Summer 2026 was full of great records bubbling up from Tennessee’s underground, but the first truly ferocious release of the fall is the debut from Nashville’s Yammer Jaw. The four-man unit released their first album, Burth, on September 18th, but all four members are seasoned musicians.
Guitarists Chris Clark and Stephen Small forged their chemistry together in the abrasive unit Sheep Shifter, which ended in 2018. A few years after that band’s demise, they wanted to form something new. The duo decided to find a tight rhythm section that could serve as the backbone for their dissonance.
They found their drummer in Richie Townsend. The Chicago transplant met the two guitarists at a Louisville PFR BBQ, an all-day cookout centered around noise nerds from the old Electrical Audio message board. For bass duties, they turned to Ian Sundstrom, a long-running utility player in the local DIY community who released another LP this summer as a member of crossover thrashers Waxed.
Burth is a lean half-hour of frenetic riffs and sardonic spirit that recalls the meatiest parts of the Amphetamine Reptile catalog. The off-kilter melodies and contempt-driven lyricism reflect the kind of music that can only come from social outsiders in a flyover state.
“Golden Shovel” is a perfect leadoff hitter, putting the listener into Burth's uneasy mindframe. The song gives a rough definition of Yammer Jaw: monstrous bass tones, a frenzy of massive drums, guitar tones so acidic they could eat through stainless steel, and disdainful shouts delivered with a sneer.
It’s not a new formula, but what makes Burth extraordinary is the band’s ability to let the music breathe on its own and flow along its natural course, even if it flows straight into the whitewater rapids. Nothing feels forced.
The album was engineered by Shibby Poole. Poole’s hand has been on the knobs for everything from two Jack White albums and the recent Geese live record to death-grinders Woundflower and his own band Thirdface. The band confirmed my suspicions that it was all recorded live without a click track.
“I kind of think that's the only way we would have been able to capture that,” Small tells me. “We were all standing two feet from each other while we [recorded the album], so we could still feed off of each other and react and play as a cohesive unit.”
“Cuckin’ ‘Round,” premiered in July as a single from the album via Decibel magazine, is a good example of the band’s ability to craft a song. The staccato barking and choppy rhythms build tension, which is released as the track descends into an avalanche of scratchy guitar noise and screams from Small and Sundstrom.
The song was inspired by the human tendency to bow to authority. “The name of the song came first,” Small explains. “You know that scaredness, say for example, when a cop walks up to you? And you might be doing something maybe wrong? And you’ve got a little weed on you? And all of a sudden you fold.”
Just a couple of weeks ago, Yammer Jaw teamed up with director Jim Valosik for the music video of "Gun," the seventh cut on the LP:
“Lamp of Freedom” enlists Clark’s son, who programmed the electronic elements of the song, layered with Einstürzende Neubauten-esque noises made by Small using sheet metal, saw blades, and weights placed on guitar strings.
The soundscape is accompanied by a rant from Clark about the abuse of power and the weaponized exploitation of the rest of us. Clark says it was inspired by a diatribe from Dr. Jacoby in the Showtime revival of Twin Peaks. “To me, it sounds like a mad scientist’s laboratory,” Clark says.
But no matter how violent the band’s music might sound or how dark their subject matter can seem, a sense of humor is never far away. The last track on the first side of the record is called “Beefy Streams.”
Small explains: “Shibby has a bathroom at the studio. He had some stage mics set up in the shower for a different project. I asked Shibby to record us every time we went to take a leak.”
The track is a 30-second clip of the layered sounds of their collective trips to the pisser. And as a bonus, it’s a lock groove.
Burth is available on translucent purple vinyl, as well as CD, cassette, and streaming.
The band will celebrate the release with Iron Lung on September 22nd at Nashville’s DRKMTTR. The show will also feature Hologram, along with local rippers Human Shield and Zero Sum.
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Yammer Jaw on social media: Instagram
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