’t really thinking in terms of it being quote-unquote “castle metal.” I don’t think I knew that term at the time. I just thought of it as melodic black metal, or maybe would have called it “medieval black metal,” which I actually think is a thing all of its own, but that’s a whole other TED Talk. But yeah, everything after The Fate of Kings and Men has been an attempt to use those aforementioned elements in a way that suits me, because I have a lot of different influences than Tanner (from Obsequiae). I have a lot of different influences than Eric from Morke, even if you lump it all under “castle metal.”
RT: Right. There are similarities between Weald & Woe and Obsequiae, obviously, but you wouldn’t listen to them and say that it sounds like the same band. Nor would you listen to Morke and say it sounds like the same band. And then there’s Mystras, who I see lumped in with “castle metal,” and Mystras sounds like its own thing entirely.
Jeff: Yeah, I think it’s one of those things where there are enough players, but also a small enough number of players that it’s kind of a loose genre name right now, but somehow it all reminds us of a specific thing and all has a certain vibe to it.
RT: Do you think it leans more towards being an aesthetic than a genre?
(Long pause)
Jeff: Yeah…? I mean, I don’t know, it’s hard.
RT: I’ve thought about this for a while and I still haven’t come up with my answer to this question.
Jeff: I mean, I don’t know if I would consider medieval black metal to be its own genre because if anything, that is more of an aesthetic. There are a lot of medieval black metal bands that I wouldn’t know are medieval unless I saw them standing in a field holding a sword and wearing corpse paint. I would just think it’s melodic black metal. The way that I think about “castle metal” is like taking medieval black metal one step further. Instead of buying swords to keep in our closet at home, we’re full-on LARPing. We’re meeting in the park on Saturdays. In that way it’s got more of a visual aesthetic for sure, but in a more musical sense, there’s more of a musical incorporation of that time period. There’s the folk elements, the instrumental arrangements, the compositional methods, and all that, so I think quote-unquote “castle metal” sounds more medieval than a lot of the medieval black metal bands. I think they just lean very heavily into the imagery in a lot of cases. But that’s just my opinion, so take that with a grain of salt.
RT: You’ve touched on it a little bit, but what would you say are the characteristics of castle black metal? You’ve mentioned the folk elements and the aesthetics, but would you say there’s more to it?
Jeff: For me the difference is primarily in the arrangement. I can speak for myself and Morke and Obsequiae and Veytik, if you’re familiar with them, but there’s so much stacked guitar. It’s not a rhythm guitar with one lead stacked over it — it’s the opposite. It’s a rhythm guitar with multiple leads. A lot of times on a Weald & Woe track, we’ll have 6 guitar tracks. There might be 4 harmonies happening at the same time. I think there’s a lushness and a size to the arrangement. I think that’s the differentiator. If you listen to an Obsequiae track, there might be three or 4 different guitars at the same time doing different things, but then the bass is also acting very melodically. Very rarely in an Obsequiae track is the bass just holding down the root or fifth. There’s so much melodic movement beyond just chord changes with a tremolo-picked lead guitar on top. I think the polyphony and the use of the fourth or inverted fifth harmony is the differentiating factor there.
RT: Much to Bach’s dismay. Yeah, there is a certain grandeur to all of the guitar parts that is just so majestic and, like you said, feels like it should be happening inside of some gorgeous church. Going back to Weald & Woe being a three-piece, how does having 6 guitar parts translate to playing live? What are the difficulties of only being one guitarist as opposed to being able to play the role of multiple in the studio?
Jeff: From The Fate of Kings and Men on, we’ve been a 4-piece, so we actually have two guitarists, but we currently lack a full-time drummer. But the way that a lot of it works compositionally is, at this point in time, I’m writing about 90% of the material and Brent, our other guitarist, picks up the other 10%. A lot of that is because Weald & Woe is very indicative of my tastes—it started as a solo project, I’m the primary creative engine, so it ends up being more emblematic of me than it does everybody else, but everybody puts in their two cents. The way we work a lot of that out live is, for the folky elements, we have a backing track, which is typically a choir or some horns or something. Nothing crazy. As far as the way the guitars work is we’ll break it down into octaves. If there’s a guitar part that’s a root, fifth, and octave with a third on top, one of us will play the octave and the other one will play the fifth and the third in the scale. Since I play lead guitar and Brent plays all of the leads, sometimes, depending on the harmony, the top two notes will become a lead part and he’ll play those together while I chunk out whatever the chord is below it. So it’s not a one-to-one replication. What you hear live is different from how it is on the record because I don’t want guitar backing tracks and I think sometimes having me play the chord versus finding some way to deal with backing tracks or a pedal or something is a little heavier and lets the leads hit a little better live. It’s not particularly tricky, it’s just the way we divide up who plays what.
