Deranged dutch raw death metal experimentalists Cryptae are a band like none other, and now this simple fact is becoming more and more apparent and turning into a harrowing new reality. Their 2017 debut demo tape from Sentient Ruin had already hinted at the fact that these two freaks belong in no scene or subgenera whatsoever, and are stuck instead on a planet entirely their own, from which they have no idea (or no intention?) how to get off and come back down on planet earth. So while they’ve been “up there”, they’ve seemingly isolated themselves further, lost even more touch with reality, and evolved their abominable death metal creature to become something even more deviant, unpredictable, and aberrant – unlike nothing else out there. We already knew the two like to smash together antithetic and apparently irreconcilable styles like cerebral and punishing dark death metal with ancient strains of free form rock and jazz like those of Magma and John Coltrane (!!!), but what we’re about to whiteness today goes frankly beyond comprehension and all thresholds of sanity, and we’re stoked today to have even given the privilege to exclusively unveil the work for you all….
“Vestigial” is Cryptae‘s new mini-album that Sentient Ruin is again releasing in the US this time in collaboration with Tartarus Records in the EU on a gorgeous white etched vinyl, and it already makes their completely delirious demo from two years ago look almost like a standardized and fundamentally “normal” release. Cryptae have always made experimentation a pillar of their sound, and in fact their music often has owed almost more to free jazz and improvisational math/noise rock than to death metal, but what they’ve crafted this time goes even beyond that, and it’s now nearly impossible to even decipher the thought process, intents, or basic rationale that went behind the materialization of this fucking abomination they’ve created. What goes down on “Vestigial” is a single 18-minte composition of complete aural delirium, where death metal is mutated from the inside and essentially turned into the disfigurement of itself. Normally what happens is that death metal is the conduit for morbidity to unearth and tell tales of the most unnameable horrors. But Cryptae have gone even beyond that and made death metal itself the fucking horror and lab rat, and turned the genre into the subject of this horror story – of its own horror story – showing us how far and how deep they could disfigure and defile it. End result – the most undecipherable, fucked in the head, and completely demented death metal release of the year, where clear but largely improvised influences coming from Morbid Angel, Immolation and Incantation, have been thrown in the lab of horrors to be dissected, dismembered, and recombined anew with surreal forms of musical experimentalism coming from free-jazz, avantgarde deconstructionism, raw punk, math and noise rock, and free form improvisation, to yield the quintessence of improvised and unpredictable aural abominations.
Twisted, demented, malformed in every way possible, and utterly horrific, “Vestigial” drops this Friday August 16 on amazing etched white vinyl from Sentient Ruin in thew USA and from Tartarus Records or from the band in the EU – get into it while its here cause we can’t imagine a record like this one sticking around for long!
