Celestial Sanctuary: Insatiable Thirst For Death Metal
There’s no stopping the New Wave of British Death Metal at this point. Back in March 2021, CELESTIAL SANCTUARY released their excellent debut full-length Soul Diminished and joined the likes of COFFIN MULCH and VACUOUS in breathing life into a scene that had been stagnant – and not in a cool, putrid death metal way – for some time. Fast forward two and a bit years and as the Cambridge four-piece gear up to release their even better sophomore effort Insatiable Thirst For Torment, that wave has become a tsunami.
“I’m a fan first and foremost,” smiles guitarist and vocalist Tom Cronin. “So I’m just fucking stoked to see all this stuff coming out. I’m stoked that every other week I get to check something else out because when I was first getting back into more extreme music, it was few and far between. You’d have probably like four or five, maybe six or seven, good albums throughout an entire year; now there’s been like 50 released this year already!”
Even amid this increasingly crowded field however, CELESTIAL SANCTUARY should have no trouble standing out with Insatiable Thirst. With Cronin taking significantly more time to write than the day he allowed himself for each track on Soul Diminished, and the outfit having since hit the live circuit with a vengeance, the results are every bit the step up any band with a killer debut would hope of album number two. Most notably the quartet really seem to have increased the range of what they’re capable of this time around, as happy to slam their foot to the floor and launch into some all-out thrashing as they are to drag listeners into a slow, doomy trudge.
“The main challenge is to do that and for it to still sound cohesive,” explains Cronin. “I really don’t like it when records sound like you can kind of see what they’ve done. You can sort of go, ‘oh, they’ve gone for this there’, and it sounds really disjointed. So the challenge was to incorporate more, but also to keep it cohesive, which I’m happy we did. It was very much a conscious thing that we wanted to expand our sound and I think that’s why this record for me is way better than the first one.”
Central also to the band’s mission for this record was to do away with any attempts to lump them in with the old school death metal revival – an oversimplification at best in the case of their last album, and practically impossible this time around. Produced by the band themselves to allow for maximum tinkering with tone and parts and so on, Insatiable Thirst is a muscular, modern death metal record, not a nostalgia trip or an attempt to rehash something that was perfected long ago. “I don’t ever want to sound like a band that sounds like a parody or a tribute to another period of time,” is how Cronin puts it. “I always want to sound like a reflection of the current time instead of trying to sound like another era.”
Even in lyrical terms Cronin is ambitious not to fall into the usual gory trappings of your standard death metal band – well, kind of; the tracks are still called things like Glutted With Chunder and Gutted With A Blunt Blade, but hidden within them are reflections on deeper matters than one might immediately assume. “I think there’s always going to be that mindfulness of thinking about what is human consciousness,” suggests Cronin. “That was the entire running theme through the last album, and I just think it’s such a fucking mental question that you can go down a rabbit hole thinking about. For me as well, I basically live on a plant based lifestyle, I’m not gonna say I’m vegan, and there’s undertones about factory farming and how fucked up shit like that is.”
Serious though such matters may be, go to a CELESTIAL SANCTUARY gig near you – given how many shows they’ve played over the past couple of years there should be plenty – and you’ll realise that Cronin and co. have a keen understanding that death metal is meant to be fun first and foremost. “I now come from a mindset where I just want everyone there to be having a good time and I think that’s influenced how we sequence our set, and how we interact with the crowd between songs as well,” he elaborates. “It’s something that we sort of figured out over time, what we enjoy and what we think other people enjoy and how we think people are going to get their money’s worth because times are obviously hard. You want to make sure people go home thinking that was a fucking good night.”
Perhaps that’s why all is going so well for CELESTIAL SANCTUARY at the moment. They’re on the wonderful Church Road Records, they’ve supported all-time legends like OBITUARY and CATTLE DECAPITATION as well as like-minded younger heavyweights like GATECREEPER and UNDEATH, and in Insatiable Thirst For Torment they have a record that’s ready to take them to the next level. But as much as they may be the undisputed leaders of the New Wave of British Death Metal at this point, Cronin’s hopes for the future remain humble: “Just to have done more cool shit with my three best mates,” he concludes. “As long as we’re still enjoying what we’re doing, that’s the main thing.”
Insatiable Thirst For Torment is out now via Church Road Records.
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