RT: And what are the live shows like in terms of the crowd? Do people dress up or anything for the shows? I know you guys do, of course, but do you ever see guys in chainmail in the audience?
Jeff: It happens! It depends on if it’s somewhere we’ve been before or not.
RT: Interesting!
Jeff: Yeah, if it’s somewhere that we’ve got a dedicated fan base where people are familiar with us, we do get people who dress up. A couple years ago we played in Las Vegas and that show was freaking crazy. We didn’t play until like 1:30 a.m., it was bonkers, but the show didn’t start until like 10:00 at night. It super sucked, we drove, like, all day to get there and they were like “Yo, doors are at 10:00.” But it ended up being a crazy show! People brought actual metal swords to the show and were waving them around. It was fucking awesome. But I think that us dressing up fires people up and gets them excited about it. Especially when you put “medieval black metal” or a bunch of swords and shit on the poster, people get into that. Typically the ones who dress up are younger people who haven’t learned shame yet. We have some people in Boise who will bring some inflatable stuff or wear Halloween costumes. There’s one guy who came up to me and said “I’m dressed like a yeoman,” and that’s so cool that he even knows what that is. And sometimes people will just wear what little chainmail they have. It’s not always consistent, but it does tickle me a certain way when people show up playing into it. I’m a big fan of that. So yeah, it does happen!
RT: I’m very excited for if/when I eventually get to see you guys. You’re one of the bands I really anticipate the day I get to see.
Jeff: It’s a when, not an if!
RT: Ooh, excellent. Do you guys have touring plans for next year?
Jeff: Yes! Something on the East Coast. Because I moved to Maine and Brent lives in Brooklyn, two out of three of us are East Coast-based now, so only our bass player Zak still lives in Idaho. The plan is to do something East-Coast based sometime next fall-ish. Around September is the plan. I’m not doing it in the summer because fuck that.
RT: Yeah, is it hot in that armor? I’d imagine it’s got to be.
Jeff: I don’t notice the heat so much as I notice the helmet I wear makes my head sweaty. And I don’t know if I’m daft or stupid or something, but I don’t put, like, a bandana or something under it to catch the sweat, so sometimes the oil I put inside of my helm to keep it from rusting mixes with the sweat and gets in my eyes.
RT: Oh I bet that tastes and smells great too.
Jeff: Yeah, I mean, I’m bald, so you can see it on my head when I take the helmet off. There are always little splotches on my head from the headrest in there. But yeah, when it gets in my eyes it’s just immediate tears. I try to make it look like I’m having one of those cool Jimi Hendrix rock moments where I’m just looking up with my eyes closed, but it’s because if I open my eyes it’ll hurt. I still don’t know why I don’t put a bandana or something underneath it. Luckily it doesn’t happen all of the time, but it sucks.
RT: Going back to composition, how do you write the switches back and forth between softer and heavier passages?
Jeff: It’s something that I actually take a lot of the principles from my theater experiences. At a basic level, it’s about dynamics. Dynamics work in all art forms—music, books, moves, it’s in all of those. I mean, you can’t be operating at a 10 out of 10 all the time, otherwise it gets boring and there’s nowhere else to go. I try to either use a soft part to break the momentum right before a very big part or sometimes I’ll start somewhere a little softer in order to give us somewhere else to go. More often than not I’ll put a softer passage in the middle somewhere to break it up for a second and give the listener a second to breathe. Keeping dynamics in mind, I try to say “Alright, we’ve all been blasting away here for a minute, let’s do something quieter or something different.” We’ll often do one before a big bridge, and I’m a sucker for a bridge. I think writing bridges is one of my strong suits, if I may give myself accolades for a moment. I like to put something before a bridge, even if it’s not necessarily a switch to fewer instruments, it could be a switch to a folky part or adding more choirs or sometimes we’ll just switch to a chunky rhythm part first. There are a lot of ways to employ dynamics beyond volume. Sometimes it’s best to simplify the arrangement or focus on being really heavy for a second before breaking out into a soaring lead or some big open chords or something. I try not to sit on one thing for too long. I’ll definitely go back to stuff though. I think I tend to have more of a pop music sensibility when it comes to song structures. I’m very much an “A-B-A-B-C-D-E-A” person. I very much like to bring it back to where we started, if you’ve ever noticed that.
RT: I have, yeah.
Jeff: I just like to have a bridge or a middle that changes a lot. I like to make sure I’m not hitting the same idea or same notes over and over. We’ll follow up something really heavy with something really pretty or stack a bunch of guitars in a way that isn’t heavy at all. Sometimes I’m actively trying to do something that isn’t heavy. I don’t think that heaviness is necessarily a key part of what Weald & Woe does. There are moments for sure, but I’ve never set out to make the world’s heaviest band. We’re not competing for that title. We try to focus on what would make for a lush arrangement instead of trying to always be ball-busting heavy. So yeah, we try to use dynamics in every sense of the word to alter what’s happening to keep things interesting.
