With their first two albums, Out of the Garden (2015) and The Ruins of Fading Light (2019), epic doom demigods Crypt Sermon quickly cemented themselves as one of the premiere metal acts of the ’10s. Their third album, 2024’s The Stygian Rose, continued to turn heads for all the right reasons, earning a rare 10 out of 10 rating from this here outlet. Now, the Crypt Sermon saga continues with the release of a brand new EP entitled Saturnian Appendices. Featuring three brand new songs and a cover, Saturnian Appendices both expands upon the foundation laid down with The Stygian Rose, while foreshadowing what’s to come, and believe us, there’s a lot. Don’t take our word for it. Take frontman Brooks Wilson and drummer Enrique Sagarnaga, who sat down with us to discuss this new release, their ever expanding musical palette, and Savatage.
Greetings Brooks and Enrique, and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Brooks Wilson: Busy! We’re packing, getting ready for some dates across the sea and stressing out, but management’s got everything lined up for us. I think we’re all very happy to have someone else organizing our lives for us *laughs*.
Enrique Sagarnaga: *laughs* Yeah!
Well this is a big week for you guys. Not only do you have the euro shows this weekend, but this Friday sees the release of a brand new Crypt Sermon EP, Saturnian Appendices, which largely serves as a companion to your most recent album, The Stygian Rose. What led to the development of these songs, and why ultimately were they left off the album?
BW: I’ll answer that. So, there’s two things. These were songs composed amongst the songs that we had written for The Stygian Rose. Of the songs that we did write, we paired it down to I think the 8. There’s even a track that we still have somewhere, a little short bit that’s even recorded somewhere, that we haven’t even released. These songs thematically were different enough lyrically that I thought they could sit aside from the full length runtime of a 45 minute LP. Condensing our music down to a digestible single listening session was an objective for this album, so while we recorded a lot of songs, we paired it down to fit the runtime of your classic heavy metal album, so that’s “Only Ash and Dust” and “A Fool to Believe”. Those two songs we recorded in the same session. “Lachrymose” we recorded on our own, mixed by Damian Herring, and the Mayhem cover is about 10 years old, I think.
ES: I’m with Brooks’ sentiments. I think one of the things we wanted to do with the new record was keep it lean and mean. One thing that was unique about a song like “A Fool to Believe”, that was the first song that (rhythm guitarist) Frank Chin had really significant songwriting contributions, in terms that he was the one who presented the song to us. With that said, we found that that song had a different tone to it. If you go back and listen to that song in the context of the rest of the full length record, there’s a vibe shift in that track. What I personally found with that song is that, for whatever reason, it worked very well when married to “Only Ash and Dust”. Those two songs feel very appropriate when you’re listening to them back to back. Even in the original sequencing of the record, I forget where in the record they were, but…
BW: They were late in the album. We were going for a near hour length album and they were late in the album.
ES: They were paired together, and they always sounded very good together in that way. I personally believe that “Only Ash and Dust” is a track that features a lot of the things that I think make our last record pretty compelling, just from a songwriting perspective. There’s no musical callbacks to certain moments from the last record, but I think it encapsulates a lot of what that last record did in a song. I think we all felt like those two tracks together were strong enough to be their own release. The mentality of what we’re doing moving further, with everything that we’d written on this last one, was to hint at us shifting our sound a little bit, and giving the listener a clue as to maybe what we have coming up next or just how we’ve grown as a band. Those two songs together give even more of a peek into that.
I know these songs conceptually expand upon the themes explored in The Stygian Rose. Could you two expand upon this? Where do these songs lie in the overall narrative?
BW: One thing I think we are continuing to encounter is whether or not The Stygian Rose is a concept album. I’m not certain that we necessarily feel comfortable with that phrase, but lyrically, it’s set in its own reality. Lyrically, it is a developed thematic album. When you listen to the album itself, with the song “Glimmers in the Underworld”, that song was one of the first ones we wrote for the album, and it just lyrically has that, “Hey! Here’s where this person’s at in their life.” For the most part, the rest of the album is a lot about the magical practices that this person’s going through, the narrator of the album, whoever it is. They’re engaging in these magical practices that in some sort of way lead you to the final song on The Stygian Rose, which is a culminating lyrical thematic closure to the album.
