How Bad Was The Unspoken King, Really?
In the murky pantheon of death metal disasters, few albums can stand toe-to-toe with The Unspoken King, an album from Cryptopsy that really beggars belief. An album like Illud Divinum Insanus will inevitably attract retrospective appraisal because of its badly calculated swings and because of its colossally botched misses. Any of the Graveyard Classics albums have huge comedy value alone. Most comparable is probably Promise by Massacre, another album that saw a notable death metal band try and shift gears and hop onto a hotter, newer sound; in the case of Massacre, that sound was ’90s-styled groove metal – in the case of Cryptopsy, it was deathcore.
In 2008, the complete flattening of subcultures was certainly en route but wasn’t yet complete. There was much more of a stark division between the average fan of deathcore and the average fan of death metal, between side-fringe swoops and camo-shorts. There was no reality in which The Unspoken King, releasing when it did, would ever have avoided a scalping. 2008 was also the time where the scrutiny of the average metal fan towards deathcore was hitting its peak. By this point, many of the defining bands of the genre had established themselves; in 2008 alone you had records from Veil Of Maya, The Acacia Strain, Whitechapel, Winds Of Plague, Carnifex, Annotations Of An Autopsy, All Shall Perish and After The Burial. We were about to see the commercial peak of the genre with Suicide Silence the following year. It didn’t matter that if you examined the musical fossil record, you could draw a line from Devourment to Here Comes The Kraken, all that mattered was that deathcore was now reaching the heights of its pariah status and there was no room for nuance.
For context, just three years prior, you’ve got Once Was Not. It was an album that saw the return of Lord Worm, an album that ditched the turn-of-the-millennium mathcore apologetics of And Then You’ll Beg, and an album that was seen as a return to form for Cryptopsy. Though personally, in hindsight, I’m not sure how much of a “return” Once Was Not really is. I’ve got a fondness for the hardcore pedigree and predilection for knuckle-dragging throughout And Then You’ll Beg, but it was made clear that it was not a sound Cryptopsy fans were hankering for. So when Lord Worm came back, people were naturally caught up in the hubbub and excitement, ready to accept a return to “classic” Cryptopsy, though I would argue every Cryptopsy has a distinct sound and what defines “classic” Cryptopsy is different to a lot of fans. That’s part of the reason I’m underlining this so much—to emphasize how the “core” sound that dominates The Unspoken King already had its canary in the coal mine back with And Then You’ll Beg, which I kind of see as a larval form of The Unspoken King. I can absolutely see a world where in place of Once Was Not, you had an album that bridged the gap between the two sounds more elegantly, and maybe in that world The Unspoken King would have gone down just a bit smoother.
May 26th, 2008. You pick up the CD the day it lands. You’ve ignored the build up and press coverage to give yourself as honest and unbiased a first-listen as you can. You pop the disc in. “Worship Your Demons” starts to play.
Cryptopsy has always set the tone of their records with their introduction: the filtered, off-kilter guitar that introduces Blasphemy Made Flesh; the disquieting sample and cacophonous mix of None So Vile; the considered, leering threat that introduces Whisper Supremacy; the chest-thumping, self-destructive machismo of And Then You’ll Beg; the juxtaposed acoustic introduction to Once Was Not that teases the listener with a rug-pull that we both know is coming. So when The Unspoken King awkwardly bursts to life with an assault of uncertain sledgehammer blasts and uncharacteristic mega-tech sweeping… yeah, it sets the tone alright.
