Heavy Song of the Week: Crypta Bring Death Metal Majesty with “A Portrait of Decay”

Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “A Portrait of Decay” from Crypta.

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Crypta call to mind At the Gates at their best, conjuring a similar level of decrepitude and gothic decay that their peers doing more melodic death metal often fail to capture. The occasional sins of the genre, such as privileging Iron Maiden-isms over creating something that is fundamentally death metal, are utterly absent here. There is a real sense of emotional depth here, the same kind of melancholy that haunts Opeth and colored the windowpanes of Katatonia’s early heavier work. All of this without covering the truly tremendous guitar work, including numerous solos that marries technical acumen to a clear emotional goal in a way a lot of players striving for more sensitive approaches to death metal struggle with. But don’t let my words fool you: There are rippers here too, not to mention a spectacular nylon-string acoustic solo to close the track.

The tremendous playing, which includes some eerie bass work and a drum arrangement that threads the needle perfectly between death metal blasts, sumptuous grooves, and more orchestrate approaches to the kit, still acts ultimately as second-fiddle to the utterly entrancing vocal performance. Sometimes, a band foregrounds a vocal seemingly out of a sense of obligation rather than it being the right call for a track, or otherwise fails to develop the musical bed the vocalist interacts with. Here, it feels like a perfect union, as if the band is moving to automatically generate the emotional color the vocal implies. “A Portrait of Decay” reads less like a song in the real and more how a song feels like it should unfurl in your head, making it all the more magical that they managed to capture it the way they have. It’s our Heavy Song of the Week.

Honorable Mentions

Dream Unending – “Strained Sincerity”

Never would I have guessed that my favorite modern death-doom band would return with a track that marries noir-ish urban jazz timbres, an almost country-and-western gallop, and a deep cavernous growl. For a band founded on the consistently perfect idea of “what if we do Pink Floyd,” this shift opens more abstract doors fitting for a band named clearly after the surreality of continuous dream. They lean further into progressive rock here, specifically the more elliptical elements of shifting tonalities and melodies that seem to almost melt in your hand, all to conjure a beautifully strange sound. The clean jazz guitar counterpoint to the heavier riffy guitar line creates a powerful emotional counterpoint that demonstrates clearly why this band has been the recipient of so much praise over its short life.

Knife – “Shadows”

Heavy metal is beautiful. In what other genre can there be a group called Knife where you know exactly how they will sound without even clicking? Even more so, in what other genre is this a good thing? Knife offer here a blend of speed metal, traditional heavy metal, and just the right amount of that pre-extreme metal split vocal grit that will be reminiscent of WASP for those true rockers amongst us. Some heavy metal is experimental and high-brow while some embraces modernity and reaches the masses, both of which are beautiful things. This is simple and earthy. Knife ultimately ply the same trade as genre greats like Accept, Riot, or Manilla Road, all children of the refined form of metal Judas Priest forged in the ’70s which birthed the magical form we still worship today. Raise you still, gang.

Lost in Kyiv – “Tróia”

It’s easy for post-rock or post-metal to feel meandering without any real emotional gravity to it. Not so here; like great psychedelic music and its sonic children, this works by painting an image with sound, using shifting melodies and new shifts in instrumentation to feel like a drama is unfurling before you. The key to great music like this is it should genuinely feel worsened if there were vocals. “Tróia” feels like being caught between the primal force of the elements while ensconced in the concrete, steel, asphalt, and glass of a city. Yet despite this heady kind of imagistic terrain, it still manages to feel outward rather than inward, driving against and through the world rather than deeper and deeper into some solipsistic interior. Its video, featuring graven statues of angels lit by flourescent lights that cannot seem to pierce their total darkness, that fusion of the utterly unnatural with the preternatural, fits the emotional space perfect;y.