Pyrolysis and tetramethyl ammonium hydroxide (TMAH)-induced thermochemolysis are widely used in soil analysis as fast, sensitive and reproducible techniques to release diagnostic fragments from large organic molecules. Conventional experimental approaches share the common shortcoming of discriminating against high boiling analytes, which often carry the most significant structural information. Non-discriminating pyrolysis, based on capacitive discharge heating of deactivated stainless steel capillaries containing the samples, enables the analysis of some of these diagnostic targets in the soil humic organic network, thus revealing some of the "soil carbon we do not see" that is often cited. The technique is capable of detecting high boiling point surrogates of the soil lipid fraction along with markers of soil microbial communities (e.g. sterols, hopanes, terrestrial fatty acids beyond ~ C₂₂, etc.), which could not be detected unambiguously by conventional analytical pyrolysis up till now.