Emerging from cryosleep six years after their landmark full-length Visitations from Enceladus, English sci-fi phenoms Cryptic Shift have returned with their most ambitious and otherworldly album yet. Overspace & Supertime is a monolith of astral death/thrash that pays homage to the genre progenitors of the ’80s and ’90s while scouting new hyperspace lanes into the future. If you want a glimpse into where “old school”-coded extreme metal should be boldly going in the years to come, look no further.

Overspace & Supertime is not an easy album to digest in the age of diminished attention spans and sub-40 minute albums (which I often prefer myself), considering it’s a full 80 minutes of dense, technical metal spread out over only five tracks. But upon fully locking in and immersing oneself into this colossal work, you will find what may just be the most important album in cosmic metallurgy since Absolute Elsewhere… perhaps even surpassing it in some respects. The Leeds four-piece specialize in chaotic, ever-shifting extreme metal that draws heavily from some of the foundational acts in the worlds of sci-fi death and thrash metal; Timeghoul, Voivod, Nocturnus, etc. This is progressive metal that completely ignores the late ’90s/early ’00s shift towards melancholy and melodicism the genre would take post-Edge of Sanity/Opeth, instead retaining the speed and technicality of the aforementioned North American forebears. And as other innovators like Atheist and Cynic were key in introducing to the genre, Cryptic Shift frequently interrupt the cosmic metal with periods of jazz fusion (the band citing Allan Holdsworth and Mahavishnu Orchestra as two key influences).

After blasting off with “Cryogenically Frozen” — itself a well-composed journey through jazzy clean sections and blistering thrash — we reach Overspace & Supertime‘s centerpiece, the 29-minute “Stratocumulus Evergaol.” If there’s one must-listen track on the album, this is absolutely it. Exceeding the lofty heights set by Enceladus‘ 25-minute opener “Moonbelt Immolator” (astute listeners will recognize some motifs from the 2020 track), this six-movement epic takes Cryptic Shift to new levels of intensity. “III – Sagittarius-Carina Galaxic Marine Corps: Deploy to HD 10180 h” is a devastating attack absolutely fitting the thematic context of a space battle. The ears and mind are overpowered with abrupt shifts from thrashy skank beats to hyperspeed blasts, dual guitar starfighters whizz by the head with impeccably tight riffage and otherworldly squeals, and frontman Alexander Bradley’s vocals rapidly switch between left and right channels to further incite the chaos of combat. Following more clean interludes and noisy ambience, the song reaches what feels like an epic climax with a two-step beat and melodic riffing… then you glance at the runtime and realize the song is only about 16 minutes in. This track alone might be a grand finale on any other album, but its conclusion means we’re only at the halfway mark of Overspace & Supertime.

If chaos were visualized as a black hole, Overspace often lives on the event horizon; there are moments where a song feels like it’s seconds from falling apart and spaghettifying (“Hexagonal Eyes (Diverity Trepaphymphasyzm)“) but it never actually gets there. A testament to the high caliber of songwriting showcased by Cryptic Shift, and I would venture to guess an indicator of genuine jazz fusion background amongst one or more of the band members. Being the noisiest, “least metal” and having the most jarring shifts in tone, the 20-minute title track that closes the album is perhaps the most impenetrable. But even it is not without its merits, the least of which are two theremin solos from Mike Browning (Nocturnus) to give the song a further extraterrestrial flair. The band describe this track as the most progressive and they’re right; this is Overspace & Supertime at the furthest reaches of known Cryptic Shift space.

Behind the astronomic musical ideas is an equally vast concept that runs in a parallel reality of that depicted on Visitations from Enceladus, with Overspace‘s protagonist “The Recaller” experiencing some of the same events and planets. And just as this album goes bigger and weirder than its predecessor, so does the story (minor spoiler: there’s a mucosal, gelatinous fortress hidden within a gas giant). I admittedly tend to not pay as much attention to lyrics as I probably should, but I highly encourage giving the lyrics sheet your undivided attention. Not only so that you can better parse the cumulative ten movements of “Stratocumulus Evergaol” and “Overspace & Supertime,” but because solos are given individual titles. In a world of wholly digitized music consumption, don’t let such lovely names as “Premium Grade Vim-Diesel Injecting into Parched Exhaust Tubes,” “Leveraged Mammatus Globules of the Lithospheric-Nimbus Shield,” or “Shootin’ from the Hip in the Sonic Temple” escape your awareness.

Aside from the quality of the technical performances on the album, a fundamental aspect of Overspace & Supertime is the manner with which the stringed instrument players push the sonic boundaries of their respective instruments. For those with elite taste who also loved Slimelord’s 2024 debut Chytridiomycosis Relinquished (as Chris and I did) it should come as no surprise that 3/4 of Cryptic Shift also play in that death doom act. That album blew me away with its guitar theatrics that perfectly encapsulated dark, murky swampiness, and the band do very much the same here for a journey through outer space. Pick scrapes, otherworldly dive bombs, fretboard-spanning solos, basically every guitar technique that you could imagine (and more) are used to perfect the alien, astral atmosphere befitting Overspace‘s themes. Gorguts pushed the limits of what you could make death metal guitar sound like nearly 30 years ago with Obscura, and Cryptic Shift do the same here. Combine this with a production job that feels very much adjacent to the foundational period the band evokes (as opposed to overproduced modern digitization), and you have an album that feels like a wormhole from the ’90s to the present in many ways.

Like a lot of the best new metal at the current stage of the genre’s history, Cryptic Shift create music for the future by heavily building upon the works of the past. Given their status as the foremost sci-fi death metal act of the modern age it will no doubt be hard not to compare Overspace & Supertime to the works of Blood Incantation. An unfair comparison, perhaps, given that the Denver crew draw from different wells of inspiration in ’70s prog rock and space ambient versus Cryptic Shift’s tech thrash and jazz fusion. But if there’s one album that might come close to dethroning that band’s elite status in the genre in the eyes of some, Overspace might just be it. To draw a parallel with my own favorite album, Overspace & Supertime is to Absolute Elsewhere as Far Away from the Sun is to Storm of the Light’s Bane. Due to its denseness and subsurface subtleties it may not take the greater metal world by storm, but for those who venture deep into its alien landscapes they may just find a more rewarding experience. This is the death metal album to beat for 2026.

— Colin

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Overspace & Supertime will be available February 27 through Metal Blade Records. For more information on Cryptic Shift, check out their Facebook and Instagram pages.