Craetor ‘Surrender’
Surrender is a mind-bending EP where the storms of styles wrap you up in an immersive noise-coiled boom, heating up the ground beneath you. Ghosts, old and new, scream and soar throughout the EP, while their faces are bent and distorted, forging into new ones. Surrender is something very special. The worlds and feelings stirred by these songs didn’t exist in this world until Craetor drags them out of thin air. It’s truly something new and gritty in the landscape of rock, and haunting enough to experience severe deja vu.
“Intro” is heavy as well as atmospheric, emotive and psychedelic. As if it’s derived from the same string of desert blues, a scenic long-shot messes up your heart and mind. It’s hard to describe the exact you see, but the baking of the sun and the bleakness and shattering of noise becomes a feeling, an undissolved haunt that gets under your skin.
“Riot” is a hysteric, gritty underground punk wrapped up in the heat of noise. It’s warm, almost a burning feeling, but the high contrast and almost an high altitude brightness give you a caged exposure. At the same time, it remained free-spirited and rebellious, deteriorating deeper into a metal, swampy doom land with over-heated psychedelic. The palpability of these feelings prove that Craetor is on a completely new level, just a few months after their last release.
“Stone” gives you the same goosebumps from Nirvana’s grunge songs. Even the soaring guitar has Kurt Cobain’s ghost screaming into it. “Stone” is a wicked track. Just when you’re on the edge of your seat, waiting for a cathartic break point, they punch you in the face with a sudden change of direction, coming back with a sort of skeleton aesthetic, goth impression wrapped in its grunge sonics.
“Wretch” has a hint of suffocation in its soundscapes while the vocal line is pure cathartic. It continues up the vines of grunge and punk from the previous two songs, but much darker and deeper intense. At some point, you see a man running, hitting the walls, against the world. The battle and struggle live so vividly in “Wretch” and among the instruments.
“Wither” comes in the sounds of death’s heavy footstamps. A heavy track with a thick, metallic texture, laced with hauntingly captivating melodies. Withering is a poetic idea, and the mourning of what has been, and “Wither” captures death, the process of death and its aftermath.
Surrender is purely a mind-blowing experience. Read our interview with the band and learn more about backstory of their unique sounds.
Punk Head: I love the grit and authenticity in Surrender. Tell me more about this EP. Is there a story/theme? And what’s the story behind it?
Craetor: For Surrender we really wanted to accentuate the warm tones that are present on a lot of our favorite albums. We opted to record the album ourselves in order to maintain a certain analog sound, which definitely comes through in the grit. As part of the process we used minimal overdubs in order to preserve as much of the raw sound we produce as a three piece. We’re really interested in creating the most robust sound possible with just the three of us, and we tried to translate that as much as possible into the EP.
PH: Can you talk about any standout tracks on the EP and what makes them special to you?
Craetor: For us the standout tracks are “Stone” and “Wither.” The tracks epitomize the blend of doom, psych, and stoner rock that we wanted to achieve on the EP. The writing process behind these was very collaborative, and brought the best out of all of us.
PH: Who would you most like to collaborate with if it could be anyone in the world?
Craetor: There isn’t really any particular artist we would like to work with. For us right now our goal is to keep producing more music and evolving our sound. Naturally we would like to make the switch from working independently to working with a label, and there are a number of which we would love to be involved with. Labels like Heavy Psych Sounds or Electric Valley Records that carry a really diverse array of artists are the types of groups that we’d ultimately like to work with.
PH: In finding your sound, how did you guys land on stoner rock?
Craetor: Stoner rock ended up being the natural meeting ground for all of us as musicians. We all share an interest in the palm desert scene, and in particular looked at Kyuss as inspiration for our first tracks. Initially we tended to lean more into the punk/thrash realm, but over time we’ve found ourselves more in the stoner rock niche.
A large part of that is due to our backgrounds individually as musicians. Our guitarist tends to lean into the heavy psych realm, our drummer into the hardcore scene, and our bassist/vocalist into a doom tone. Melding these sounds together has really dictated our genre.
Finally, stoner rock is a loose enough term that gives us agency to experiment within the genres we are interested in. We’re constantly evolving our sound, and we like the freedom to pull elements from doom, psych-rock, grunge, and metal without boxing ourselves in too tightly.
