Matt McGachy told Blabbermouth what the plan was before anybody had heard a note of this thing.
We really wanted to make a groovy record, and we think we've done it.
Matt McGachy, Blabbermouth, 2025
Groovy is not the first word you will reach for. Try it on the opening minute of "The Nimis Adoration" and see how far you get. But hold the thought, because he is right, and where he is right matters.
The Montreal four have made their ninth album, out on Season of Mist on 20 June 2025, two years after As Gomorrah Burns, written mostly in vans and dressing rooms on tour, which McGachy says they had never done before, and recorded, engineered, mixed and mastered by their own guitarist Christian Donaldson in his own studio, which means every decision you hear on this record was made by somebody who has to play it. Eight songs. Thirty three and a half minutes. Not one second of anybody clearing their throat.
Flo Mounier is sixty seconds of your time away from proving he is still the best drummer in this genre. Four separate outlets that disagree about the rest of the album agree about him, and the reason is not the speed. Speed is cheap in 2025 and half the bands doing it are triggering the kicks anyway. It is the dynamics. Listen to what the snare does inside a blast beat here: it moves, it gets quieter and louder inside the same passage, it swings a fraction behind the beat when the riff needs weight. Machines do not do that. That is a man playing.
"The Art of Emptiness" is the album's centre and the track to send anybody who has not paid attention to this band since the nineties. Blabbermouth called it a career best vocal from McGachy and that is not a stretch: he drops from a guttural into a rasped high scream inside a bar and neither register sounds like a costume. Donaldson answers with the one solo on the album that is written rather than fired off. "Fools Last Acclaim" is where the range gets tested hardest, demonic low to wraith high and back inside a single phrase. "Malicious Needs" closes it at just under six minutes and carries the only genuinely quiet passage on the record, which after thirty minutes of assault lands like a door opening onto a flooded street.
The length is a decision too, and it is the right one. Thirty three minutes of this is roughly the point at which a human ear stops registering violence as violence, which Metal Storm's reviewer noticed as well, calling the short runtime a mercy. Bands with half of Cryptopsy's ability routinely put out fifty five minute albums and lose you by track seven. Angry Metal Guy and Metal Storm both came out of this one saying it clears the previous album, and on pure execution they are right: the playing is tighter, the songs finish where they should, and nothing here is stretched to fill a side.
Then there is the mix, and here the critics have split three ways over the same file. The Progressive Subway says it is too clean, surgically accurate, and that the polish scrubs off the filth that made this band frightening. Dom Lawson at Blabbermouth hears the exact opposite record, raw and chaotic and mercifully free of the processed sound the subgenre has settled into. A commenter on Sputnikmusic just calls it grating.
Three listeners, one mix, three different records, and all of them are describing something that is really in there.
Take a side, so here is mine. It is clean, and clean is the correct call for a band whose entire argument is that you can hear every note of what they are doing. Smear filth over this and you lose the thing worth buying. What it costs them is the sense of danger, and that is a real cost, not a quibble.
The bigger limit is the one the band chose. This is a consolidation, a better version of the last album rather than a step past it. The guest spot from former singer Mike DiSalvo on "Embrace the Nihility" points backwards too, and it is a warm gesture rather than a shock. Nine albums in, with the cover painted by their late singer Martin Lacroix, this is a band curating itself.
None of which stops it being a beating. Thirty three minutes, no filler, a drummer at the height of a thirty year career and a singer who has quietly become the best one they have had. If you left Cryptopsy behind after None So Vile, this is the record that drags you back.