Cinematic Chaos and Cosmic Warfare: Cryptic Shift Unleash Overspace & Supertime

There are albums you listen to.

Then there are albums you enter.

Cryptic Shift’s Overspace & Supertime, released February 27 through Metal Blade Records, does not simply follow up 2020’s Visitations From Enceladus. It fractures time, splits its own mythology in two, and drags the listener through parallel timelines, cosmic warfare, alien sorcery and existential aftermath across nearly an hour of progressive death and thrash metal ambition.

Now that the record is officially out in the world, the wormhole is open.

“It’s been a long time coming as almost everybody knows,” the band reflects. “So, you know, it’s pretty sweet to finally get it out there and let everybody know we’ve been working on.”

The scale of that work becomes clear quickly. This is not simply another technical metal record. It is a screenplay rendered in distortion and atmosphere.

Writing a Universe, Not Just Songs

Cryptic Shift have never approached composition casually. Riffs are not stitched together. They are assigned. Scenes are not implied. They are scripted.

When asked about their process, the response is strikingly literal.

“It can be quite detailed. Like the big track, Stratocumulus Evergaol. We knew for a long, long time it was going to open up with the Recaller going down to this cityscape, like Coruscant style planet, finding this guy who gives her the coordinates to go and meet this alien sorceress that you see on the front cover.”

From there, the journey unfolds cinematically.

“She travels through space to this gas giant where she goes through a whole space battle of thrash metal ripping riffs. Goes down into the cloudscapes and meets loads of bizarre wildlife and the bizarre cloud geology. It’d be like a trippy mindscape adventure before she actually met the sorceress right at the end on her little craft and then blasts off out of the gas giant to the next planet.”

That roadmap exists before the final lyric is written. Before the last riff is locked in.

“That was always the roadmap. That’s like the screenplay script that you’re kind of mentioning.”

Yet the process is not rigid. Music and story move together.

“The two kind of run almost parallel to each other. There’s certainly ideas or changes that happen and they require maybe some work to be done to the story. We might work on certain riff ideas and passages and Xander will have to figure a way to fit those into the story. But then on the contrary, we might not be able to work too much on certain songs because he might not have fleshed out where the story is going at that point.”

The result is something rare in modern extreme metal. Narrative composition where structure serves meaning.

The Recaller and the Split in Time

Overspace & Supertime expands the saga first introduced in “Cosmic Dreams” and later developed across Visitations From Enceladus. The universe did not simply continue. It fractured.

On “Cosmic Dreams”, the universe is obliterated in a cataclysmic end of time battle. The singular character at its centre is blasted backward through time. But something else happens.

“His spirit gets split in two.”

From that fracture emerge The Amnesiac and The Recaller.

“The Recaller is the complete opposite, the mirror image to the Amnesiac. She remembers all the events of Cosmic Dreams and the Amnesiac is totally opposed. He kind of ends up being a bit of the antagonist because he has no memory of that.”

Where The Amnesiac stumbles through time alone, The Recaller forms alliances. Where one reacts blindly, the other moves with knowledge.

That duality defines this record.

Revisiting the Moonbase

Revisiting locations from Visitations was never about nostalgia. It was about perspective.

In “Moonbelt Immolator” there is a suspended chord figure that anchors a key section of the track. That location returns in Overspace & Supertime through “Hexagonal Eyes”.

“When I was writing that section, I had a bunch of sections that could have slipped in there. The one we chose stayed in Moonbelt Immolator, but there was a handful of other stuff that I set aside and was like, this’ll be great for when we go back to this location.”

It is described almost like cinematic B roll footage.

“Bringing back that chord recalls Moonbelt Immolator. Because it is based on the same chord but the whole arrangement around it is slightly different, it’s not like a throwaway riff. It was a really cool arrangement that just didn’t fit in Moonbelt Immolator.”

The effect is subtle but powerful. Familiar yet altered. Memory refracted through time.

Combat in the Clouds

The centrepiece of the album, “Stratocumulus Evergaol”, is a 29 minute odyssey that functions as both sequel and escalation.

