Extremity is in the eye of the beholder. Something that's barely a blip for you may be the pinnacle of vulgarity, violence and sexuality for someone else.
This is not true for Cryptopsy. Regardless of your musical or metal proclivities, Cryptopsy is extreme in both content and delivery. They play blistering, technical death metal, combined with lyrics dealing in everything from insanity and serial murder to blasphemy and self-designed torture machines. While this may seem like your average death metal approach, there is a proficiency and legitimacy to Cryptopsy's music that makes them that much more intense, that much more aggressive, and that much more listenable — a viewpoint held by the band members themselves.
"It's hard to write Cryptopsy because it has to be extreme!" says Matt McGachy, the band's longest-tenured lead vocalist. "It has to be memorable, it has to be catchy, it has to have groove, it has to be heavy. There's a lot of boxes that need to be checked to fall underneath the Cryptopsy umbrella." It's not all about brutality or proficiency, which sets the band apart from some of the more soulless, mechanical tech-death out there.
Cryptopsy — which for over a decade has been made up of McGachy, Flo Mounier (drums and backing vocals), Christian Donaldson (guitars), Olivier "Ollie" Pinard (bass) — are no strangers to harrowing tours and uber-complicated riffs. In fact, much of the band's newly released ninth studio album, An Insatiable Violence, was written on tour in less-than-ideal circumstances.
"It was really hard," says McGachy. "We tried writing in the moving bandwagon and it wasn't fun. We were supposed to stay two nights in St. Paul [MN], and someone in the band — I won't mention who — misplaced their passport at a gas station and we had to make the longest drive of the tour to go back to the gas station that night to pick it up. And that night, we wrote the beginning of either song six ["Our Great Deception"] or song seven ["Embrace the Nihilty"]. It was being constructed at that moment. And Chris was bouncing around — bandwagons are bouncy! — and people were drinking, and we fought. It was not a fun night. [On our recent tour] with Carnifax, we had many days off, so we rented hotel rooms, dragged the gear in, and wrote. But I do nothing. I just sit there and yell 'riffs!' That's all I do is just sit there and force them to write. [both laugh] I do nothing. I'm on my phone and I'm like 'riffs!'"
Mounier concurs: "Chris and I had a few skeletons of songs put together before actually working on the tours. But we did a lot in hotel rooms on days off and in a moving bus at times. It was quite the process. In returning back home before entering the studio, Chris and I met up a few times to finalize ideas."
Although it couldn't have been easy to put all that complex music together, Mounier still looks back fondly on the process, adding, "Since we were all together to contribute, it was fun."
After an 11-year break between albums (during which time they put out two EPs, The Book of Suffering: Tome 1 and Tome 2), the band returned in 2023 with As Gomorrah Burns, their first full-length release since their 2012 self-titled return-to-form. Since then, the band have put themselves on a brutal work cycle, during which time they've vowed to release a new album every two years. Unsurprisingly, the reason may not be entirely related to artistry or inspiration.
"Flo is old," McGachy says, as we both laugh. "I see him as an Olympic athlete. I see him as a professional hockey player. I was watching the [Canadiens] last night. We lost. And Ovechkin can still do it, but for how many more years? Same question with Flo." We both laugh. I add that I feel like Flo's going to keep going until he can't go no more.
He adds, "He's gonna want to, but I'm gonna have to tell him, No, because [his] feet just suck." Again, we both laugh. He is kidding, of course, adding, "Flo's amazing right now, he's at the best he's been in years. I have hope that [Cryptopsy is] going to continue for at least 10 to 15 more years, but I'm foreseeing an ending. And I want to release the most amount of music before that, because this lineup is the longest-standing lineup of Cryptopsy ever. We have a lot more to give, and it's exciting what we're doing, Chris and Ollie and Flo are just gelling so well together."
Mournier agrees, adding, "I believe that the band is at its strongest right now and it's because we're giving ourselves more goals. We're basically all on the same page and very much enjoy playing Cryptopsy stuff. It hasn't always been like that in the past. We are now here to destroy!"
An Insatiable Violence was recorded, engineered, produced, mixed and mastered at Donaldson's studio by the man himself. "Chris is a genius," McGachy says. "He's so much fun to be with and he's the ultimate hater, so anyone that hates anything [we do], he's already thought about it."
He continues, "I went and hung out at Chris's house for a week, which is what I did for the last record as well, which is something completely different than what we've done in the past. [In the past,] I would go after work and track two to three songs and then go back to work the next day and then come back a week later. It was fragmented. Whereas now, we were immersed in this record. Chris did [Flo's] drums into him doing guitars into me coming over, and then Ollie coming over. He lived this record for a month and a half, and then he mixed it for another month."
An Insatiable Violence feels like a logical continuation from the band's previous effort, As Gomorrah Burns, although even more focused, pointed and calculating. It rips while grooving, pairing the band's trademark technicality with rhythms that will get the pit moving. When I mention this to McGachy and Mounier, they both immediately agree.
"We wanted to write a groovy, memorable record," McGachy says. "That was our goal. We've toured so much recently, 140 shows over the past year, and we go up there and we play and we see [the audience's response]. And when we're writing stuff, [we think] 'Oh, we gotta write the most brutal, complicated shit ever.' And yet, what works is the simple shit. That's when the kids go, 'Oh, I understand: I will walk in a circle because Matt told me to.'" He laughs and adds, "So we had an aspiration to write a really groovy record. That being said, Chris and Flo went into the studio and every day I would get messages that said, 'This is the most fucked up shit we've ever written. It's so intense.' And then they were like, 'We failed. We didn't write a groovy record at all — it's just balls-out Cryptopsy. And then I went and laid down my vocals, and then the groove came back. It's just a magical thing that happened. It's something different that I dragged into this record: a very open, wide, high, dirty-sounding scream. And it just happened."
He stops for a moment and thinks about it: "Lots of happy accidents. Cryptopsy, we like happy accidents."
When I ask where the record fits in with the rest of the band's eclectic, punishing discography, Mounier describes it simply: "Every Cryptopsy album was written with the current feeling at the time. The current influences, the current emotional state. This one was definitely focused; it was more of a purposeful effort."
Interestingly, McGachy's main lyrical inspiration came from a dream he had about a person who designs and builds a machine for personal torture, which they tinker with every night to make it more efficient, more intense, more destructive.
"I did have a crazy dream, the most lucid dream I've had in years, of a person working on a machine. And then they strap themselves in and the machine tortures them. And they love it. And then they wake up the next night and they work on it again to make it more efficient, to make it torture them even better. And then the name came to me. The original name was An Insatiable Lust for Violence. And I wrote it down in my phone, and I have it still. I'm always shy to reveal my ideas to Cryptopsy and the rest of the guys. But I did, and they liked it, they ate it up, which is good."
Yet, as McGachy thought more about the device, the idea went deeper, and he arrived at a much realer — and more insidious — concept: "And then it's just like, 'The Machine,' the internet, social media. I'm so addicted to social media, it's a real problem that I have, amongst other things." We both laugh, because duh.
He explains, "And I feel like shit on days when I just doomscroll. You feel horrible! And now I run the band's socials. And when we're announcing something, there's captions you have to write. So I work all day on this caption, I send it to the guys, we refine it, we make it better. And then I post it and then spend all night torturing myself, reading these comments — mostly positive recently, which is nice, but also negative [ones]. And of course, you only think about those. And then I wake up the next day and I do the same thing. An insatiable violence."
I tell him that the concept also reminds me of the Nine Inch Nails music video for "Happiness in Slavery," which he mentions that someone has sent him. I add that Cryptopsy's take feels less nihilistic — that, in their world, this constant repetition of pain and pleasure is cathartic. It never ends, and that's part of its appeal.
"We all need to re-examine our relationship with social media. It has been constructed to destroy us. You can use it for the good, but we have to be careful of how it makes us feel. But then I was like, 'Oh my God, did I rip off Kafka?' So I went back and reread [Kafka's short story] 'The Penal Colony,' which I'd read years ago, and there's nothing about social media, obviously, but there's a machine that tortures people and someone really likes it. I don't know if that inspired me or was in my brain for all this time — but yeah, go read 'The Penal Colony.'"
Such a dark concept needed visuals to go along with it, to complement the destruction. Since no great death metal album is complete without great cover art, for Violence, the band went in a very personal direction: in January 2024, Martin Lacroix, a former vocalist for Cryptopsy and forever-friend to the band passed away, and the band approached his family to commission a piece for the album that was as disturbing and as haunting as the music itself.
"It was the easiest choice ever," says McGachy. "Ollie came up with the idea to contact Martin's family to see if he had some pieces that were not commissioned as of yet. Ollie went and hung out with Martin's cousin Danny, and we saw all the pieces and all of us were like, 'That one!' It was so easy. It was amazing. Martin was the nicest person ever, just a phenomenal artist, a nice human, fun to party with, and an awesome vocalist. He was just wonderful, and the aesthetic of his [cover] painting is cold. It's bleak. It's ominous. It's perfect, just perfect. And there's another piece inside the booklet that we've also commissioned from the family, and they were just so excited that we're still honouring him after all this time, which made me very happy. I guess there's these weird decisions that you make that become somewhat iconic. I feel like it's gonna be an iconic artwork, the way None So Vile [the band's undisputed classic from 1996] just hits."
The band, who have always been on the fringes thanks to the nature of their music, actually won the 2024 JUNO for Metal/Hard Music Album of the Year, a well-deserved award and moment of recognition for such a relentless and brutal band. This trend — of seeing heavy, complex and challenging music pop up in more unexpected and mainstream places — is wholeheartedly welcomed by the band.
"Seeing Gojira at the Olympics was brutal-ful, just wonderful," says McGachy. "It's something that needs to happen. I went to go see Voivod recently. They did a collab with the OSM [Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal] and it was phenomenal. Shout out to Stephan, the bassoon player. Just a wonderful, wonderful human."
He adds, "But yes, I think that we're very extreme. Cryptopsy is balls-to-the-wall scary metal, so I never imagined us going somewhere. [There's] that Cannibal Corpse moment in Ace Ventura, and Gojira doing the Olympics — [these are] key moments in metal. But I feel like there's been a big gap between those two. So hopefully there's more of that that's happening. It was nice to win the JUNO, but the biggest change in my life is that my aunt and uncle finally came to see us. They didn't even come to the show, they just came to hang out with me, because I'm a real musician now."
I tell McGachy that, while listening to the album, my wife came home and asked if this was the band I was interviewing. When I answered in the affirmative, she left the room. He laughs and nods, pleased with this news.
"Good, good. It has to be disturbing. It's gonna keep happening. But recently, with Gojira doing what they did, people at work were like, 'Do you ever think Cryptopsy would play the Olympics if it happened in Montreal?' And I was like, no, it'll be Voivod. It's always Voivod."
We both laugh. Cryptopsy at the Olympics? How brutal would that be?! We should all be so lucky.