Recently we featured up-and-coming swamp gas-huffing death doomers Slimelord on our Demo:listen column. At several points during that interview, Xander, the band’s guitarist, mentioned that several of the men in Slimelord, including himself, played in another band, Cryptic Shift. Xander used words like “demanding” and “lengthy” in association with Cryptic Shift and its forthcoming full length.

The Leeds-based quartet who once stylized their name as Crÿptic Shift began as early as 2012, but, although their thrash was always heavy and morbid, it would take the group several years to become the bringers of “astrodeath” that hover ominously overhead today. Now, at the cusp of their underground era, with the marvel that is Visitations from Enceladus blowing our mind, the timeline makes perfect sense. We should’ve seen this coming.

From their forthcoming debut album, Visitations from Enceladus, out May 4 on Blood Harvest, this is Cryptic Shift’s “(Petrified in the) Hypogean Gaol.” Read an exhaustive explanation about the song, the album and the future from Cryptic Shift guitarist/vocalist Xander below the premiere.

“(Petrified in the) Hypogean Gaol”

Visitations From Enceladus by CRYPTIC SHIFT

Across the gulf of space, over the peaks of a gargantuan nebula, at a barrier of tears that seep through to incomprehensible realms, a time wound opened. A severed umbilical free floats where one form crossed into a further plane. Beyond the flow of time, they awaken…

It continues right away from our 2017 single ‘Cosmic Dreams.’ Our character, having being separated from his physical self by falling too deep into ancient and forbidden dimensions via astral projection; he witnesses the very end of space-time itself: Two celestial entities clashing at a universal scale cause the rupturing of existence and our character is caught between overlapping time-wounds and his form is split into two…

Visitations from Enceladus is a full on interdimensional sci-fi quest, no underlying life lesson or moral; pure imagination and space fiction worship ONLY. It opens with the mind-melting 26 minute track ‘Moonbelt Immolator’and continues across 3 more intricate compositions involving mysterious alien races, hyperspace travel, interdimensional sorcery, Star Wars[-]style space battles above gas giants, journeys to the astral plane of Rasskhazu to retrieve advanced mythical artifacts, frantic races for survival against weird mutations on an unstable crack moon housing an ancient moonbase… To experience the full adventure you’ll have to order the record! In the second track ‘(Petrified In The) Hypogean Gaol,’ the character has escaped an ancient moonbase via escape pod just as it’s nuclear core overacts and the whole complex is obliterated. From the viewglass, Earth looks much different to what he remembers; hideous black streaks scar the surface and odd spires tower into the thermosphere on the far side. On the planet below, he encounters tribes who have predicted the arrival of this strange visitor and lead him to confront a humongous celestial entity that has burrowed itself into the planet’s core…

This whole track was composed in the D Lydian mode intentionally to defer the use of the low open Eb string, this challenged me to write interesting riffs and chords without always relying on the open string; and the lydian sound is one that has always intrigued me with its major sound coupled with a sharp 4, it creates a totally mesmerizing flavour. ‘Hypogean Gaol’ traverses multiple time signatures while blasting extra terrestrial beasts with plasma fire and utilizes unorthodox chord inversions as the track ascends in a blasting climax with tasteful solos and light-speed riffing.