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The Unspoken King
The band called it experimentation. The fans called it garbage.
- URL: The Unspoken King
- Location: Internet
- Date: 3/2008
- Facebook: Unknown
- Twitter: Unknown
- Known For: Album leaks
Summary
Coming into 2008, Cryptopsy was one of the most respected death metal bands in the world, let alone Canada. With a back catalogue boasting five albums, some of which are generally regarded by the heavy metal community to be amongst the finest death metal albums ever to have been released, many people were eager to get their hands on the new album coming out that year. Sure, Lord Worm had left the band again, citing health reasons, but he'd left before and the albums released during his last period of absence were decent at least. Surely the band would be able to piece together something that, if not brilliant, would at least be memorable. And... well... they did manage to accomplish that.
Origins
In early March a couple of songs from their upcoming album, the rather tepidly titled The Unspoken King, leaked onto the internet and shocked their fanbase and the metal community as a whole into an awkward silence, not unlike the one you'd expect when a trainable drops his pants in public. Rather than being in the vein of their previous output which was well known for its intensity and aggression, the band had adopted a more "commercially viable" and trendy sound which resembled deathcore quite closely, complete with awful out of tune singing and bree bree growls. For you folks who aren't in the know, deathcore essentially takes superficial qualities of death metal and fuses them with the more fashionable aspects of modern hardcore, creating a figurative harlequin fetus which nobody really likes. But anyway, these two tracks leaked and despite the fact that they were pre-production and album quality wasn't to be expected, the undeniable, objective truth of the matter was that the songs were irredeemable crap. A veritable crapstorm soon took over every single metal forum, chatroom and any other avenue of online discourse, with fans and observers alike flummoxed by the band's recent change in direction. Even before the album itself came out fans were both ridiculing and disowning Cryptopsy in droves, labelling them "sellouts" and referring to the band as "Craptopsy" and "CryptXopsY". This even provoked a number of lovely responses from the band's drummer and brains of the operation, Flo Mounier, both on the SMNnews forums and via Blabbermouth.
| —Flo Mounier, SMNnews |
| —Flo Mounier, Blabbermouth |
While this was unfolding, the unthinkable happened and the entire album was leaked onto the internet on the 17th of April. Obviously this only served to perpetuate the delicious drama, which was now into its second month. Encyclopedia Metallum had about 10 reviews posted within a couple of days (those being the ones that were accepted. Only God knows how many were rejected) and was the catalyst for a policy change on that site to prevent people from posting reviews of albums before their official release date. It still has one of the lowest review averages on the entire website, too.
So June rolls around and the album is released. And people were still getting more and more pissed off about the whole thing on both sides. It even came to a point where Cryptopsy uploaded a track to their MySpace titled It's Dinner Time, mocking their fans and accusing them of being basement dwelling nerds living with their parents, which is always a good tactic when you've just released an album with an almost entirely new lineup and a new sound (regardless of how accurate said accusation may be). And the album was a flop. Big surprise. You could find it in bargain bins just a couple of months afterwards because nobody wanted to buy it. And they ended 2008 a laughing stock.
Current status
Languishing in the bargain bin, to put it simply.
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