Straight up, “Worship Your Demons” is mostly unrecognizable as Cryptopsy. Describing it on paper as “Cryptopsy doing deathcore” is, while accurate, not even a particularly helpful description because the band immediately sounds totally faceless; brutish and unpleasant in a wholly different way, a wholly homogenized way. Even the introduction of new vocalist Matt McCachy—who is typically excellent—is botched, with shrill shrieks, deliberate voice cracks and muddy production obscuring both the sort of vocalist he ordinarily is and what he’s capable of. The transition between “Worship Your Demons” and “The Headsman” is admittedly pretty slick, though, and the clean vocals that get introduced over the groovier, mid-paced riffing feel like easier chewing for long-time fans. In its unmoving mediocrity, I think “Worship Your Demons” was a bad choice as an opener, but it was certainly an honest one; it’s hard to find an opener that’s as cards-on-the-table as this, one that is as transparent to the listener in regards to what is to come. You read reviews back in the day of people who, upon hearing the first track, tapped out instantly. It’s hard to blame them.
But as I said, “The Headsman” starts well. It’s at its best when it’s mid-paced and menacing, and is at its worst when it’s attempting to tap into a ferocity that both the band and the album’s production aren’t equipped to deliver here. The Unspoken King introduces itself as an album more focused on rhythmic dexterity and bludgeoning force than memorable riffing, but that isn’t a sin itself. Cryptopsy made the decision to chase a sound and in doing so were subject to the whims of its tropes.
“Silence Your Tyrants” is a marked improvement, and it isn’t a coincidence that one of the best tracks on the album, the first definitively solid track, is the one that surrenders itself the most to the caveman-brained thickness of deathcore, with its mosh-friendly breakdowns, graceless china blasts, calculated voice-breaks, broken up and given space to breathe with linear, melodic leads. It’s, of course, very of its time, and shows that by 2008 so many tropes and clichés of the genre were already set in stone. In no world could Cryptopsy have continued in the style, realistically. Part of the appeal of deathcore is that it’s a dead end, a place where progression goes to die. But it’s a reasonably dynamic song, and has confidence to shift around the tempo, compared to “The Headsman” which is only a minute longer but feels an eternity with its unseasoned, unmoving heaviness.
But then we have “Bemoan The Martyr,” which is surely the point of no return for the average Cryptopsy fan. Their use of these soaring, truly nauseating radio-rock clean vocals feels almost shameful when the band immediately attempts to get more riffy and heavy in the second half, like an animal trying to hide its own shit. This combination of ungainly chugs and 4th-rate hardcore-brah vocals, followed by the descent into a completely overwhelming, muddy cacophony as the multiple vocal layers overdub, causes whatever parsable instrumentation to blur together into one mess of unimpressive composition. The introduction, with its indistinct, rumbling bass, its spoken word and its painfully earnest, painfully dull cleans… forget deathcore, this has all the trappings of the worst of post-grunge. Much is said of Cryptopsy and their shift to sounding like a value-brand All Shall Perish, but much less is said about them trying to sound like a budget version of Sevendust. Despite all of its attempts at wild, flailing musical chaos, it sounds distinctly muted and unthreatening. And fuck, those clean vocals—whatever defense you try to mount for The Unspoken King, nothing changes the fact that “Bemoan The Martyr” is surely the nadir of the band’s entire catalog.
“Leach” has more overt hardcore leanings, and initially seems to have a sharper image of what it actually wants to be: muscular, meat-headed, and mean. At first it is pretty solid, featuring a decent high-low vocal spar with session stalwart Youri Raymond, but it ultimately kneecaps itself with a thoroughly uninteresting clean vocal element that tries and fails to harmonize with the harsher vocals in the mix. It’s not the idea of Cryptopsy being clean that I have issues with, it’s the fact that without fail they jut them awkwardly into tracks they have no business in, being obviously written by musicians not experienced with them enough to know how to handle them. The more melodic of the deathcore pioneers, with their roots in mall emo and MySpace net-pop, had a better grasp of hook and harmony in their songs; Cryptopsy, legendary as they are, just weren’t equipped to write songs like that, and “Leach,” with its exhausting length and constant activity despite an actual lack of notable things happening, is disastrous. For all the criticism you can throw at The Unspoken King, I can’t say it isn’t a challenging listen; at just under 50 minutes, it nonetheless feels like a fucking eternity to get through. If you want to experiment in musical time dilation and don’t much fancy listening to Coil‘s Time Machines, The Unspoken King is the album for you.
