As a genre term, “technical death metal” covers a lot of ground. It’s applied to bands ranging from Suffocation to Spawn of Possession, from Cryptopsy to Atheist, from Decapitated to Behold the Arctopus. It has been applied to the band whose new song we’re premiering in this post, but despite the broad landscape of sounds the term has come to encompass, the music of The Replicate still seems out on the fringe of the territory — if it hasn’t crossed over into a new and strange frontier altogether, at least compared to the modern drawing of the boundary lines.

The Replicate is the solo project of an Indian musician named Sandesh Nagaraj. Before moving to Los Angeles where he now lives, Nagaraj was a member of other extreme metal bands in his native land over a decades-long life in music, including Myndsnare, Extinct Reflections, and Stranglehold. On The Replicate’s debut EP A Selfish Dream, he is accompanied by drummer Ray Rojo as well as a trio of vocalists and other “cunning pals”. But Nagaraj is a damned cunning ringleader himself. Continue reading »