Jun 23

Jun 23 Album Review : Cryptopsy - An Insatiable Violence (2025)

I’m obsessed with the idea that one transcendent success is harder to live with than a lifetime of failure. Failure gives you purpose. Success, real world-bending success, just gives you a high you can’t ever replicate. Metallica didn’t fail by any commercial standard, but you can still feel a weird resentment in the air when people talk about them, like they’re angry the band never recaptured the magic of their first four records. That’s because they couldn’t.

Once you write the soundtrack to a movement, you stop making music and start responding to a legacy. That’s how records like St. Anger are made.

Cryptopsy never reached that scale, but they did have a moment like that with None So Vile in 1996, an album that essentially detonated in the center of extreme metal and made everything around it seem obsolete. It’s haunted them ever since. If 2023’s As Gomorrah Burns suggested they were done trying to outrun that ghost, An Insatiable Violence confirms it. It’s not a return to form, it’s a recalibration. This isn’t a band chasing their past; it’s a band who finally remembered why they're playing evil music in the first place.

An Insatiable Violence sticks to the blueprint Cryptopsy refined years ago: eight songs, thirty-three minutes, not a single wasted moment. It’s intricate, aggressive, and unrelentingly articulate, like being verbally assaulted by an eloquent swamp monster. Compared to As Gomorrah Burns, this record is straighter, groovier, and significantly meaner. If Gomorrah was the tormented older brother pacing the basement in existential crisis, Violence is the psychotic younger sibling punching holes in the drywall just to feel something.

There are a few clear standouts on An Insatiable Violence, starting with its opening track. Cryptopsy has a long-standing habit of kicking off albums with something memorable, and The Nimis Adoration ranks high on that list. It's a bouncy, breakneck opener with savagely well-placed flashes of melody. Chris Donaldson's riffs aren’t overly complicated. They’re conceptual, almost narrative, which gives the whole track a vertigo-inducing momentum.

It feels like falling out of the sky toward certain death while a montage of your worst mistakes plays on a loop in your peripheral vision. A powerful statement of intent.

Dead Eyes Replete is another scorcher. It’s somehow even more aggressive than The Nimis Adoration and, fuck it, I’ll say it: it channels a bit of that None So Vile mania. Look, we all know Cryptopsy aren’t unhinged people. So they’ll never sound as genuinely dangerous as they did in ’96. But this song gets close.

The riffing is relentless and just anxious enough to keep you off balance, while Matt McGachy delivers a borderline psychotic vocal performance with so much range it’s like he’s possessed by two different guys with a grudge against each other. Add a rhythm section that hits like a malfunctioning machine gun and you’ve got a track that feels bigger than the sum of its already monstrous parts.

Since I’m a sucker for variety, I’ve got to shout out The Art of Emptiness, which opens with a death-doomy chant transitioning into awesomely dissonant riffing. It slowly morphs into a more conventional modern Cryptopsy labyrinth: tempo changes, jagged transitions, jazzy ideas, but the mood never breaks. It’s brooding, complex, and still kicks ass.

The other major standout is Embrace the Nihility, where legendary drummer Flo Mounier and Chris Donaldson basically hijack your nervous system. It’s an all-out sensory assault, stacked with so many sharp ideas at once it almost feels like improvisation. And over it all, Matt McGachy delivers one of his most delightfully gurgly performances to date alongside ex-vocalist Mike DiSalvo. Pure, viscous chaos.

I don’t usually dwell on lyrics when it comes to death metal, but they feel crucial to the fury of An Insatiable Violence. There’s a thematic throughline here: disconnection, alienation, and the slow-burn psychic collapse we inflict on ourselves through our relationship with technology.

Until There’s Nothing Left and Dead Eyes Replete channel the cold, hostile edge of that one-sided interaction, the way screens flatten empathy and turn people into data. Meanwhile, The Art of Emptiness and Our Great Deception explore the subtler, more corrosive effects: the soul-rotting illusion of meaning in endless information. It’s not just heavy. It’s heavy with intent.

The titual insatiable violence Cryptopsy isn’t just musical, it’s existential. There’s a thematic overlap with Anaal Nathrakh’s apocalyptic Joystream, but where Nathrakh offers a cold, hopeless fatalism, Cryptopsy channels something more actively corrosive: anger. Not the kind that fuels rebellion, but the kind that cannibalizes itself. This isn’t a call to arms, it’s a sprint toward mutual destruction, a warning about the cult of self turning us all into predators.

Therefore, An Insatiable Violence isn’t liberating. It feels more like an embrace of the inevitable. A final, furious howl before everything collapses.

I’ll say it, An Insatiable Violence is unhinged. It’s driven by a quartet of musicians pushing themselves as fast and furiously as humanly possible, teetering right at the edge of control… or at least making it feel that way. The ideas still fight for space, less chaotically than on As Gomorrah Burns, but with the same overwhelming intensity.

What sets this record apart, though, is its emotional undercurrent. Not sadness or anything weepy, but something deeper: a vicious self-audit. This isn’t just technical brutality. it’s the sound of a band probing what they’re made of, piece by bloody piece. Greek philosopher Heraclitus claimed that you can never step into the same river twice, but Cryptopsy are swimming with the same intent and energy as ever and I’m here to witness this rebirth in brutality.