Celestial Sanctuary will release Cradle Of The Rotten, Shrine To Those Most Foul on 22 January 2027, their first album for Metal Blade, and they have given a number for what is on it: roughly a quarter death metal, three quarters everything else they count as heavy metal.
That is an unusual thing for a death metal band to announce in advance, and the band's explanation is plainer than the arithmetic. They wanted to work out what the band actually is, filter out the rest, and stop writing towards what anyone expects.
Forty seven minutes, and the subject is one English town. The record is a bastardisation of the history and the legends around Bury St. Edmunds: the piercing and beheading of King Edmund, the Black Shuck, the Red Barn Murders, the Witch Trials, the Sunken Bells of Dunwich, the Lantern Man. A local horror catalogue rather than an imported one.
Tom Cronin says Lashed By Chain was the first song written for it, and describes a dual guitar solo that would not be out of place in an Iron Maiden song. On a record that is one quarter death metal, that is not a throwaway comparison.