(written by Islander)
Nearly 20 years into their career, which in the context of metal is akin to a geologic epoch, the Danish band Crocell prove through their latest album that they are at the peak of their powers rather than on a downhill slide. They have used their accumulated experience to create a harrowing adventure, equal parts furiously violent, oppressively crushing, and deeply haunting — an adventure threaded with dark melodies that are just as vital as Crocell’s ability to hammer hearts and fracture spines.
The name of the album (Crocell’s seventh full-length) is Swarm of Insects, and it will be released on May 29th through Emanzipation Productions. As the label’s texts explain, “The album title evokes images of biblical plagues, but may just as well reflect a humanity blindly swarming and feeding on whatever scraps are thrown its way.” And thus “the lyrics explore tyranny, oppression, betrayal and demagoguery.”
As for the music, Crocell’s evolved hybrid of death and black metal often does sound like audio portrayals of plague, but it drives a listener’s imagination toward other visions as well — which you can now experience for yourselves through our full streaming premiere.
As for why Swarm Of Insects sounds like this formidable band at the peak of their powers, rather than stumbling down the other side of the hill, we might point to the fact that it’s the first album in Crocell’s career that they recorded entirely themselves, or that it is the first one written with guitarist Mads Bertram following the departure of Rasmus “Hexen” Henriksen (RIP) in 2023.
But of course the accumulated songwriting and performance experience of the entire lineup, and the final mix and mastering by Lasse at Ballade Studios (known for work with Afsky, Strychnos, Konvent, and Slægt), have a great deal to do with the results as well.
It’s sometimes fun to speculate about why a band picks one particular song rather than others as their album opener. In the case of this new record, which begins with “Sarcophagus“, one might guess that Crocell decided to both chill listeners to the bone and overwhelm them, as a spine-tingling way of beginning to reveal the nuances of the album as a whole.
The song’s lonely opening guitar arpeggio both rings and is ragged, and it slowly squirms like a miserable creature, but the band soon join that with immense throbbing chords, skull-splitting beats, gargantuan growls, and ghostly shimmering tones in the upper elevations.
The song towers in its torment, but also begins to attack, driven by more vigorous rhythms, more feverishly vibrating riffage, more hard-slugging grooves, and truly explosive howls. Emotionally, it’s pitch-black — a seeming amalgam of pain and fury, of desperation and hopelessness. It penetrates, it’s exhilarating, it’s memorable. And it’s just the beginning.
Like the curtain continuing to draw back on a changing pageant, the following song “Sculptor Of Nations” begins with its own slowly ringing guitar arpeggio (against a backdrop of abrasive noise) and then violently surges, with drums blasting, layered guitars viciously boiling and venomously writhing, and the beastly vocals going mad.
It’s varied in its pacing, like every track here, and it also cements the impression created by the opening song that the music has been produced in a way that finds a vital intersection of piercing clarity and bruising power, and mixed in a way that allows every ingredient to stand out. It also reveals a startling change in the vocals, which begin to wretchedly cry out with excruciating passion and to wail — just before the song explodes in a maelstrom of frightening intensity.
Crocell’s hybrids of soul-searing melody, avalanche-strength heaviness, and heart-hammering aggression continue to unfold across the following six songs. The importance of the melodies should be emphasized, because even in the music’s most turbocharged and terrorizing phases the melodies ring out in ways that sink themselves into a listener.
To be sure, the melodies’ emotional qualities are daunting and dire, tormented and grief-stricken — this definitely is not joyful music — but it hits us where we live now. The music becomes especially haunting when, in songs like “Traitors’ Blood” and “Labyrinthian Tunnels” (among others), the band briefly ease back on their furiously charging and battering-ram momentums.
We should also call out “Shredded Banners” because it includes a rare but striking guitar solo, and it also provides a particularly vivid display of the always-nimble bass-work and the shattering nature of the vocal variations.
The album closer “Volcano” is also worth a specific mention because it’s one of the album’s most hard-rocking and neck-wrecking tracks, but also an atmospherically bleak one; it’s the kind of ultra-dramatic song that seems tailor-made for ending a live set.
And with that, we’ll step aside and leave you to the full stream of what may prove to be the best album of Crocell’s formidable career, and may also prove to be one of this year’s best albums too.
CROCELL Lineup:
Andreas Posselt – drums
Tommy Christensen – guitars
Asbjörn Steffensen – vocals
Mads B. H. Gath – guitars
Uffe Laustsen–Jensen – bass
Emanzipation Productions will release Swarm of Insects on vinyl LP (orange/black marble, limited to 300 copies, digipack CD, and Digital formats. They recommend it for fans of Marduk, Immortal, Necrophobic, and Belphegor.
The unsettling cover art is the work of NNart.
ORDER:
https://targetshop.dk/crocell/
https://crocelldk.bandcamp.com/album/swarm-of-insects
FOLLOW CROCELL:
https://www.facebook.com/crocelldk
https://www.instagram.com/crocelldk/