Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
Have you ever heard evil? Not the theatrical kind with a hook you can latch onto — the real, suffocating kind that comes from sitting in complete darkness long enough that it starts to feel normal. That is the closest I can get to describing what “Cranial Devastation” sounds like from start to finish.
Four years after their debut “Volatile Forms”, Dead Void return with their second album, due June 5 via Dark Descent Records and Me Saco Un Ojo. If the title sounds like a warning, that’s because it is.
Dead Void invoke a form of doom-laden death metal that shuns clarity in favour of chaos. The vocals shift unpredictably: sometimes as deep as they can physically go, other times breaking into a sudden crescendo that pulls the floor out from under you. The end result is a as disorienting as it can get. On top of that, the decision to pair the album with the artwork of French symbolist Odilon Redon says a lot. It all mirros the surreal and the unease.
Across five tracks, “Regurgitation of Ancient Manifest” is an early standout. The song builds through shifting layers of weight before landing on a bass line at the end that is, honestly, almost disturbing. It lingers long after the track ends, and it feels like an anticipation of everything still to come. “Isolation’s Hold” and “Phantosmial Stench of Decay” left me genuinely baffled — and I mean that entirely as a compliment. Both songs are so packed with experimentation and colour that labelling either feels beside the point. After multiple listens, I still couldn’t fully predict where they were going with the sound. But I liked it.
That said, I found myself going back and forth with this record. You might listen through once and think: this is as raw as it gets. And that’s fair. But I personally felt there were moments where the death metal side sits in real contrast with something more considered and deliberate, still dark and doom-rooted but reaching a bit further out. Each track is lengthy by design — the runtime is a reflection of the doom side of what this band has to offer — and the title track, “Cranial Devastation”, sprawling over nine minutes, sits as the heaviest and darkest point on the record for me.
All in all, “Cranial Devastation” is not an easy listen. It was never going to be. It’s a record that asks you to stay in the discomfort long enough to understand what Dead Void are building. And then, just as you think you’ve found your footing, they close with “Jeg Kan Ikke Flygte Fra Mig Selv” — Danish for “I Cannot Escape From Myself” — and suddenly the whole thing feels even more personal than you expected. Once you’re in, you realise there’s nothing quite like it.
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