Review: Cryptic Shift – Overspace & Supertime

February 26, 2026

Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see…

I once thought of Cryptic Shift as the UK’s answer to Blood Incantation and I know that I wasn’t alone in drawing the easy comparison between these two cosmically-minded progressive death metal bands. Both bands’ output is heavily influenced by hard science fiction, both pay homage to early ’90s Floridian death metal, and they each put out what had at the time been the best release of their careers pretty close to each other near the turn of the decade. While Blood Incantation went on to dabble in ambient soundscapes and kraut rock on their subsequent releases, there was only silence from Cryptic Shift with no new music since 2020’s phenomenal Visitations From Enceladus.

After nearly 6 years of waiting, we finally have the new album Overspace & Supertime which makes up for the long silence with nearly 80 minutes worth of music. It’s an album that takes more than a few dedicated listens to fully digest, yet it is immediately apparent what took so long. Overspace & Supertime is such a dense and expertly constructed album it’s a miracle that it didn’t take twice as long to make. Each of the 5 songs are very long, which we could have easily predicted based on the runtimes on Visitations, with two of the new tracks even more incredibly long than the others (“Stratocumulous Evergaol” and the title track each exceed 29 minutes and 20 minutes respectively).

There’s a lot to unpack from an album as dense as this and it’s best experienced through a quality set of headphones with the lyric sheet in hand. Overspace & Supertime is an album that you could likely listen to every day and you still wouldn’t have fully absorbed it by the time you finally turn to stardust; there are new quirks in each listen that you hadn’t noticed before. Cryptic Shift began releasing music a little more than a decade ago as a technical deathrash band that wasn’t any stranger than Voivod, but with each subsequent EP and full length release has only become more cosmically weird.

It’s hard to overstate what an incredible accomplishment Overspace & Supertime is. Cryptic Shift are masterful musicians who write incredibly complex music in a way that somehow still feels accessible. The way the band employs dissonance in their arrangements is impressive, often manipulating the feedback from their instruments to emulate otherworldly sounds such as the phaser sounds in “Hyperspace Topography.” Although they’re writing technically proficient music, it’s those unconventional moments that add to the immersive qualities of the album and build a world where you feel as though you’re a shipwrecked space traveler.

“Cryogenically Frozen” starts the album in a jazzy fashion but quickly goes further than Cynic or Atheist ever did with mixing jazz and metal influences in their music. The breakneck riffs and dizzying Alan Holdsworth-like solos are often broken up by brief melodic interludes. There are a quantum shit-ton of riffs and movements in the arrangement of each song but the band knows when to return to certain melodic ideas to give some cohesion to the chaos.

As I mentioned before, the second track “Stratocumulus Evergaol” is the longest song on the album at over 29 minutes. While incredibly lengthy and labyrinthine, the song is actually arranged in 6 movements that tell the story of an intergalactic battle and it serves as an example of how using the lyric sheets as a companion will aid with digesting the song. On the subject of the lyrics, I certainly won’t pretend to know everything that they’re writing about. I had to stop and look up words like “pulchritudinous,” which I learned was the longest word for “beautiful.” At times I wonder if they’re huge hard sci-fi nerds with quite a bit of cosmic knowledge or just really good at making shit up (for example, “Amassing armada of Zoergoric contractors above the icy Ichneaumonoidia”). For as dense and heady as this song gets at times, Cryptic Shift also manages to throw in some really catchy riffs like the one that kicks off and carries through the 4th movement of the song, almost sounding like a bouncy Thrice riff traveling through a black hole.

Xander Bradley turns in an incredible vocal performance on Overspace & Supertime and makes some choices that further lend to the otherworldly feel of the album. While following along with the lyrics you can hear that Bradley makes some interesting pronunciations, almost as though he’s a native speaker of an extraterrestrial tongue trying to deliver a message in an approximation of English. On “Hyperspace Topography” we get a little bit of the Cynic robot voice and the guttural howls in “Hexagonal Eyes (Deverity Trepaphymphasyzm)” are downright ghastly.

The 20+-minute closing title track could almost be the stylistic outlier on the album with its more Opethian approach to melodicism instead of the angular thrash riffs that make up the meat of the rest of the songs. There’s even a theremin over an absolute banger of a riff, which I didn’t know I needed to hear until now. It’s a perfect closing track for what is honestly a perfect album. On Overspace & Supertime, nothing is predictable but everything is exactly as it should be.