We had “Glimmers” as the intro. When we wrote “The Stygian Rose”, we were sitting there like, “We’re writing the last song on the album.” The lyrics were always gonna be the closer lyrics too. Everything in between had this ability to shift. I started, as we were putting it together…there’s nothing that happens in a sequence in this album. You have, essentially, lyrics that feel like scattered writings. What I ended up doing with the lyrical theme is that I felt “Only Ash and Dust” and “A Fool to Believe”, they fleshed out the character who’s delivering the writings in that book, but the lyrics that we landed with on the full length album are the magical practices they’re doing and engaging with.
In the same way that we have, on the last album, “Key of Solomon” or “The Snake Handler”, explicitly talking about both actual magical practices while also being symbolic placeholders for very personal things I had going on at the time, in this way, the character on these songs, “Only Ash and Dust” and “A Fool to Believe”, they’re explaining who they are, where they find themselves emotionally at this time. This album I thought was really fun for me to write the lyrics to because it didn’t have to be me writing lyrics, Brooks. I inhabited a different person to write the lyrics, which is a really great exercise.
Closing out the EP is a cover of Mayhem’s “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas”, reinterpreted in an epic doom style. Whose idea was it to tackle this song and were there any apprehensions towards rearranging such a metal classic?
BW: Enrique, you were there more for the genesis of the concept, I believe.
ES: Yeah, everybody in the band is an island of their own. We all have a lot of different tastes in our music, metal or otherwise. (Guitarist) Steve (Jansson) and I, we always bonded over our affinity for old school black metal. For a while, we had been in touch with TT from Abigor, shooting the shit about heavy metal and where our commonalities lied. At some point, we had tossed the idea around about doing a cover song. I think it was with the intention of pitching it to Decibel magazine as a flexi because it would be cool to do something like a cover, but have a nice unique home for it that wasn’t just us putting something up on the internet.
In the process of shooting the shit on this thing, that idea was thrown about, doing a Mayhem cover in a way that wasn’t like anything you’ve heard before. All too often, when you hear a band do a cover of a song and it’s a straightaway cover, by design, it’s always gonna fall short of the original. I wanted to talk to Steve and figure out a way that we could do something that still sounds like us, but still pays homage to a band that meant a lot to us, even in our formative years of metal fandom. That’s how that ultimately came together.
I don’t think we had our sights set on covering that song specifically. We just thought it would be cool to do a doomed out cover of a Mayhem song, and what that could be. If I remember correctly, Steve fell on that song because of the main melody in it. It’s kind of an easy song to doom out. Everything fell into place pretty quickly. We wrote the cover in a day or two, in just arranging it in a way that was gonna be more like us at the time than anything else.
BW: Yeah, and we had TT from Abigor contributing some of the sound effects and vocals that were gonna lead us into what we would explore more on the next album too. It’s fun to have that introduction of that epic soundscape element.
Are there any songs you’d like to see Crypt Sermon cover in the future?
BW: That’s a tough conversation. I don’t even think we should really talk about it because I have a billion songs I could say that I can think of a way we could figure out how to cover it. That’s what I think is cool about our expanding sound. Even just going outside the metal genre, there’s our ability to adapt to other styles as well. So yeah, I just don’t think we’re at a good place to talk about it yet.
This latest album cycle has seen the addition of keyboardist Tanner Anderson, whose talents are featured heavily on a track like “Lachrymose”. In what ways has his presence affected the band’s writing process and overall sound?
BW: This one’s for me. Tanner came in during the writing of Stygian Rose. We brought him in as…he contributed guitar riffs, but also has, from a production angle, we really like his solo bands, Obsequiae, and everyone knows him from Majesties too: His multi-instrumental abilities to play just about anything that we would need at the time. I think we haven’t even begun to utilize Tanner in the way that we can, but for The Stygian Rose and “Lachrymose” in particular, he brought more atmosphere, depth, sound effects, and ear candy, all that stuff that really brings everything together. You fill in the gaps and there’s nothing missing from the full palette because he’s got that sonic sphere covered.
ES: One of the mentalities that we had when writing the new record was heavy on editing, in terms of songwriting editing. We wanted to make sure the record had as much fat trimmed as possible, for it to never feel bloated. Having the record be a single LP was absolutely a deliberate choice by the band this time around. I think Tanner and (bassist) Matt Knox too, for that matter, they both proved to be great band members to have because our quality control and our editing process got better for it. Like I said, we already have pretty expanded musical palettes, but these guys even more so. They just add more flavor to that. They were very instrumental in helping us with that process.
