REVIEW: Cryptopsy - An Insatiable Violence

Timeline is set and finale projected

33:46 // June 20th, 2025 // Season of Mist

Each morning in the land of exhausted lungs and grinding machines, the faithful return to their altars: blue-lit screens, sterile interfaces, and the glow of curated suffering. Pain is no longer endured; instead, it’s scheduled, self-inflicted, and parades with algorithmic hunger. In the loop of content and cortisol, new kinds of violence emerge, bunched up, distorted, and echoing with a violence too symmetrical to be a mere accident. Canadian legends Cryptopsy volunteer to take the weight of expressing such dystopian gospels on their shoulders. While looking at the visceral grime of their early years through the rear mirror, the band has now established its own refreshed brand of technical death metal eye-gouging aggression, as it was laid out two years ago with As Gomorrah Burns and progresses today on An Insatiable Violence.

The current decade saw the band attempting to remove the stains off its name after an almost irremediable time period in the late 2000s - early 2010s. From the inhuman, pulverizing first two albums - Blasphemy Made Flesh in 1994 and None So Vile in 1996, both gargantuan releases still recognized as among the genre’s highest summits ever, a series of unfortunate events and certain lineup mixing resulted in semi-acceptable follow-up releases that led to the detour of all detours, The Unspoken King, in 2008. Satiating on highly questionable deathcore flirtations, the album was derided, dismissed, and difficult to defend, a sort of moment that really felt like a full stop for a band that once sounded infinite. 

2012’s self-titled album was a noble attempt at damage control, but it never quite kept me on my toes. It was eventually over a decade later and with As Gomorrah Burns that Cryptopsy truly reignited and finally tapped back into the spark they’d been chasing since their infamous fall from grace. The same stardust of creativity is sprinkled all over An Insatiable Violence, a trim 34-minute affair that moves at warp speed, balancing on a razor’s edge while still bludgeoning with both fists. The album centers on surgically executed hyper-technical brutality, invoking a maelstrom of fishhook riffs, galloping rhythm sections, and punchy grooves with full velocity and venom, anchored by a dense but crystal clear production that leaves no space for murk - every single note here is exposed under the sun.

As usual, Cryptopsy lunge directly at your throat with the unhinged opener “The Nimis Adoration”, which is the first of several categorically crushing tracks with little to no fat and binding technical prowess. Flo Mournier remains a biomechanical marvel behind the kit, with a dominating drumming performance and blast beats that seem to arrive before the downbeat. At the same time, I could say that singer Matt McGachy has now won me over and earned his spot with blood, sweat, and remarkable vocals, that undulate between higher-pitched shrieks and guttural pronouncements in a pristine and varied way, pushing his limits and versatility as much as possible. The album’s first half is almost flawless, with the instrumentation in a frenzy and procedurally lacerating violent shapes in unrelenting clarity. Pick and choose anything among “Dead Eyes Replete”, “Until There’s Nothing Left” or “Fools Last Acclaim” and you’ll have a hell of a blast.

Similarly to As Gomorrah Burns for me personally, though, the second half of the album shows hairline fractures in focus, and a slight disorientation compared to the controlled demolition of its first half. Parts within tracks like “Our Great Deception” and the closer “Malicious Needs” are slightly caught in repetition (with the former at least including a wonderful guitar solo later on) and at a couple of moments drift dangerously close to filler. Moreover, An Insatiable Violence’s concept of doomscrolling self-destruction and digital masochism, expressed in the allegorical story of an individual building and fine-tuning a machine to torture himself, only skims the surface in terms of narrative weight. To me, this made the record something like a finely polished marble statue, thrilling in precision yet slightly aloof in its emotional reach.

Even including these few weaker instances, the overall delivery on this new work is remarkable. When the dust settles and the bones are counted, Cryptopsy stand tall with a formidable and well-engineered album that prospers in ferocity as it leaves the lights flickering and never looks back. It sounds like their darkest days are behind them, and there’s still something vital burning at the core of this prolific, pioneering band. There’s no reinvention or rebirth with An Insatiable Violence, yet it may as well be another step on a trajectory way better than what anyone would have imagined 15 years ago.

8/10