(written by Islander)

We’ve had lots of good things to say about the previous music of the Lithuanian band Crypts of Despair, most recently within Andy Synn’s review of their 2021 album of blended death and black metal All Light Swallowed, which he described as “a perfect example of the level of annihilation that can be achieved by the crossbreeding of these two savage styles” — “the sort of highly-evolved, apex predator that doesn’t really need to do anything particularly new or revolutionary to achieve its goals – it simply kills and kills and kills again, without remorse or restraint.”

At an earlier time, in the context of their preceding album The Stench of the Earth, I also referred to their music as both “an irresistible headbang trigger” and a simulacrum of “what it feels like to suffer a cranial fracture and concussive trauma.”

Now these killers are returning with a third full-length (their second one for Transcending Obscurity Records), and a title as bleak as those of the first two: We Belong In The Grave. What we have for you today is the third single from the album, “Terminal Dais.“ Continue reading »

If you haven’t had a good solid headbang lately, we can fix that problem for you. And if you’ve been wondering what it feels like to suffer a cranial fracture and concussive trauma, we can take care of that, too. And we can supply both those needs in one fell swoop through our premiere of a track called “Path To Vengeance” off the debut album by Lithuania’s Crypts of Despair. Entitled The Stench of the Earth, it will be released on November 24 by those German specialists in death (metal) at Testimony Records.

Crypts of Despair first took shape in 2009, went into a hiatus in 2013, and revived in 2016, eventually assembling the revised line-up that recorded this new album, whose lyrical themes include “disgust and hatred towards humanity, death worship and the occult.” Continue reading »