Brooks, your vocals on this album, and this EP for that matter, remind me strongly of Savatage’s Jon Oliva. Do you consider Savatage an influence on yourself and the band? I can’t help but notice the music has gotten more progressive.
BW: Yeah, absolutely. 100% an influence. Savatage is one of those bands where it’s not correct to call them underrated, but I certainly don’t think they’ve gotten their flowers in the way that they could have. I don’t feel like you hear their unique stamp on a lot of other bands, and their unique stamp is very good, smart songwriting that’s both so catchy, but also really heavy. “Hall of the Mountain King” is such an absurdly catchy, almost silly song, that is such a MEAN riff. It is one of the most brutal verse riffs. It sounds so heavy and Jon’s voice is incredible, inimitable. I actually love their later stuff too. I like their other singer that they got later on Edge of Thorns (Zak Stevens). I love his voice too. Savatage is awesome. If their name can come up more because we’re bringing out a certain element back to music that reminds people of them, then good. They deserve all the praise they can get.
Expanding upon the last question, for a band that is regularly branded as epic doom, The Stygian Rose felt more like a traditional metal album on which epic doom is one of a multitude of incorporated influences. Would you agree with this assessment, and where does the band view themselves stylistically at this point?
ES: Especially as we get older, we want to find constant, new, and refreshing ways to express ourselves. By that, I mean also what is refreshing and interesting to us. I feel like the community as a whole, they agreed that the first two records were doom records, and that’s totally cool because they were and that’s how they fell by design. By the time we came into this third record, and the fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and twentieth, hopefully *laughs*, what we’ll always wanna do is not necessarily reinvent ourselves, but assess the things that we find to be special about the kind of music that means so much to us, and find ways to do right by that music, pay it tribute, and add our two cents into what the current conversation about that music is.
Does that mean that we’ll never do a trad doom metal record ever again? I don’t know. It’s not in the cards right now because we’re still trying to grow and see where our path will take us. It’s just as much of a surprise to us as it is to everyone else listening to the next record. The most important thing that we always focus on is: Is the track that I’m listening to right now engaging and interesting to me? Does it reward me as the listener on repeat listens? Are there little things I can pick up on? What is there lyrically or musically that I can dig deep into on my 12th listen of this album that will be engaging that wasn’t on the first? It’s that kind of thing.
Sticking to a genre, sticking to a specific style of music, I don’t really think that’s where this band is paying a lot of attention right now. The cards are gonna fall where they do and we’ll figure it out together with you *laughs*. Brooks, I think you’d agree with the lyrics. The story you…the Paschal Beverly Randolph concept behind The Stygian Rose, maybe that was laid to rest on this record. Maybe it won’t be. We don’t know until we cross that bridge and write the next record that we’ll be able to hone in on that.
One other consequence in our lives that definitely affects our songwriting process is where we’re at in life as human beings and what the world looks like. On the first record, Brooks, you were married, but I don’t think any of us were. By the second record, Brooks had children. On the third record, Steve had children. We’re all married. Things change. Our outlooks on life, whether that’s a doomed view of the world and its future like it has been, our maybe something else might come up in our lives that might completely shift our perspective on things. We can’t ignore that under this banner of a genre.
The Stygian Rose was an album that, upon its release, was met with universal praise by virtually every metal outlet. Does such accolades put pressure on the band as far as crafting a follow up goes?
BW: I think so, but I don’t think we’re the type to really get hung up on it. We already knew that we were gonna have to embrace people questioning what type of music we play, the epic doom thing, and the commentary of whatever. “It’s good, but it’s not epic doom.” That shit’s always gonna happen. We’re concerned with expanding our ability and unconcerned with tethering ourselves to the things we’ve done before. Even when it comes to the idea of epic doom, I think we agree as a band that doom metal is the elemental heavy metal. It’s the undergirding foundational music. It’s the primordial stew of what became heavy metal
To a certain degree, doom’s always gonna be there, but I don’t think we’re concerned about the labels too much. I don’t predict that we will, but if we start writing stuff that’s outside outside the world of metal, I think we would be still unconcerned with it the label and genre conventions. The band is comprised of a bunch of people who want to pour our energy into making something different and special that’s inspired by the elemental things that keep us making music. You can look at our lineup and see the diverse array of musical backgrounds that we come from. Yeah, they’re all metal, but they’re different types of metal.