“The Plagued” opens with the audio run-off of a Smackdown Vs Raw soundtrack, but it at least has the decency to be open about it. Compared to “Bemoan The Martyr” and “Leach,” I appreciate that it’s willing to immediately engulf the listener in the most middling sounds of a Three Days Grace compilation without tricking me into thinking I’m going to get anything else first. “Resurgence Of An Empire,” though? Quite solid, I think—good, even. Grounded by this heavy, death-march tremolo rhythm, it naturally loosens up and flexes its muscles during its mid-paced portions, where the cleans are at their best, contributing to the tone and pacing of the track here moreso than anywhere else, and I can imagine a whole album in this style being much more successful. Would it have been any better received? I doubt it, but it would have been much more appealing to go back to after the initial backlash. “Anoint The Dead” is also a pretty solid song. Its more dense, tech-adjacent flair, sweeping lead guitar arpeggios and vocal support from Gabriel McCaughry of Ion Dissonance make it a highlight in the tracklist. And at this point in the tracklist, you think to yourself “Oh, look at that, a back-to-back stretch of winners.” But, of course, it can’t last.
“Contemplate Regicide” is a song of two halves, memorable for its generous melodeath influence and catchy guitar leads but once those cleans kick in and the bizarre, fantastical production choices make themselves present—these odd, panning electronic stabs and haunted mansion midi keyboard progression—it unfortunately tanks the whole procedure, and a cowardly retreat to the sound of its solid opening does little to repair the song.
And then “Bound Dead” is just so much dead weight; nothing uniquely bad or surprisingly good. By this point, nearing the end, whatever good will generated by the album’s brightest moments has subsided and listening just becomes exhausting. The melodic mid-paced middle portion of the song is probably one of the low-lights of the whole album, a minute that feels like an eternity, engendering nothing in the listener: nothing that stirs, nothing offensively bad in its performance, just total musical stasis. The closing track “(Exit) The Few” is at least some high weirdness in its own right, with its lead guitar melody counterbalanced by these sinister-sounding, hoarse vocals mixed low in the mix, erupting into a scattershot jumble of low-end rumbling, of growls and phlegm and feigned madness. At such a short length, with all of its experimental stabs, with all of its unearned menace, with all of its unconfident darkness, it’s not entirely unfitting as a closer for an album like The Unspoken King.
In spite of my best hopes, it’s still pretty woeful.
Did it matter, in the end? Maybe not especially. Cryptopsy would lick their wounds and come back 4 years later with the self-titled Cryptopsy in 2012, a typical elder statesman death metal album: largely overproduced, largely unmemorable, but that was enough for most fans. They would release a pair of EPs, compiled together as The Book Of Suffering – Tome I & II in 2018, As Gomorrah Burns in 2023 and An Insatiable Violence last year, each record better than the last. Cryptopsy are in a good place now, one of the better examples of the old guard still thriving in 2026. The Unspoken King ultimately wasn’t a career death knell, and doesn’t define the legacy of the band in the same way similar disasters have for others.
It was just the wrong band to record it, it was the wrong time to put it out, it was the wrong audience to receive it. And in the time since its release, no one has gone back to reclaim it. No one has tried to re-examine or reappraise it because, ultimately, there’s just nothing there to rediscover. Nothing beyond its status as a discography oddity and a punching bag, nothing that isn’t better articulated by the bands who did this style the best. That’s the issue with being such a transparent album, I suppose. Whatever faint praise I gave Cry[topsy for putting out a wholly honest album is ultimately a back-handed compliment, because as a result The Unspoken King is one of the most one-dimensional records you’re likely to hear, with nothing to communicate, with nothing to grasp. It ultimately being bad—really quite bad—is all you’re left with. Nothing to reflect on, nothing to even nod your head to afterwards, just badness and a real sense of wasted time, both for Cryptopsy for having spent their time making it and the listener for having trudged through it.
