Sentient Ruin is proud to work again with Cryptae, one of contemporary death metal’s most enigmatic and defiant entities who we’ve worked with ever since their first demo tape, as we ready the release of their debut LP “Nightmare Traversal" scheduled for release on vinyl, casette tape and digital formats on October 2020 and pre-ordreable now via our Bandcamp and website shop.
The track “Oubliette” was unveiled earlier this month in occasion of Bandcamp Friday, and now we’re happy to offer you another glimpse into this abhorrent album via the exclusive music video premiere of the track “Cryptic Passage”, published today by CVLT Nation - who in presenting the the song and visuals remark that “the band’s first ever music video for the track “Cryptic Passage”, is an unparalleled and surreal audio-visual experience that confirms the Dutch duo as one of the most unique, visionary, and insane entities in contemporary death metal and extreme metal vanguards in general.”. You can read the feature and check out the track HERE.
Dutch experimental raw death metal deliriants Cryptae (featuring members of Plague Organ, Imperial Cult, Dead Neanderthals etc.) set out to once again crush your synapses with the nauseating and surrealistic churning miasma that is their debut full-length album "Nightmare Traversal". Although both band members come from vastly different musical backgrounds, which include experimental and improvised styles of music outside of metal, Cryptae remains the conduit through which they revel in their unending love for the most defiling forms of death metal and through which they explore the possibilities of the genre's most aberrant deformations. With "Nightmare Traversal" the duo focused on writing the most warped, disorienting, and suffocating death metal delirium they could come up with, leaving experimentation and free-form composition to run rampant as usual while adding more focus than ever before to the violence and inescapability of their unique and unclassifiable death metal crush-depth.
Lyrically and thematically on"Nightmare Traversal" the band has envisioned a surreal and dystopian artificial landscape inspired by old violent and gore-drenched video games, almost like stripping away the player, the monsters, the guns and the gore from 90s games like DOOM, Carmageddon and Blood, to leave the motionless and surrealistic digitalized settings to take a life and center scene of their own. This has resulted in an amorphous and glitched aural monstrosity packed with bleak lyrics, oppressive atmospheres, and erratic song structures channeling visions of crude concrete geometry, suffocating corridors, hidden passages and drab horizons of an empty and encapsulated digital world that strangles the listener. Completely unclassifiable, hideously crushing, and triumphantly weird, "Nightmare Traversal" is an experimental raw death metal lucid nightmare, the cold echo of collapsing buildings, mangled flesh, crumbled steel, exploding bodies, and hollow shrieks reverberating through an abandoned and warped universe of pixelated horrors and inverted digitalized architectures.
Cryptae made heads turn in 2017 with their insane self-titled debut demo tape, an hallucinogenic and erratic spasm of experimental raw death metal rooted in improvisation and free-form composition that instantly established them as an unpredictable and visionary anomaly in death metal. From its sophisticated minimalist and surreal aesthetic to the unclassifiable horrific music, the release instantly made the band standout as a complete absurdity in death metal, and while voluntarily cryptic and unaccessible, the demo tape was soon sold out shortly after release. The band then followed up in 2019 with “Vestigial” (released on vinyl in collaboration with Tartarus Records), a single track, twenty-minute delirium of experimental death metal improvisation that confirmed the band as a total untethered rogue entity within death metal. “Nightmare Traversal" is the the culmination of the band’s visionary experimentalism coupled with their isolationist confidence, talent and perseverance in wanting to create unheard death metal absurdities that lay on a plane of existence entirely their own.