I never heard of Cryptorium before, but the promo spiel for sophomore album Through the Bowels of Ceaseless Dissonance (Bowels for short from here on) was intriguing enough to get me on board. Promising rough-n-ready Swedeath in the vein of Entombed and Dismember isn’t a new sales pitch, but when they also go out of their way to emphasize how raw, gritty, grimy, and unclean the album is, you have Steel’s full attention. And to their credit, Cryptorium are as good as their word, and Bowels lives up to its pretentious name. This is in-your-face, up-your-ass death metal with zero effort to be melodic. It’s messy, muddy, chaotic noise fit only for a rabid man-beast, and it’s served with a heaping helping of cesspool-level scuzz and scum. Is this what you need to wash down 40-plus minutes of excessive HM-2 pedal abuse? If so, you came to the right crypt emporium, chumbo.
After a short, inappropriately gentle intro, you’d dumped in the industrial meat molester with the raging title track, and it will leave marks and lasting trauma. It sounds like Autopsy throwing up raw meat and Drano all over an Entombed promo only to have a young Carcass start doing unlicensed surgery on the revolting mess. If that makes you think you need this in your life, you’re a mighty sick little pupster. Jagged, razor-sharp riffs slice and slash in all directions, and the sheer amount of murky nastiness is unsettling. It’s still Swedeath, but right on the cusp of transmogrifying into something way nastier. The shitstorm this stirs up helps prepare you for the follow-up track “Malodor,” where things fly off in another unhealthy direction. This is the album highlight for yours truly, finding a near-perfect sweet spot between Swedeath, grind, slam, and OSDM that smashes everything in its path, then comes back around to grudge-hump the remains. There’s more than a little early Carcass in here, especially in the repellant and sickening vocals, which are like a garbage disposal arguing politics with a slimy abomination from some godforsaken Hell pit. If the abrasive riffs and ginormous grooves here don’t get you geeked up, you need a steady diet of military-grade Cryptworms. The grotesqueries endure on killer cuts like “Rivers of Celestial Blood,” and the especially vile “Revolting Obsession.”
By the halfway point, you will have given up any hope of feeling clean again, because this shit gets deep quick. The vocals on “Concrete Interment” sound like outtakes from all the 28 Days movies (except the Sandra Bullock one), and it’s like the band found a new setting on their HM-2 pedals designed to destabilize steel bunkers. As fun as much of Bowels is, there are some issues that hold it back. Several tracks run too long, especially closer, “Consumed by the Eternal Rot.” When things are this nasty and vicious, brevity is the soul of wit, and too much of a brutal thing becomes…too much. There is also a degree of uniformity between tracks that can make it difficult to separate individual cuts from the gory paste caused by relentless sonic hammering. At 43 minutes, Bowels pushes the envelope of how much the listener can absorb and process. This is the kind of berserk death platter that would be better off in that 34-36 minute time frame. Another issue is how things devolve into a chaotic mush when too much is going on. At several points on the album, things almost become unlistenable. I love the frantic energy, but it goes a bit too far into blood mania.
The album features vocals from recently deceased co-founding bassist Karl Arvidsson on several tracks. It appears that the band’s future may be uncertain in the wake of his passing, but his performance here is worthy of enshrinement in the death books. He and Fabian Larsen put on quite the vulgar display of death power, showcasing a vocal range from raw meat in a blender all the way to a hideous manster raging at the blood moon. The vocals make the album the pummeling force it is, and it’s a huge shame that Arvidsson is no longer with us. The riffing from Larsen and Ludvig Carman is savage, abusive, and uncivilized. They take the common HM-2 buzz to a new level of ear-grating torture, and I’m here for it. This is a band that believes in everything louder than everything else, and this thing feels like an endurance test at times, but a fun one.
Cryptorium bring new life and energy to the tried-and-true Swedeath sound even as they try to blow it all up in a flurry of rage and hostility. Bowels isn’t perfect, and it has some glitches, but it will impress you with its sheer force and barbarism. I hope Cryptorium can survive the loss of Karl Arvidsson and go on to develop their uber-destructive sound. If you love your death metal unhinged and merciless, this will firm up your ham candle nicely. But are you tough enough to endure the Bowels?
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Transcending Obscurity
Websites: cryptorium-label.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/profile.php?id | instagram.com/cryptorium_swe
Releases Worldwide: October 30th, 2026
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