Cryptopsy: Honouring Our legacy

With a career spanning over thirty years and releasing some of the all time classics from the death metal genre CRYPTOPSY have remained relevant as one of the most fierce and brutal bands in the scene. The new album An Insatiable Violence arrives a mere two years after the previous album As Gomorrah Burns which is an uncharacteristically fast turnaround for the band.

This increased speed of output is all part of vocalist Matt McGachy’s plan to maintain the band’s relevancy in this social media driven world. “We rarely write so this is a special record for us because we got it done so quickly. Something I’ve been aspiring to do is release music more frequently since The Book of Suffering releases. When we came back after the pandemic it was so good to be back on stage and releasing music. The vibe in the band is so cohesive now so I forced us to release a record much quicker than we had done previously which meant us sitting down after a show and forcing ourselves to write even when we didn’t want to. I think it is important in this modern day and age to release music much faster to fans because everyone’s attention span is so short now compared to back in the day.”

CRYPTOPSY’s latest outing, An Insatiable Violence, continues the ongoing evolution of their style of death metal. In particular the central theme of the album is humanity’s current obsession with social media. “I had a dream about a person who was fixing a machine, then at night they tie themselves into the machine which begins to start torturing them but the scary thing is that they love it. As they’re being tortured they start imagining all the ways they could make the experience even better so the next day when they wake up they start working on the machine again trying to implement all those ‘improvements’ before torturing themselves again. They always want to bring it just close enough to the end without actually dying and just pushing that sadomasochistic pleasure as far as it can go. The themes and the album title all came from social media and expands upon what we were doing on As Gomorrah Burns where that album was about humanity and our relationship with technology, An Insatiable Violence is about social media. The person in the dream is humanity, and the machine that tortures us is social media.”

While CRYPTOPSY have cemented themselves as one of the legacy bands of death metal, the band’s catalogue hasn’t been without some divisive albums. The band infamously attempted a more deathcore inspired sound when Matt joined the band with The Unspoken King in 2008, much to the ire of classic fans. Many years after the release of the album Matt reflects on how that album came to be and the experience at the time.

“That era of CRYPTOPSY was very fractured there was no clear leadership. There were a lot of people writing stuff and wanting it to be completely different for the band so that’s where I fell in. I was a metalcore vocalist akin to something like KILLSWITCH ENGAGE so deathcore wasn’t as natural but I strived to do the most brutal vocals I had ever done at the time. It wasn’t the best record evidently, but there are plenty in the CRYPTOPSY camp that stand by that record and others that don’t, which is fine. You take what you can and learn from albums like that. In my opinion our biggest mistake in the wake of that album was our reaction to the fan’s negative comments. We should have never responded to the criticism in the way that we did so I wish I knew my publicist from Century Media from back then so I could ask him ‘why didn’t you tell us to stop?’ However the best thing to happen out of all of that, was that the band always believed in me. Flo Mounier always stood behind me and knew I could do it whereas other bands would have fired the new singer and blamed them for everything. Instead they stood by me and allowed me to take the time to grow into a better death metal vocalist and I like to think I am now doing a pretty okay job after almost twenty years.”

Despite all of the criticism from their fans after Matt’s first outing with CRYPTOPSY the band to this day have no qualms about adding new elements to their established sound as evidenced by the new album. “Obviously we’ve found we have to stay within some sort of map of what CRYPTOPSY is but we do weird things with our music. If you look at An Insatiable Violence as a vinyl, the last four songs on side-b are really strange CRYPTOPSY songs with slower sections, melodic intros and the track Malicious Needs is just weird and dissonant. It’s death metal but it’s strange and we haven’t been worried about doing that stuff.

Over thirty years with a turbulent history with many band members coming and going, landmark albums and infamous albums, CRYPTOPSY have long since been considered one of the most influential bands in death metal with a strong legacy behind them. Ahead of the new album Matt explains what it is like being part of a band with such heritage. “We don’t have to live up to our legacy, what we aspire to do is to honour it. Anything we release or do is always with the legacy in mind and how we can uplift it rather than tarnish it. There is certainly pressure as those early CRYPTOPSY albums are viewed as such important albums for the scene however as long as we continue to create music that we are happy with and feel at home in CRYPTOPSY then we will continue to revere the band’s legacy and honour it as best we can.”

An Insatiable Violence is out now via Season Of Mist. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS121 here: