Cryptic Shift Bend the Cosmos on 'Overspace & Supertime'
The title alone — Overspace & Supertime — tells you Cryptic Shift are not writing songs about the parking lot. This is technical death and thrash metal with avant-garde and jazz fusion elements, aimed unapologetically at the cosmos, and it has landed as one of the year’s highest-rated metal records (an 87, if you’re counting). The best part? All that technicality serves the voyage. Nothing here is complexity for its own sake; it’s complexity as propulsion.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: The bass is mixed like a lead instrument — audible, articulate, and agile enough to chase the riffs through every hairpin, which is exactly what fusion-inflected tech metal demands.
The Spatial Dynamics: The mix opens up beautifully in the avant-garde passages, letting textures drift into wide, weightless space before the death-thrash engine reignites and pulls everything back to center at full burn.
Standout Performance
The whole band plays like a single navigation system, but the rhythm section’s fluency deserves special mention — sliding between thrash gallop and jazz-fusion looseness without a single audible seam.
Why It’s Certified
Records like this are why we love the extreme end of the pool. Cryptic Shift take death metal precision, thrash velocity, and fusion vocabulary and weld them into a spacecraft. Heavy metal work ethic, rainbow presentation — or in this case, nebula presentation. If you’re a player, prepare to feel inspired and mildly called out. One of the year’s essential metal listens. Certified.