Following up their 2023 full-length, Everything Bleeds, Crown Magnetar is back with a short taste of what’s to come with Punishment. It’s a four song EP, so it’s going to be a ‘get in, get out’ type of affair. Something that, to be quite frank, it all thats really necessary from Crown Magnetar’s particular brand of technical deathcore. While they bring in a variety of different ‘flavors’ of the genre (symphonic, technical, brutal, etc), it’s such an urgent and frantic affair that it benefits from a rather quick runtime.
With the longest song not even hitting four minutes, these songs do get exactly to the point. Opener “Barbed Wire Noose” is the longest cut, and it’s combination of visceral breakdowns, which are effectively placed and meaty, and explosive bursts of speed laced with some slight dabbling in keyboards and blackened atmosphere. If it sounds like a lot, it’s more straight-forward than it might sound, which is not a slag in the slightest. “Nailed the Fuck Down” is a musical beating, with savage midtempo riffs and vicious blasts acting as a jackhammer, elevated by some atmospheric effects. It’s a whirlwind of energy. The same type of description can be applied to the final two songs as well, though “Bringer of Dead Light” does take the band the furthest into the blackened atmospherics and evil sounding riffs when it takes the time to slow down from the blistering pace it occasionally strives for. To that end, the finale of “Decapitation Ritual” really slows things down in it’s second half, to almost hypnotic levels – all without losing the tension and energy in the music.
Punishment takes the utter savagery that’s present in the deathcore genre and gives it all of the proper proportions to make it work. No one is going to be saying that Crown Magnetar are breaking boundaries, but they know how to do up the trimmings of the genre with plenty of energy and flash. Considering the number of more generic attempts to be found, that’s definitely worth a gander if you have any interest in this particular sound.