Words by

Bogi Bjarnason

Icelandic blackened death-core mongers Cries of Derision have kept a relatively low profile since their formation at a LHÍ freshman party in the fall of 2013, and limited their live appearances to the odd art exhibition opening or surprise performance at the Úlfsmessa off-venue event at the Eistnaflug festival. However, with a heavy online presence and a month-long residency at lower Manhattan squatter museum ABC No Rio last summer, they quickly garnered both attention and praise from the NYC art scene as well as the Brooklyn-based transcendental black metalers of Liturgy, who put them in contact with Short Mercy Digital label head Yorn Gracebuck. After rave reviews for their first release with the label, a split 7” with heralded power-violence outfit Spazz, a debut full-length titled ‘Psychedelic Visions in Black’ is set to drop internationally on June 6. We caught up with frontman Bani for a quick back and forth on the subject.

You’ve flown far below the radar on the home front and I suspect most people outside, and even inside, the metal scene haven’t heard of you yet. How come?

We are the creature under your bed, so to speak. Iceland is a hollow pretension of a creative stream gone dry, filled with posers who cannot tell hype from quality and cultural vampires of the stay-cation kind, and we will have nothing to do with its flaccid, rotting, corpse.

Your music echoes early Job For A Cowboy reimagined through a prism of a primal Wolves In The Throne Room and the more psychedelic aspects of Nachtmystium. How did you arrive at this unique formula?

Some time ago our bass player Mylur and I ordered some t-shirts and vinyl from Nachtmystium’s Blake Judd, and they never arrived, so we decided to take an eye for an eye and stole his sound and some of his image as well. The JFAC influence is pure nostalgia for the MySpace era in metal that we were too young to have been a part of as well as a yearning to revitalize the innovations that became the basis of the death-core genre.

You have been booked for a tour later this summer to support your debut album. Tell us a bit more about that.

We’re booked as support for a very exciting tour package called the Smoke From The Yurt Tour and will be opening for famed post-metal act Yurt and the sludge band Smokestack who are co-headlining, with additional support from up-and-coming speed metalers Thrashing Grimness out of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. The tour spans the whole of New England as well as various territories in the upper Midwest and eastern Canada. John-Boy Walton, the guitarist from Smokestack, offered us this spot when we were smoking a hookah at some Williamsburg gastropub whose name I can’t recall as I was high as a kite at the time. We of course dropped everything to accept this great opportunity and I’ll miss the birth of my firstborn son as a consequence.