Album Review: Cryptic Shift - Overspace & Supertime (Metal Blade Records, 2026)

Written: 25th February 2026

Following debut EP, Beyond The Celestial Realms in 2016, Cryptic Shift released their debut full-length album Visitations from Enceladus in 2020 to critical and public acclaim. Blending technical death metal with thrash and progressive leanings, the band already starting pushing at the edges of what extreme metal could be. Across four tracks and forty-six minutes – including the twenty-six minute Moonbelt Immolator - Cryptic Shift unleashed their own brand of cosmic horror with a narrative that followed a lone traveller though interstellar battles, alien encounters and mind-bending dimensional landscapes. Now, six years later, they return with Overspace & Supertime which drummer Ryan Sheperson describes as, “playing as an alternative reality to the happenings of Visitations from Enceladus, taking our character into new dimensions filled with both greater adventures and more bizarre encounters. Whilst the concept themes of our sci-fi tale has grown, so have our efforts in synthesising it with the ultimate Astrodeath soundscape.”

What is immediately apparent is just how far Cryptic Shift have been prepared to stretch the concept and their music. Overspace & Supertime is an eighty minute album with just five tracks: three around the ten minute mark, one of twenty minutes and another approaching thirty. Before hearing a note, these figures suggest an epic challenge of listening lies ahead. And yet, while the scale of this undertaking is undeniably monumental, the conviction and ingenuity with which Cryptic Shift previously constructed Visitations from Enceladus suggest that if any band were capable of meeting such an audacious challenge head on it might well be them.

Opening track, the ten minute Cryogenically Frozen begins with hints of jazz around the start of the narrative revealed in swirling spoken words. Throughout the album, these words intertwine with the belligerent attack of Xander Bradley’s growling and guttural vocals. From the first moments of Overspace & Supertime, there is so much going on that the only thing a listener can do is hold tight and hope they make it to the end with mind and soul intact. However, Cryptic Shift are not about to make the journey an easy one. Following the relatively calm opening, Cryogenically Frozen bursts into life with riffs complex and technical enough to tax the ears of even the most accomplished of extreme metal fans. Restless, insistent bass from John Riley and flurries of scorching thrashy death metal guitar collide with Ryan Sheperson’s fiendishly intricate drumming in ways that seem to bend time and construct. Nevertheless, there are moments of melody within the song, it just takes multiple listens to even have a chance of comprehending everything that the track (and indeed the album) has to offer.

Cryogenically Frozen, in the band’s words is, “as if metal had an alternate timeline progressing from the lineage of masters like Cynic, Pestilence and Allan Holdsworth.” The vivid, detailed lyrics follow a character called The Recaller awakening from suspended stasis into a violent cybernetic conflict. They set the narrative foundation: fractured identity, hostile encounters and the first hints of cosmic dimensional anomalies. Vacant blaster embraces my palms / Cloistered duellists exchanging ricochet bolts / My human node, guided by paladin / Unburdened path to hithe divulged.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ddLanl3ozs

Even with Cryogenically Frozen being as complex and diverse as it is, it is almost as if Cryptic Shift were easing us in because what follows – the almost thirty minute, six part Stratocumulus Evergaol – is one of the most mind bending extreme metal compositions I have ever heard. It is a vast and occasionally disorientating voyage that almost pushes the genre to breaking point. Narratively, it finds The Recaller navigating alien worlds, skirmishes, prophetic visions and metaphysical encounters. Taken through a gelatinous electro-organ / Biological nimbus-symbiote navigation systems / Kilometres long mucilaginous transmography.

On a track that could almost serve as an album and certainly an EP in its own right, Cryptic Shift create an epically cinematic piece that is both bewildering and intoxicating in its panoramic complexity. Without doubt, credit is due for the sheer will required to create a track of this nature, whatever your views on the music. The space battle of Part III - Sagittarius-Carina Galaxic Marine Corps: Deploy To HD 10180 h – is a blazing torrent of blast beats, incendiary guitars and Xander Bradley’s unrelenting commitment to telling the story as graphically and expressively as possible. Such is the runtime of Stratocumulus Evergaol that its individual sections can last longer than the entirety of many songs you are likely to hear. Within the second half alone, there are intensely melodic movements, moments of relative calm and there are several times when you feel the track is ending only for another theme to materialise. The precision within the instrumentation is quite incredible and fans may notice some riffs which mirror those from the previous album. Cryptic Shift state – on a track that in part pays homage to Mahavishnu Orchestra -  “This is the spiritual successor to Moonbelt Immolator and it runs parallel timeline-wise; with both songs’ characters visiting the same planets and happenings across their runtimes. This means that thematically similar motifs and entire riffs from ‘Visitations…’ are permitted to appear.”