If for whatever reason, we had blast beats on the next album, you can be sure that we thought about it and were like, “OK man! We’ll just do it!” It was done with commitment. When we experiment, we’re not gonna release something that we felt was concerned with what the feedback was gonna be. It was gonna be fully realized. That’s one aspect of our collaboration: We do focus on having a lot of agreement on the final product. We are all very proud of the work that we put into it because a lot of us do commit a lot of time to the songwriting and song crafting. That’s why it takes a long time to release an album for us. We write near full albums and scrap ’em! We wrote tracks for Stygian Rose we didn’t record because we didn’t like ’em. We just didn’t think they were good enough.
Stuff like that happens and that’s the type of band we are. The next album, I’m sure we’ve got some riffs and songs coming together, but who knows? Once we start getting it together, if we start to feel there’s a larger theme emerging here and we need to write different songs, that’s what we’ll do. If it’s because we aren’t an epic doom band anymore on the next album, then whatever. I don’t think we care about that label in particular. I just imagine that we’re gonna write music that comes from a place of musical interest that we have and that we all share. One cool thing about our band is that we all get along really well and enjoy talking about music, but also enjoy sharing life together. These are the best dudes I know *laughs*!
Enrique, you play alongside other members of Crypt Sermon in the blackened thrash band, Daeva, who released one of our favorite albums of 2022, Through Sheer Will and Black Magic. Is there anything new happening in that camp?
ES: Yeah, we’re writing a new record right now. We softly announced that a little while ago. That band has its own mission and its own set of…I’m gonna call them artistic conditions *laughs* that we like to abide by. That’ll just come together as it does. I think that genre in particular is really hard to do well. Too often, bands fall into a pit of writing riff salads. In order for that record to be better than what came before it, which is always my goal with anything that we do, going back to your question about pressure, what we want it to be for that band is it for it to be more impressive, to be more dynamic, to try and look at the genre and what makes it so special for us and see where we can propel it in a different direction.
As far as Crypt Sermon’s concerned, in terms of pressure, I just wanted to add my two cents to it. For me, the only pressure I face with this kind of thing, it’s not critical acclaim or everyone loving it. It’s more having our listeners understand our intent. Even lyrically on this last record, I was overcome with joy to see that people were really keen on exploring the story that Brooks crafted out of the background, that he pulled a lot of the info from regarding the sex magician and his quest to find this idealized love. Brooks, you can expand upon that if you want to, but I just wanted to note when it comes to that kind of stuff, there’s more effort being put into it than one might think. We don’t wanna slop together a bunch of fantasy lyrics, put a fantasy album cover together and boom: You have a heavy metal record.
To see people react to and understand it, or at least try to look into it and have some curiosity sparked, to me, that meant a job well done on our end. If there’s any kind of pressure, for me as an artist or a creative of any sort, it’s for people to look into our “messaging” and connect with it or understand it or at least try to. I’m a big fan of FromSoft games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne and games like that. I think a lot of the people who play those games and don’t understand the plot, or get lost in it, don’t bother to read item descriptions in those games, don’t try to do some very basic research behind the lore of the games. It becomes such a more rewarding experience when you look at those games as a whole and try to understand how many branching paths there are to a store. In many ways, I think of art and music and what we try to do, whether it’s across this band or Daeva or anything else we’re in, I try to look at it the same way.
Whereas many acts today release EPs haphazardly, Saturnian Appendices feels spiritually in line with the EPs of the ’80s and ’90s, which musically served as a bridge between the albums that proceeded and followed. What are your favorite EPs and why?
BW: I don’t know that I can sit and…I’m also just terrible at list making. I can think of a lot of hardcore EPs, which is kind of a weird thing. I came from the hardcore punk scene, so I’m just thinking of the Richmond bands, all of them like Crestfallen, pg.99, they never had full length albums. All they ever put out were EPs. Now there’d be 12 songs on an EP, but you’ve got 14 minutes and 12 songs. When I think of EPs, I think of a less than 40 minute record, somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes of material, and less so the conceptual confines of an LP. Again, I’m also just terrible at list making *laughs*.
