Lithuanian death metal outfit Crypts of Despair returned in 2021 with “Excruciating Weight,” a punishing preview of its second full-length album, All Light Swallowed. The track arrived ahead of the record’s April 23 release through Transcending Obscurity Records, a label known for championing uncompromising extreme metal from across the globe. With its dense riffs, oppressive pacing and hostile atmosphere, the song positions the band as a force committed to death metal’s most severe and exploratory traditions. Rather than leaning on a single stylistic lane, the group draws from several darker strains of the genre.

We Belong In The Grave

Crypts of Despair first gained broader attention with its 2017 debut, The Stench of the Earth, an album that introduced the band’s abrasive sound and bleak lyrical outlook. In the years since, Lithuania’s heavy music community has continued to develop a stronger international profile, with underground groups increasingly finding audiences beyond the Baltic region. The band’s follow-up reflects that growing confidence, presenting a more expansive and focused version of its earlier attack. All Light Swallowed seeks to turn heaviness into an atmosphere rather than simply a matter of speed or volume.

“Excruciating Weight” moves through a series of crushing rhythmic shifts, balancing rapid drum assaults with slower, suffocating passages. Vocalists Dovydas Auglys and Simonas Jurkevicius deliver guttural performances that feel less like conventional lead vocals than another layer of the record’s sonic pressure. Guitar work from Auglys and Benas Juskus supplies the track with both jagged dissonance and thick, doom-laden weight. Drummer Henri Mall drives the arrangement through abrupt tempo changes that keep the song unstable even at its most methodical.

Stench Of The Earth

The music carries echoes of several established death metal institutions without settling into imitation. Its uneasy, dissonant textures recall the modern extremity associated with New Zealand’s Ulcerate, while its infernal character nods toward the blackened violence of Belphegor. At other moments, the song’s cavernous guitar tone and ritualistic pace evoke the foundational influence of Incantation. Those reference points matter because they show how contemporary death metal bands continue to reshape the genre’s long-standing vocabulary of blast beats, low-register riffs and apocalyptic imagery.

Members of Crypts of Despair have described the song as a particularly revealing statement of the album’s overall identity. Although “Excruciating Weight” was reportedly the final composition completed for the record, the group said it emerged through an instinctive process rather than careful calculation. Additional details took shape during the recording sessions, a method that can preserve urgency while allowing arrangements to gain depth in the studio. That approach is audible in the track’s restless structure, which feels composed with purpose but never overly polished.

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The title speaks to the band’s larger preoccupation with emotional burden, darkness and mortality. Extreme metal has long provided artists with a language for confronting despair, violence, faith and psychological collapse, often through imagery that would seem excessive in other musical contexts. Crypts of Despair use that tradition to create a mood of sustained dread rather than simple shock value. The result is music that asks listeners to sit with discomfort, not merely react to it.

For Transcending Obscurity Records, the release also reinforced its role in a global underground ecosystem that increasingly depends on independent labels, direct pre-orders and specialized digital communities. As streaming services make international discovery easier, niche labels have become important curators for listeners seeking music beyond mainstream metal’s boundaries. Releases such as All Light Swallowed demonstrate how regional scenes can reach a worldwide audience without abandoning their local identity. Crypts of Despair’s work carries the harshness of its own environment while speaking to a broader audience drawn to ambitious, uncompromising death metal.

“Excruciating Weight” ultimately functions as more than an advance single: it serves as a compact declaration of the band’s intent. Its combination of dissonance, doom-heavy momentum and relentless percussion suggests an album built to overwhelm rather than entertain casually. For longtime death metal listeners, the track offers familiar elements delivered with conviction and sharpened production. For newcomers, it provides an unfiltered entry point into the oppressive sound world Crypts of Despair has developed on All Light Swallowed.

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