Third track Hyperspace Topography explores themes of altered perception, bodily transformation and an imagining of which geographical features might make up the next dimension. Glissade over an abstract moorland / Where a scabland tract penetrates the longitudes of quasicrystalline calderas / Excreted from the fossil / Viscous scrambling through wades of carbon ooze / Vehicle lodged at the crest of an outstretched geological arm of anti-matter. Not for the faint-hearted! Featuring a staggering array of styles from shoegaze to alternative rock to fiery extreme metal, Hyperspace Topography is crammed with a wealth of interesting guitar work from Bradley and Joss Farrington. From black metal embellishments to some truly beautiful clean breaks, Cryptic Shift consistently twist and play with dynamics and tempo, changing from multi-faceted passages to less convoluted segments.

Initially, Hexagonal Eyes (Diverity Trepaphyphasyzm) is a dazzling amalgamation of effects before a crunching riff descends and Cryptic Shift approach hyper speed once again. The band state, “Hexagonal Eyes demonstrates a vicious proficiency never before seen in death and  thrash metal. A relentless flow of smart compositional ideas seize your attention in a black hole grip, across our most extreme material yet.” It is hard to argue with such an assessment and across another ten minutes, we experience a whole host of ideas which encompass thrash, death and progressive metal. In their bid to outdo even themselves, the band clearly set themselves no boundaries and even though once or twice Hexagonal Eyes threatens to derail itself, the quartet manage to keep the train on the tracks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBbcffc3T2g

Ending the album, the twenty minute title track, draws the narrative to a close (for now) describing encounters with ancient dimensional entities, perilous astral navigation, existential revelations and culminating in a climatic trial to determine whether The Recaller transcends or perishes. Coursing through the crush, departing hindrance, phantasmagore oddment / Disintegrating extension of the jet-sable staithe-line / A grand hallway of entropic reflections. Musically, it is a complete smorgasbord of everything we have heard so far with another dozen ideas thrown in for good measure. For each heavy riff, there are moments of exquisite melody and genuine experimentation. Mike Browning of Nocturus contributes two gleefully twisted theremin solos and, in the band’s own words, “The Jesus and Mary Chain hijacked our spacecraft for two minutes straight.” It is the most progressive song here and it features moments of disturbing cosmic horror within both the storytelling and the music, particularly during the quieter, haunting central segment.

Cryptic Shift have spoken about their desire to create something stunning from a technical point of view and across Overspace & Supertime, they have achieved precisely that. The instrumental relationship between John Riley on bass and Ryan Sheperson on drums is astonishing but it is matched by the intuitive partnership between Xander Bradley and Joss Farrington whose guitars spiral with a fluency that borders on telepathic.

The attention to detail throughout the record is remarkable. Spoken lines and strange sonic effects move across from left to right speakers to create a sense of genuine spatial movement. Incredible artwwork from Jesse Jacobi helps to draw you into the world of The Recaller. Every instrumental section and guitar solo has its own title such as Adversarial Atronach Patrol, Surmounting An Asymmetrical Pulley System or Precipitous Mandate Of The Auditory And Telekinetic. It is at this point that a lyric sheet becomes not merely useful but essential, as the experience becomes even more rewarding when you can follow the myriad of names, narrative turns and musical cues that flash past at light speed.

Some listeners will certainly find the record too challenging, too overwhelming or simply too vast but that is part of its uncompromising nature. A question that I asked myself was whether Overspace & Supertime resides in the realm of genius or insanity. In truth, it resides in both. This is an album that demands to be experienced in a single sitting, while at the same time making such an undertaking daunting due to its sheer density. However, if you meet it on its own terms, it becomes a display of instrumental brilliance, vocal mastery and narrative ambition that goes far beyond what even devotees of their debut could have imagined. There are moments when the band push the music to the point where it threatens to exceed its own structural limits and still they pursue this path with absolute conviction. For that, they deserve the highest admiration. Overspace & Supertime is wild, audacious and often bamboozling, yet once you yield to its magic and majesty, it becomes an endlessly rewarding journey through extreme metal’s furthest reaches.

Overspace & Supertime is released on 27th February 2026