ES: It’s weird. I always think of live EPs more than anything. Honestly, I’m a Maiden freak, so Maiden Japan. I love that record. I’m trying to think of proper, standalone, actual EPs. A couple years ago, I had the pleasure of working with Cynic. Post-Traced in Air, the band released a couple of different EPs that showed different sides to Paul Masvidal’s songwriting. Carbon-Based Anatomy, that record, if you like very modern Cynic, which I could understand if someone, especially if they’re of the “true metal” ilk, don’t pay attention to that band, but when they released Carbon-Based Anatomy, it was this mini sequel to the Traced in Air record, which I love. It’s one of my favorite all time drum performances on any recorded piece of music, period. That record was really cool, and you could hear Paul Masvidal no longer be confined to the vocoder vocal stuff that he was doing. That record had a little bit of an impact on me. If I had to pick a standalone EP, it’d probably be that one for me, but if it’s a live EP, Maiden Japan. I know those are two completely different answers, but that would be it.
Great choices! Brooks, now you’ve got me really thinking. I was looking at this from a metal perspective, but when it comes to hardcore, even when you go back to the ’80s, that line between EP and LP is very blurred. People ask me what my favorite punk album is and I say, “Easy. (Minor Threat’s) Out of Step.” Now I’m having a moral dilemma. Is that an album?
BW: Right. Black Flag, do they even have a full length *laughs*? Until they get (Henry) Rollins, they don’t! Even with Rollins, their genre shifts are never full length albums, and when they are, they’re a slog to get through *laughs*. I was just even thinking about new bands that are coming out now, like Psyop, they have an EP that’s 10 minutes long. It’s 11 songs. Stuff like that, all those bands that are huge in the modern hardcore scene pop off on their EPs first. I’m thinking Mindforce and stuff. It’s a weird distinction.
I think that feels like a complete experience of music, and in the case of longer songs, like Enrique mentioned earlier, we were intentional. It was gonna be a single LP because we wanted to have all killer, no filler, let’s not waste anyone’s time, back to basics approach. I think we were also knowing a longer album makes people…we knowingly confronted the accusations that we weren’t an “epic doom” band because we were like, “Let’s just cut a few songs and have a regular length album.” People hate that *laughs*. “You should’ve played for longer!” It keeps the cost down too *laughs*! People don’t have to pay $40 for our album. It was intentional.
With the release of the new songs, I come at all music listening from a “What’s it like to sit down with the new vinyl?” experience. When you flip the album over, there’s a tonal reset. You have the one whole minute that you took, if you really did take that long, that you flipped it over. That brain, when you have that rest, unless its been engineered in such a way to make you flip it in such an immediate way that you don’t lose much of the tempo of the album, that flip gives you this moment to pull out and come back in. I actually love sitting down and listening to a half a record at a time. When you’re hanging out with friends, “Let’s listen to side A of this album.”
In the case of our Saturnian Appendices, it’s the same. The side A is “Only Ash and Dust” and “A Fool to Believe”, which are from The Stygian Rose. They’re directly related to that theme. Then, you flip it over and its got classic doom sounding songs, but they have a tonal reset. They don’t feel attached to side A. Side B has both different production styles and different composition styles. “Lachrymose” I don’t think could’ve fit in on The Stygian Rose. It’s got a little bit more of a gothic flare.
In closing, what does the rest of 2025 have in store for Crypt Sermon?
ES: We have a couple more live shows coming up. We’re playing Blades of Steel in Madison at the end of August. We also have our east coast shows kicking off in September. That’s a quick string of shows across Philly, Pittsburgh we’re playing the Descendants of Crom Fest, and then we’re playing New York City. Hopefully, we’ll have a couple more shows that we want to announce. Nothing we can talk about just yet, but there is something that I’m very excited about. We’ll get there when we can and announce it properly.
It’s happened to be that we’ve fallen into this pattern of five years in between records. Our intent is to break that cycle, very decidedly so. I think we’re going to get back into songwriting mode on the much, much sooner side. I know these guys have been working on some stuff on their own independently that will hopefully see the light of a day as Crypt Sermon. We’ll see what we can do. We’ll get back into the songwriting process as quickly as we can. It’s just gotta feel right. The most difficult aspect of it, like you said earlier, we’re involved in a couple other projects, but for us, this band as always been homebase. This band is, for me at least, the central hub to everything I do. Hopefully, we can get back on that horse on the sooner side.
The new Crypt Sermon EP, Saturnian Appendices, is available now on Dark Descent Records. For more information on Crypt Sermon, click here.