“This is gonna be yuuuuuge,” said Lyft driver Giovanni Stonecipher as he turned the volume up to the song Zepperiah to levels only comfortable to a wildebeest.
And thus, the band was dubbed YUUGE. An unlikely International Progressive Metal pairing of singer, Evan, of the island of Cyprus, multi-instrumentalist, Ryan, of the icy hell of Minneapolis, and drummer, Ross, of the cruel, cruel desert of Phoenix, YUUGE simultaneously interweaves formula-crushing song structures, aggressive brutality, transcendental beauty and, at times, the suspicious near silence of a cobra trapped in a wine bottle.
In an age in which Tik-Tok influencers and AI each calculatedly simulate art by parroting exhausted themes and chord structures with as much spirit as a Senator disposes a condom wrapper, YUUGE sits like Göbekli Tepe next to a Pizza Hut.