ALBUM REVIEW: Chytridiomycosis Relinquished – Slimelord

Few artists achieve a genre-defining critically-acclaimed debut album in their lifetime, let alone two, yet for CRYPTIC SHIFT’s Xander Bradley, John Riley and Ryan Sheperson, they’ve done just that with death-doom project SLIMELORD. 

In much the same way that CRYPTIC SHIFT’s Visitations From Enceladus redefined technical death metal, Chytridiomycosis Relinquished wakes death-doom from its slumber. If backyard survival simulator Grounded ever gets made into a movie, SLIMELORD should soundtrack it: double-bass drums and dissonant leads deliver a death-doom dirge that suffocates the senses, leaving you blind to Bradley’s growling gutturals stalking you like its prey. 

Squawking primates dance through dissonant drum fills, as buzzsaw riffs and blast-beats cut through swampy undergrowth like machetes in the jungle; Bradley’s ghostly growls invade the surface layers of your skin, like the fungal disease the album shares its name with; and somewhere in the depths of this dingy underworld wades an unmistakable groove that’ll lure you into its dark lairs — and that’s just opening monolith The Beckoning Bell.

Gut-Brain Axis is the musical manifestation of its namesake, as Sheperson drills dissonance into your skull like a spider seeping its venom into your brain in between melodically atmospheric grooves that lure you into a false sense of safety, whilst Splayed Mudscape lets water ripple like waves through your skin, knocking you off-balance with a rhythmically right-channel mix of singular buzzsaw riffs that cascade into a cacophony of psychosis. 

Chytridiomycosis Relinquished is a 47-minute microcosm of the paranoia that’s punctured society since the days of the pandemic as amphibians enter your eardrums and find home in your neural networks, rhythmic repetition penetrating the walls of sonic sensitivity our bodies are built to defend against. Simply look to Batrachomorpha Resurrections Chamber and you’ll find skin-crawling silence suffocated by Bradley’s sustaining snarls, before a frenetic fretboard workout throttles you into a spaced-out state of schizophrenia synaesthesia.  

SLIMELORD’s sinister debut is by no means an easy-listen, demanding your attention every step of the way through its seven tracks. Repeat listens will be rewarded for those brave enough to wade back through its waters, variations of its fungal disease mutating into existence with each new playthrough. The compelling near-nothingness of The Hissing Moor at times leaves you alone to be stalked in a silent world by long-extinct creatures of the night, and on other listens has its double-bass blasts sink into you like the pincers of a creature tearing flesh from your skin. 

Whether there’s something in the water in West Yorkshire or not, SLIMELORD, like its sibling CRYPTIC SHIFT, has delivered a debut few bands could muster in their entire careers, changing the course of a genre in less than an hour.

Rating: 9/10

Chytridiomycosis Relinquished is set for release on March 8th via 20 Buck Spin.

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