RT: I really like all of the stuff that you just said. I don’t mind an album that’s start-to-finish heavy. I don’t mind if you want to take a 2×4 to the back of my head until it’s a bloody mess. But as someone who reviews metal music, one of the ways to earn a little extra love from me is to give me a section to breathe after a really heavy passage. Otherwise it all starts to blend together. What I appreciate about Weald & Woe is that you do a good job of not blending together. Weald & Woe does a good job of giving me not just time, but space to appreciate what’s going on.
Jeff: Well thanks!
RT: And like you said, I would agree that Weald & Woe is not the heaviest stuff out there, but I’ve always rejected the idea that heavier means better. PeelingFlesh is a heavier band than The Cranberries for sure, but PeelingFlesh is not a better band than The Cranberries. If someone asked me to show them something heavy, I wouldn’t show them Weald & Woe, but if someone asked for something lush and beautiful, Weald & Woe would definitely come to mind. Back onto the subject of “castle black metal,” do you feel like it’s becoming a bigger thing? Do you think it’s catching on more or do you think it’ll always stay this small niche within the scene?
Jeff: I mean, I could see it. I’m sure bands will come and go over time, but I don’t know. I think you’d have to poll how seriously those of us who are currently doing it take it as a quote-unquote “genre,” you know? If you asked three different artists, you’d get three different answers. To be very transparent with you, maybe to my own detriment, it’s a thing that’s started to become a little annoying in its own way. It’s funny because I only ever started calling it “castle metal” because for a hot minute on the Obsequiae Instagram page, they called it “Epicus Castlus Metallicus,” in reference to Candlemass and I said “Oh that’s fucking funny, I’m going to use that too!” And some of that was a strategic ploy to get people who liked Obsequiae to listen to Weald & Woe because I think there’s a lot of crossover value there, which ultimately ended up with me getting roasted on Reddit pretty hard and getting called an Obsequiae ripoff. We also put out a long sleeve shirt back in 2023 or 2024 that said “Trve Castle Metal” on the back of it because that’s a slogan we’ve opted because, you know, it’s fun. It kind of tells you what you’re in for and it’s good branding, honestly. We used the V to make fun of all of the kvlt chuds who are like “It’s not trve Norwegian black metal!” I don’t care! It’s fun! Being seen as a true black metal band is not important to me.
“Trve Castle Metal” is something that I’ve kept because it’s fun. It’s a cool slogan to put on shit, but is it an actual genre? I don’t know. Who defines what a genre is? What are the criteria to say it is or isn’t? It’s fun and I like it! I like the other castle metal people and I like that people are starting to notice it. You’re certainly not the first person to reach out to me and say “Let’s have a conversation about castle metal,” which I’m flattered by! It’s cool that it’s gaining traction, but I worry about that phrase becoming notorious and starting a bunch of internet discourse, which, you know, has never been my favorite thing. I’m on social media for the express purpose of promoting my band and talking about books. If it weren’t for that, you wouldn’t catch my ass online ever. I think the thing that bothers me about the phrase “castle metal” is that it results in comparison. Comparison is the thief of joy and it results in people thinking that every band in a genre has to sound like the others. And like you said earlier, Weald & Woe, at times, sounds like Obsequiae. Sometimes Veytik sounds like Obsequiae. Sometimes Weald & Woe sounds like Veytik. At some point in time, we all sound like Morke and Morke all sounds like us, you know? I think that’s sort of the inextricable part of the “castle metal” moniker is that we’re all operating with kind of the same vibe in mind. We all have this thing that inspired us that we want to emulate, so to speak, but we all land somewhere different. We’re all very, very different individuals with very different backgrounds. I feel like that kind of turned into a long TED Talk about nothing, but that happens. I don’t mean to knock the journalistic question or anything because I think it’s cool that we’re getting recognized for doing something different from what a lot of other people are doing. A lot of bands are atmospheric black metal or melodic black metal—throw a rock and you’ll hit one—so it’s cool to be seen as doing something unique, but the internet is the internet and it takes the fun out of things sometimes.
RT: No, that was perfect! That’s what I was trying to get at with the question—not just whether or not it is a genre, but how you feel about people considering it one. I like that you touched on the ambiguity and the frustration of always getting called a certain thing, whether or not that thing is actually a thing.
Jeff: Something that happened to us on our last tour is we were playing in Salt Lake—I’m sure you’re familiar with Visigoth…
RT: Of course.
