Cincinnati Indie Rock group The Yugos didn’t name its brilliant third album, Weighing the Heart, after that ancient Egyptian rite by mere happenstance. After coming across the story on television — “Probably (TV show) Ancient Aliens,” notes vocalist/guitarist Christian Gough — the quartet found enough parallels to justify dubbing its new album after a dead pharaoh’s judgment.
“I was wanting to go borderline Metal with the title, with the ‘heart’ and everything,” Gough says. “So people would look at it and go, ‘What’s going on? Is this the same band?’ I also thought it was a really cool concept, taking a person’s heart and putting it on a scale with a feather and (then) you go to heaven or hell. I’m not religious, but I thought it was a badass concept.”
“To me, our last album was super lighthearted and was kind of our mission statement,” says drummer (and Christian’s brother) Jordin Gough. “This is like we’re taking a step to remain lighthearted, but also trying to balance it with being more mature.”
Therein lies the significant difference between Weighing the Heart and its predecessors, 2013’s Life is Awesome and Then You Live Forever and the band’s eponymous 2011 debut. The group, by proxy, is also different. The Yugos’ first two New Wave/Indie Rock albums were exuberant expressions of four young men bursting at their creative seams with positive energy, which was reinforced by their live presentation, as the quartet bounded around every stage like puppies on trucker speed.
In the nearly three-and-a-half-year gap between albums, The Yugos experienced evolution, growth and maturation — as individuals and as a band unit — much more than in the four previous years since their 2009 formation. Growth rarely comes without growing pains; The Yugos survived theirs by a slim margin.
“We had struggles as friends and as a band,” says guitarist Jeremy Graham. “For myself personally, it was like weighing the heart. Am I doing what I need to be doing for my friends? Am I keeping up with what I want to be doing in this band and what I know they want to be doing? This album got deep.”
“We had to have a band-in-crisis meeting,” Jordin says. “We’re like, ‘We don’t communicate with each other and we internalize everything.’ We’d talk to someone in the band about what someone else in the band was doing. So it was like, ‘I think this shows that we all love each other. If we don’t like an idea, it doesn’t mean we don’t like you.’ “
“We’re all passive-aggressive but we’re getting better,” Christian says.
Although The Yugos never intended to wait this long to release a follow-up to Life is Awesome, the growing pains increased the gap. The group had actually tracked the entire album, following it with an extensive tour and playing many of the new songs night after night. But upon their return home, the musicians made a troubling discovery.
“We listened to the album again and we were like, ‘Uh oh, we’re going to have to re-record it,’ ” Jordin says. “The songs had gotten better.”
“We cut one song and then re-recorded five or six songs,” Christian says. “It’s definitely the longest time we’ve ever spent on an album.”
The band’s new direction was hinted at when the album’s first song was leaked last fall: Moody, vaguely psychedelic, infectiously energetic and darkly propulsive, “Andopolis” pinwheels through the band’s ’70s/’80s influences, touching on Echo & the Bunnymen, XTC and The Cure without ever sounding like any of them. It also signals a shift in The Yugos’ writing process.
“ ‘Andopolis’ was one of the first songs we wrote as a complete band,” Christian says.
“I don’t think it’s the sound we planned, but it’s the sound we’re happy that happened,” says bassist Jackson Deal. “A lot of the structures and our parts were figured out live. Christian will come in with a skeleton of a song or a demo and if there’s something we want to add in, we’ll add it in. For this album, we put our own stuff on it. “
As Weighing the Heart neared completion, the band played occasional shows, but there were still a few rough patches to smooth over.
“We let our lives get in the way of the life of the band,” Jordin says. “The band requires four people and the collective ‘us’ was dying. The four of us weren’t talking and we were playing live shows as we were trying to figure out what we were doing. We all kind of forgot what we love about playing music together.”
“I was just mad for a long time,” Christian says. “I was like, ‘This band sucks. We’re never going to get this album out.’ Then we played a couple of shows and it was like, ‘I have so much fun playing shows but I hate being in this band!’ It was like sex in a bad relationship.”
With those issues largely ironed out, the band is looking forward to 2017. Weighing the Heart will get to a larger national audience thanks to its March release through established indie label Old Flame Records (the album will be available at the hometown release show Friday). The Yugos also have a booking agent for the first time, and plan to tour a lot this summer. The musicians are excited to play the new material again, now from their rejuvenated perspective.
Like any band with a long enough history, The Yugos have become a family unto themselves, resulting in a unique set of tensions and methods for alleviating them. Jordin notes that Graham and Deal are like brothers, but he and his actual sibling don’t fit the stereotype of battling band bros.
“Christian and I are pretty close for brothers,” Jordin says. “I know a lot of brothers who fight a hell of a lot more.”
“No matter how much I hate him, I have to love him,” Christian says. “Or else I’ll get grounded.”
THE YUGOS’ album release show is Friday at Woodward Theater. Tickets/more info: woodwardtheater.com. Listen to Weighing the Heart track "Steve French" here. Hear more Yugos music here.