Its extended battle sequence has already drawn visceral reactions from listeners.

“That’s exactly what we want listeners to feel,” the band says when told it sounds like an epic space battle.

In narrative terms, the missiles that once targeted The Amnesiac are redirected. The Recaller is now hunted.

“That big hanging section is like a little moment of calm before she realizes, ‘Oh no, I’ve got to turn my ship around, blast away from all these asteroids and get away from these plasma missiles that have locked on to her.’”

Musically, chaos is weaponised.

“Real ripping death thrash riffs. Super high speed stuff. Weird angular notes and pinch harmonics. That’s like the perfect component to space battles.”

Even the drums become environmental.

“There’s a lot of chaos to be created,” comes the explanation from behind the kit. “Being the player of the noisiest instrument, I guess I have to be responsible for a lot of that. Xander’s like, ‘I just want you to go crazy on this bit.’ And I’m like, ‘Crazy how?’ Then he’ll be like, ‘Oh, you know, like a spaceship’s crashing and all the engines are falling off the side.’ And I’m like, ‘Right, okay, maybe I think I know what you mean.’”

Narration through percussion. Impact rendered as rhythm.

The Alien Sorceress

Midway through the epic comes a moment of eerie stillness.

The movement is titled “Alien Sorceress Entrance Theme”.

That name came almost instinctively.

“I was playing around with a chord, added a bunch of effects in the practice room. It was such an evil atmosphere. Flanger, phaser, pitched up with a DigiTech Whammy. It sounded really eerie. I pressed record on the phone and named the file Alien Sorceress Theme.”

The sound dictated the story as much as the story dictated the sound.

Theremin Signals from Another Dimension

The title track pushes further into abstraction. Spoken word passages drift through the mix. Noise sections fracture structure. And then, a theremin cuts through the void courtesy of Mike Browning.

“Theremin’s a pretty sci fi instrument. It’s completely alien in how it works.”

The collaboration was born from memory.

“We were remembering seeing a video of Mike Browning with the theremin. He was just there with his hands like in another dimension making these sounds.”

The band reached out. He was in.

“In the section it’s around where the Recaller’s going to meet this ancient one in another dimension. He was right up for that.”

It does not feel like a gimmick. It feels inevitable.

Cohesion in Chaos

Despite the density, nothing here is arbitrary.

“That’s first and foremost. We can spend time on all these awesome riffs but they’ve got to make sense in the larger theme.”

The sequencing of the record reinforces this philosophy.

“Hexagonal Eyes is just the most ripping death thrash. Probably the most evil track on the record. At the end the Recaller passes out. So it fades to black. You don’t really know what her next move is.”

The title track begins in calm suspension.

“She wakes up on the alien ship. She’s just cruising through space. There’s not any danger.”

Intensity returns, but the thematic threads remain.

“There’s links at the start and end of the songs and throughout the songs that create that cohesion and remind you that this is all one piece of singular music.”

That cohesion is what makes a 29 minute composition feel purposeful rather than indulgent.

The Visual Universe

The artwork for Overspace & Supertime mirrors Visitations From Enceladus compositionally while introducing new figures and environments.

“Jesse’s work is really astounding. We could really see his art style coming across with our concept really well.”

The importance of that visual translation cannot be overstated.

“It’s super important for us to make sure whoever’s working on the artwork does a real good job of perfectly getting across the kind of vibe we imagine. Especially with how it ties to the concept story. It’s incredibly responsible for evoking that imagination.”

Music. Story. Art. All functioning as one system.

A Record Built for Immersion

This is not a playlist album.

This is a lights off, front to back immersion.

As one of the band says plainly, “Turn the lights off and close your eyes and just let yourself go away.”

With Overspace & Supertime, Cryptic Shift have not merely expanded their Astrodeath universe. They have solidified it. The Recaller’s journey is not a sequel. It is a reflection. A mirror. A new angle on destruction, memory, and cosmic survival.

The wormhole is open.

And the universe is only getting bigger.