Greetings tech fiends, it's that time of the week again. Before we dive into today's column, here's the usual weekly reminder that if you're looking to find even more sick bands, you can do so here.
Given the nature of what tech-death demands of its musicians along with it being a niche thing, it doesn't come as much of a surprise that even the best bands often don't stick around forever. Against all odds when it comes to the law of diminishing returns, the rarefied highly influential acts that have kept on seem eager and ever able to prove their worth anew. Few if any bands with as lengthy and influential a history as Psycroptic have delivered consistently impressive releases for over 20 years at this point. We can argue the merits of any release, but they've not had a single release that was a dud or sucked. Of course, that’s fine if you disagree! There’s certainly a fair bit of the Psycroptic fan base that only goes nuts for the first two albums. I get it.
So having stated an ultra-brief recap of their history above, I'm excited to share that we’re launching an early album stream of the group's eighth album, Divine Council. The album comes out this Friday, August 5 via Prosthetic Records. Like any top-notch band worth their salt, everyone considers different eras of their discography to be what matters most to them and a lot of people have very different favorite releases. Then you also have bands that somehow achieve a late-career evolution and rebirth on top of all that. And that's always really fucking exciting, especially for our favorite bands!
Like many fans of the band, Psycroptic's prior album, 2018's As the Kingdom Drowns, felt like a group reborn, dropping some of their best material ever. Then in 2020, The Watcher of All EP came out and seemed to cement the idea that Psycroptic was going to keep on killing it at the highest level moving forward. Needless to say, all of that really excited me as a longtime fan of the band since the release of their 2001 debut album, The Isle of Disenchantment.
Unsurprisingly, Psycroptic has delivered on their newfound rebirth of sorts once more on Divine Council. Every musician here is firing on all cylinders and the added vocal interplay and intensity of Origin vocalist Jason Keyser throughout the album is just extra icing on the cake. Whether you want to hear Psycroptic at their fastest, grooviest, thrashiest, or heaviest, Divine Council delivers on all fronts. The album clocks in at a swift run time of 38 minutes spread across nine songs. I'd be hard-pressed to honestly consider anything on here to be filler, it’s all killer and no filler. But then again, Psycroptic has had an interesting knack for excelling at a "less is more" songwriting approach (besides their first two albums which featured a different approach) when compared to most tech-death.
So be sure to check out our early stream of Psycroptic's Divine Council below. I'm confident this will be counted among the best tech-death releases of 2022 once everyone has had time to hear it. It's that fucking good and then some. For those interested, pre-orders and more can be placed here. You can follow the band through their Facebook Page and Instagram Page.
