CRYSTAL COFFIN

Today, A Beast in the Field announces October 31st as the international release date for Crystal Coffin‘s highly anticipated third album, The Curse of Immortality, on digipack CD, vinyl LP, and cassette tape formats.

Crystal Coffin are a melodic black metal trio from Vancouver, Canada that was formed in 2016 by Aron Shute (vocals, bass guitar), Lenkyn Ostapovich (guitars, synths, piano, scapes, secondary vocals), and Rob Poirier (drums). Comprised of members from previous Vancouver acts Destroy All, Koma, and Caskets, their music references their love for 1970s/’80s Italian horror cinema, sci-fi storytelling, and philosophies. Crystal Coffin combines black metal styles with influences of prog and ambient/electronic music while re-imagining 20th and 21st century atrocities as poetry and melody.

Combining a love for vintage horror, folk, history, storytelling, and other esoteric influences, Crystal Coffin released their debut album, The Transformation Room, in March 2020 to favorable reviews. The album presented scenes of the Holodomor famine that tore families and villages apart in Soviet-era Ukraine during the early 1930s and contained lyrics and music that were washed in pathos, both brutal and beautiful. The band’s second full-length, The Starway Eternal, released in October 2021, embraced a sci-fi concept utilizing the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Pripyat, Ukraine as a backdrop for fantastical storytelling. This second album expanded their progressive inclinations and infused a new confidence into their songwriting, helping to solidify themes and sounds that would steer the band’s next direction. Rightly so, The Starway Eternal garnered Crystal Coffin even more attention, setting expectations for their third album considerably higher.

And, amazingly, they’ve eclipsed those expectations. The Curse of Immortality, releasing on Halloween day 2023, leverages similar storytelling themes but looks forward into a future where the limitations on existence are no more, for better or for worse. Less a formal concept album from its predecessor, the eight tracks loosely depict a protagonist whose failed attempts at suicide have placed him into a rehabilitation center wherein clandestine medical personnel experiment on the captured and unconscious patients at night in chambers below. Through a combination of cryogenetics, evil rites, and state control, the subject involuntarily becomes the first successful completed case for verified immortality – a life that will no longer require death. The music and the lyrics found throughout are darker, heavier, and faster than anything Crystal Coffin have released and stand as the sonic culmination of the band’s efforts and intentions over the past six years. 

As always, form and content go hand in hand for the band, and the characteristically detailed cover artwork (once again by Ostapovich) as well as “classified document”-style inner sleeve vividly complete the totality of The Curse of Immortality. Altogether, the album stands as Crystal Coffin‘s boldest and most complete work to date.

First track and preorder info to be revealed shortly. Aforementioned cover artwork and tracklisting are as follows:

Tracklisting for Crystal Coffin’s The Curse of Immortality
1. Shadows Never Cast [6:15]
2. The Undead [5:08]
3. The Vortex of Earth and Death [4:19]
4. Final Breaths [5:36]
5. Cryogenesis [6:00]
6. Rise [3:42]
7. Leviathans Encased [5:54]
8. The Closing of the Crystal Coffin [5:36]

MORE INFO:
www.crystal-coffin.com
www.facebook.com/Crystal-Coffin-2228111600765172 
www.crystalcoffin.bandcamp.com

Today, A Beast in the Field announces October 15th as the international release date for Crystal Coffin‘s highly anticipated second album, The Starway Eternal.

Crystal Coffin is a melodic black metal trio from Vancouver, Canada that has played together since 2017. The band consists of Aron Shute (vocals, bass), Lenkyn Ostapovich (guitars, vocals, synths, piano, balalaika), and Rob Poirier (drums). Crystal Coffin is influenced by the progressive black sounds of Enslaved and Wolves in the Throne Room, the straightforward aggression of High on Fire, and the haunting keyboard work of Fabio Frizzi. Lyrically, the band re-imagines 20th century atrocities into poetry and melody. In March 2020, the band released their first full-length, The Transformation Room, on A Beast in the Field to positive reviews. For the remainder of the year, the band wrote and rehearsed the music that would form their second album, The Starway Eternal.

Massive and mesmerizing, The Starway Eternal continues Crystal Coffin‘s contemplation of worldly struggle and the fine line one can find between hope and hopelessness. Cast against the historical realities of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown of 1986, the assumed protagonist – an operator at the power plant – discovers the portalway behind an inoperable console and soon finds that her longing for meaning in this chaotic world answers the opportunity to seek out the purported gods and angels that live among the cosmos in our known solar system. To find such entities would be to imbue a sense of importance in our collective existence beyond the daily disorder and existential despair that one accepts. Her trips into various corners of space reveal little to no such beings, and during one such fruitless endeavor, her portalway back to earth is shut permanently; reactor 4 at Chernobyl back on earth has suffered its meltdown during shutdown operation. Frantic, she makes the decision to return to earth by falling through the fiery atmosphere as a lonely, final and futile act of desperation. Of course, survival is impossible, and such an act becomes a metaphor for our time wandering the earth with little connection to anything beyond the physical world.

Indeed, with a thematic scope so portentous, Crystal Coffin‘s compositions suitably follow that awe-inspiring arc, collectively comprising the band’s best and most adventurous work to date. Musically, The Starway Eternal was written during the lockdown months of spring-into-summer 2020 and rehearsed as restrictions started easing into the autumn. The music and vocals are intentionally more aggressive than its no-less-considerable predecessor while also trying to paint a landscape that contains elements of science fiction and moments of pathos. As they did with the content of that first album, on The Starway Eternal did Crystal Coffin reflect upon actual events of the 20th Century in Eastern Europe to create poetic images of struggle, defeat, regret, and the hope for a lifeless form that yields a form of peace beyond our consciousness can consider. More immediately, each of the band members come from families rooted in European backgrounds and have a shared interest in history, science fiction motifs, and vintage horror.  

Refreshingly cinematic, palatably modern, and unselfconsciously adventurous, Crystal Coffin dazzlingly skirt the outer boundaries of black metal and psychedelic, space and time, with The Starway Eternal.

Begin travelling with the brand-new track “Shapeshifter Huntsman” here:

Cover artwork, courtesy of Lenkyn Ostapovich, and tracklisting are as follows:

Tracklisting for Crystal Coffin’s The Starway Eternal
1. Shapeshifter Huntsman
2. The Starway Eternal
3. Skeletons
4. Console of Horror
5. The Red Forest
6. Cremation: Between Fire and Ice
7. The Descent
8. Mega Tomb (including Tomorrow’s Ghost)

MORE INFO:
www.crystal-coffin.com
www.facebook.com/Crystal-Coffin-2228111600765172 
www.crystalcoffin.bandcamp.com