Exclusive Track Premiere: Crypts of Despair’s “Obliteration of the Impure”
On April 18th, Lithuanians Crypts of Despair will release their third LP We Belong in the Grave via Transcending Obscurity Records. Mixing together the gloomy atmospherics of Ulcerate, the doomed-out pacing of Krypts, and the kind of brutal death metal breakdowns one would expect from Cytotoxin, Crypts of Despair’s new album is a nasty, brutish affair. It coronates Death as King in a time of leviathanic turmoil. Fans of Saevus Finis‘s Facilis Descensus Averno (2024) will find much to enjoy in Crypts of Despair’s similarly misanthropic melancholy.
Thus far, we’ve been treated to “Terminal Dais,” “Expulsion to Purgatory,” and “Undisillusioned,” three tracks that make clear the growth of the band from 2021’s much-celebrated All Light Swallowed towards the kind of lightless gloom heralded by the title of that release. “Terminal Dais” is a somber-minded approach to Aborted, more tenebrous than assaulting. Even “Expulsion to Purgatory,” with its militant, marshaling machine-gun breakdowns, is overcast and forlorn. “Undisillusioned” showcases just how exciting and belligerent We Belong in the Graves can be. After again flirting with the brutal death metal territory of Unfathomable Ruination but staying on just this side of the death metal divide, the song’s final 45 seconds return us to the album’s macabre motif, a deathly breathing up from the sepulchre that haunts us at nearly every turn.
Today, we’re stoked to premiere the album’s 4th single “Obliteration of the Impure.” Nestled neatly between “Terminal Dais” and “Expulsion to Purgatory,” this latest single is mid-paced and tank-treaded, only rarely breaking into a blasting, hemorrhaging moment of delirium. Simonas Jurkevičius’s bass—made out of loosely assembled rubble—cracks and shudders like a crunched tombstone. Jonas Kanevičius’s grunts, gutturals, bellows, and screeches are as relentless as the riff-after-riff-after-riff-after-riff structure of the song. And yet things do relent, as they always inevitably do on We Belong in the Grave. “Fall before these pious lessons” we will, as the impending cataclysm arrives around 3:29, right before the obliterative, scratching winds of the song’s final moments scatter the dust of us away into the otherwise empty winds. It is a blueprint for the band’s approach throughout the entire album.
The band thinks similarly about “Obliteration of the Impure:”
“This song is a blend of nasty grooves and crushing atmosphere. It was the first song created on this album
and helped to shape the rest of the sonic landscape of We Belong In The Grave.”
The politics of im/purity rage around us. It permeates even our most important, radical thinking about how to rescue the world from ourselves. “So long as we continue to privilege our worlding capacity,” write Swarbrick and Tremblay, “we ignore that the very idea of our world is bound up with exclusionary sentiment. We fail to see that conceiving of the world as ours necessitates the worldlessness of others, human and nonhuman.” This kind of necessitated worldlessness of others, a perhaps potentially inescapable reality of even the most capacious thinking about life, is the dark underbelly that permeates “Obliteration of the Impure.” Whose world is it? Who gets to remain? Crypts of Despair has an answer, though it might be a harrowing one. Find out below:
We Belong in the Grave arrives
April 18th on Transcending Obscurity Records.
As always, the merch and the riffs are equally sick.