Jeff: Jake Rogers is a friend of mine so he came up to the show because he’s been a Weald & Woe supporter from day one, so we were playing at Aces High Saloon and I was back at the merch table after the show and he came up and said “We came up with a nickname for you: Spudsequiae!” You know, because we’re from Idaho, and I thought it was hilarious and flattering coming from him, but I was also like… People get so stuck on descriptors sometimes that they don’t see what something actually is. There are so many different things that we do that Obsequiae doesn’t do at all. People latch onto the idea that everyone who does this thing wants to be Obsequiae. That’s not true. Not everyone who plays the guitar wants to be Robert Johnson. I’m inspired by so many things. Saying that I’m not Obsequiae is like saying that I’m not Blind Guardian. Good! I wasn’t trying to be! I want to do my own thing. I’ve always wanted Weald & Woe to be its own thing, which is to say a weird amalgamation of Wintersun, Obsequiae, Bathory, and DragonForce. That’s the cultural touchstone that I’m operating on. If I had to pick 5 desert island bands, that would be 4 of them. Like I’ve said, there are sprinkles of Obsequiae in what we do, but how far back do you go? How many sprinkles of Fall of the Leafe, or the others who inspired Tanner, do you see in Obsequiae? We get compared to only one thing a lot of the time because they’re kind of the fun common denominator. I’d say we sound like Obsequiae as often as we don’t sound like Obsequiae. At first it was really flattering for people to put us in the same boat, but as time has gone on and we’ve gained some legitimacy and had our own reviews and sold a lot of records and played some festivals and toured a bunch… And I’m kind of done being compared back to Obsequiae. It doesn’t feel cheap, but it sometimes makes me feel like people aren’t listening on the merit of what Weald & Woe is, they’re listening with the goal of comparing it to Obsequiae. And that’s a battle that, unfortunately, I’m always going to lose.
RT: I get that. There’s a Roman naming tradition of naming a kid Gaius or something and then naming the next kid Antigaius, which just means “not Gaius.” That’s kind of what you remind me of, and I can see it being frustrating with there always being Obsequiae and “Antiobsequiae.” Like, you’re not just not Gaius, you’re your own thing. And do you sound like them? Sure. Do you now sound different from them? Yes, you do. We all do our own things and there’s unique inspiration, there’s some trade between artists, everyone’s going to be inspired by something. I don’t think I’ll ever write a riff that doesn’t sound a little bit like some band that I’ve taken inspiration from, but to only ever compare a person to the closest thing feels a little disingenuous sometimes.
Jeff: There’s also something about that that says to me that people think that someone owns a sound. Obsequiae, who I love with my entire soul—and Tanner is a dear friend and I would go to battle for him—did not invent the use of fifths. I don’t think that everyone who has ever stacked a fourth and a fifth with several guitars is ripping off Obsequiae. And Tanner will tell you that he ripped off other people. Did Metallica invent downpicking? Is the use of chromatic shit only for Black Sabbath? No! It’s not that I did Obsequiae’s sound worse, I just did it different. They don’t own the sound. Castle metal is not a trademarked sound. Other people can stack fifths on stuff and put a castle on an album cover.
RT: And black metal fans can be the world’s hardest people to please, too. If you do anything that’s not “trve kvlt,” they say “This isn’t real black metal!” But then if I were to sit down and make quote-unquote “real black metal,” they’d say “You’re just ripping off Burzum.” So many internet-dwelling black metal fans are just kind of wieners and cannot be pleased.
Jeff: If some of them cared about hygiene as much as they cared about whether or not I’m a black metal artist, they could probably go places.
RT: But if they spend money on deodorant, they can’t buy as many records, Jeff!
Jeff: Yeah, bootlegs are expensive, and so is Old Spice.
RT: Man, speaking of Old Spice, I paid $9 for a stick of deodorant the other day and I wanted to [my editor has strongly advised me not to publish this joke]. Anyway, Jeff, my final question for you: how do you take care of such an incredible beard and what are the downsides of having one?
Jeff: I wash it regularly with conditioner, which is important. I also use beard oil very often. If I really need it to lay down and look nice, I’ll use some beard balm. That’s a thing people tend to confuse. Beard oil is for hydration and should be used regularly, whereas beard balm is for styling. You also have to brush it a lot. I brush mine out several times a day. Over time you can train it to lay a certain way. It’s the same deal with my mustache. I have one of those mustaches that goes out to the side, but that came from years of combing it that way. Beards get split ends like anything else, so if you want it to grow, you need to trim the split ends, so every once in a while I’ll cut it back a bit to let it flourish. The hardest part is that it gets stuck in my guitar strap. It does also affect the things that I choose to eat. I tend to eat almost everything with a fork and knife. I almost never pick up a piece of pizza or a hamburger and take a bite. I always cut it up. Otherwise I have to dig it out of my facial hair.
RT: So how often is a nice platter of lamb rogan josh worth the mess of getting it back out of your beard?
Jeff: Zero percent of the time.
