“Mindwarp! Mindwarp! Mindwarp!”
There are few terms in rock music that carry more baggage than “concept album”. Every album will have its themes, if only because it will have been crafted within a specific time window. The rock genre is known for taking this to a theatrical level, too often to a fault. Even though many absolute classics fall into the category, for every concept album trope (Characters! Orchestras! Suites! Voiceovers!), there’s a chronically bad example close to hand. Furthermore, we live in an era of sapped attention spans. Every artist under a certain threshold is being nudged to keep it short, add exactly one layer of nuance, and cater to the people who buy their band merch at Primark. It’s no surprise you don’t see many albums with track lists that read like a sci-fi short story anymore.
But, as ever, what one listener can barely tolerate is another’s manna, and audiences seem to respond strongly to ambition, one way or the other. Overspace & Supertime is the concept album 2026 that is set to part audiences like they’re the Red Sea. It’s an eighty-minute onslaught of cosmic progressive death and thrash metal from the Leeds masters Cryptic Shift. It’s been six years in the works since their debut record made quiet waves and proved the band is a force to be reckoned with. Visitations from Enceladus was a tidy forty-six minutes, and even that record baffled many yet made a cult audience for the band. As they are almost doubling the runtime and making everything they did before even more ridiculous, you’re either laughing if off already or rubbing your hands together with glee.
Opener “Cryogenically Frozen” welcomes us to Cryptic Shift’s science fiction soundscape with a tense and abstract sound collage. It’s Pink Floyd’s Saucerful of Secrets meets Cynic’s Focus,as jazz chords spin among proggy passages, then come samples of machinery and cosmic stardust. These passages create the atmosphere that the band are calling ‘astrodeath’, which is absolutely fucking awesome. At two minutes in, from the fog of war a thrash metal band emerges in a fighting stance, spitting harsh vocals over crazy high-BPM metal. The song dives in and out of the ‘astrodeath’ realm, defying the idea that a band needs to be in one space or another; Overspace & Supertime always straddles the divide, especially by being liberal with guitar production. “Cryogenically Frozen” is one of the few tracks on the record that deigns to repeat itself, dropping its title in a chorus crazy enough to be worth playing twice – and when it does hit, the pre-chorus has been its own escapade lasting several minutes.
So far, so, so progressive, but we ain’t heard nothing yet. Vying to become the all-time emperors of sci-fi metal, Cryptic Shift have placed their twenty-nine-minute epic “Stratocumulus Evergaol” in prime position as the second track. Cryptic Shift scholars will drool when they find out that it is the sequel to “Moonbelt Immolator” in both run-time and theme, telling a tale that runs alongside the original. It’s a relentless piece that defies description, brimming with Cryptic Shift’s wild thrash-death approach that fires solos left, right, and centre. Every moment is gratifying and in its totality it’s dizzying. In true concept album epic style, it’s divided into moments, two of which are fairly clean switches as the band pause for just long enough to flip your LP over to side B (but not long enough to tune – you played yourselves there, lads).
Only an absolute Cryptic-scholar will come to know “Stratocumulus Evergaol” in its entirety. Each of its six sub-parts is its own journey, and you’ll be damned if you can trace out the edge of one’s end and the next starting. Of course, this means all ideas of conventional pacing are no aid to interpreting the piece. Among many incredible moments, one favourite rises to the top: at the sixteen-minute mark, some built up tension is resolved into the most hyper-happy thrash riff you’ve ever heard, right down to the gang vocals that enter on its repeat. The finale of the track (a passage named “Fossil Cargo”) is duly astounding, and it’s worth appreciating that Cryptic Shift don’t close this out with some canned reprise of opening riff; they’re light years ahead of most takes on typical prog structures here.
Without so much as a pause for breath, the slew of epics continues. Two ten minute pieces follow with “Hyperspace Topography”. It wasn’t picked out as a single, but it could be the record’s accessible cut. This is not just due to its frequent clean guitar passages, but also its delivery of straight-up thrash metal segments that are extremely satisfying. Instead, the album’s first single (also an Opeth scale epic) was chosen to be “Hexagonal Eyes (Diverity Trepaphymphasyzm)”, providing an accurate miniature of the entire record and an incredible VHS style music video.
Side D of the record is the title track, “Overspace & Supertime”. After kicking open the pod bay doors with five minutes of unrelenting Cryptic Shift-age, the title track gets decidedly soupy with the most extensive atmospheric excursions so far. Where most artists in this vein opt for synthesisers and Berlin School charm, Cryptic Shift embrace feedback and droning guitars, a smart move as it feels more true to the four-piece format. To draw a direct line to the greats of sci-fi tinged metal, a feature from Nocturnus’ Mike Browning adds theremin to the cosmic thrashscape, yet another detail they’ve paid great attention to. As expected after such a detailed album, they were never going to let up for the final stretch. The six-minute dreamscape is shattered by the band throwing it into hyperdrive for the final stretch.
Amid all of its maximalism, there is no single moment of Overspace & Supertime that “takes the piss”. Yes, it’s ridiculous, and some will call it braggadocious; you will know immediately if this album is not for you. But zoom into any two minute segment and there’s no sign of fluff – no excess repetition or minimalism, no footnotes read in Klingon, no phoned-in riffs or performances – everything is immensely detailed and rewarding. The moments of ‘absolute’ space ambience are essentially contained to the first and last tracks, designed to draw you into the warp and effective at doing so. Even if these segments are not what you’re sitting down for, that only explains five minutes of the total eighty-minute runtime. All the rest is technical, progressive thrash-meets-death metal of the highest quality. In the year of 2026 such an album is an incredible “anti-slop” move. We can only hope this ultra-codex of a release isn’t the band cleaning out all their ideas to call it a day.
9/10
Overspace & Supertime releases through Metal Blade Records on the 27th February and can be pre-ordered here.