More than 20 years removed from where they started, Crippled Black Phoenix are approaching a new threshold with their upcoming new album. Sceaduhelm is the UK macabre rockers’ most inward-looking and grave statement to date. It turns away from collective upheaval to face emotional erosion, fatigue and private collapse.
“Sceaduhelm is a deeply impactful and affecting record that permeates the psyche with its mysterious aura”, Ghost Cult writes in an early 8/10 review. “It is both darkly alluring and strangely uplifting”.
“It’s like a morphine drip”, Metal Epidemic says in a 5/5 review. “This album is addictive. The more time you spend with it, the more it fuses with your DNA”.
Sceaduhelm was released today on April 17 on Season of Mist, and you can hear all 12 stark and striking songs by listening to the full album stream on the Season of Mist YouTube channel.
Order the album here: https://orcd.co/cbpsceaduhelm
Where previous Crippled Black Phoenix records addressed historical violence and societal fracture, Sceaduhelm moves inward, listening to what accumulates in the aftermath: grief, complicity, damaged intimacy and the weight of endurance. The album unfolds as a unified psychological space rather than a traditional concept record, with slow builds, minimalist repetition, and unresolved tension carrying as much weight as melody. While stemming from founding member Justin Greaves (ex-Electric Wizard, ex-Iron Monkey), vocals are shared between Belinda Kordic (Killing Mood, Stabb), Ryan Patterson (Fotocrime, Coliseum, Mirrorless) and Justin Storms (Wailin Storms), each occupying a distinct but aligned emotional register across the album’s twelve tracks.
Tracklist:
1. One Man Wall of Death (04:14)
2. Ravenettes (04:22)
3. Things Start Falling Apart (05:21)
4. No Epitaph / The Precipice (08:30)
5. The Void (03:49)
6. Hollows End (04:26)
7. Dropout (03:48)
8. Vampire Grave (06:24)
9. Colder and Colder (04:56)
10. Under the Eye (07:07)
11. Tired to the Bone (04:50)
12. Beautiful Destroyer (08:33)
Full runtime: 1:06:22
CRIPPLED BLACK PHOENIX are approaching a new threshold with Sceaduhelm, an album that withdraws from outward spectacle and turns instead toward interior collapse, exhaustion, and moral attrition. Severe, restrained, and emotionally exposed, the record presents itself not as a dramatic statement but as a slow accumulation of unease. Where earlier works often grappled with collective trauma or historical violence, Sceaduhelm listens to what lingers afterward: fatigue, memory, complicity, and the quiet weight of survival. The result is a unified emotional landscape rather than a narrative concept, marked by repetition, patience, and unresolved tension.
Crippled Black Phoenix was formed in 2004 by multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Justin Greaves, initially conceived as a fluid musical project rather than a fixed band. Emerging from Greaves’ post-Iron Monkey creative reset, the project was built around collaboration, instability, and a refusal of rigid identity. From the outset, Crippled Black Phoenix positioned itself as a voice for the marginalised and dispossessed, whether human or animal, individual or collective. This ethical undercurrent has remained constant throughout the project’s evolution, shaped in close creative partnership with vocalist and lyricist Belinda Kordic, whose role has extended far beyond performance into the wider artistic and conceptual framework of the band.
The band’s early releases established a reputation for long-form compositions, cinematic pacing, and emotional gravity. Albums such as A Love of Shared Disasters and The Resurrectionists introduced a sound rooted in repetition and slow transformation, drawing as much from post-rock and folk traditions as from metal’s sense of weight and endurance. With I, Vigilante in 2012, Crippled Black Phoenix reached a wider audience, refining their songwriting into more direct structures without abandoning their commitment to atmosphere and tension. The album remains a reference point within their catalogue, both for its accessibility and its bleak emotional clarity.
Subsequent releases resisted consolidation. White Light Generator and Bronze expanded the band’s textural range, incorporating harsher dynamics, sharper political commentary, and a more confrontational production approach. Great Escape functioned as both retrospective and recontextualization, drawing together material from various sessions into a fractured but revealing whole. Throughout this period, the band’s identity remained deliberately unstable, with shifting lineups and an ongoing refusal to settle into a predictable formula.
In 2020, Ellengæst marked another pivot. Built around the use of multiple guest vocalists alongside Kordic, the album explored themes of death, memory, and historical residue, earning recognition for its cohesion and emotional impact. Rather than treating guest contributions as novelty, Crippled Black Phoenix used contrasting voices to deepen the album’s sense of dislocation and grief. The pandemic-era context further sharpened the record’s introspective tone, even as live activity was forced into suspension.
That inward momentum continued with Banefyre, a record concerned explicitly with persecution, inequality, and the violence inflicted on those deemed different by society. Drawing on historical and symbolic imagery, the album balanced outrage with ritual, placing acts of oppression within a broader continuum of human cruelty. Its production embraced rawness and abrasion, reinforcing the band’s long-standing commitment to evolution over repetition. Banefyre reaffirmed Crippled Black Phoenix as a project unwilling to offer comfort or resolution, even as it expanded their sonic and thematic reach.
Sceaduhelm emerges from this lineage as a narrowing of focus rather than a departure. Written primarily between 2023 and 2025, the album developed through uncertainty, self-questioning, and prolonged doubt. The process was deliberately fluid, allowing compositions to remain open and emotionally vulnerable until late in production. Justin Greaves remains the sole composer of the music, with lyrics written after the fact and assigned to voices according to emotional fit rather than hierarchy. Belinda Kordic, Ryan Patterson, and Justin Storms share vocal duties, each occupying a distinct but aligned psychological register.
As with previous releases, Justin Greaves remains the sole composer of the music, each composition emerging from his own emotional and creative impulse. The lyrical dimension is separate and equally personal. The words and themes are written by the vocalists themselves, each lyricist expressing their own feelings, experiences, and perspectives rather than interpreting someone else’s narrative. Belinda Kordic, Ryan Patterson, and Justin Storms each author their own texts, bringing distinct emotional viewpoints into the material.
Lyrically and thematically, Sceaduhelm is preoccupied with exhaustion as a condition rather than a moment, with time framed not as a healer but as an eroding force. Songs address burnout, grief, surveillance, institutional violence, and damaged intimacy, often blurring the line between the personal and the political. Musically, the album favours restraint over release, employing repetition, minimalism, and slow escalation to sustain tension without catharsis. Recorded across multiple locations and mixed with deliberate austerity, the record resists warmth, clarity serving discomfort rather than solace.
Within Crippled Black Phoenix’s wider catalogue, Sceaduhelm does not seek to resolve previous narratives or replicate past high points. Instead, it documents a moment of exposure and endurance, listening closely to what remains when spectacle fades and outrage exhausts itself. It stands as a severe, human record, concerned less with declaration than with persistence, and affirms once more the band’s refusal to stand still, soften its gaze, or offer easy answers.
Line-up:
Music – Greaves / Words — Patterson
Justin Greaves — Guitars, Drums, Samples
Ryan Patterson — Vocals
Belinda Kordic — Backing Vocals
Wes Wasley — Bass
Robin Tow — Percussion
Lucy Marshall — Synths
Apparently recorded at various times during 2023 to 2025 at:
Chapel Studios, Lincolnshire, UK
Engineered by Pieter Rietkerk
Additional sessions at:
Kapsylen Studio, Stockholm, Sweden
Engineered by Jörgen Jugglo Wall.
House Of Foto, Louisville, KY, USA
Engineered by Ryan Patterson
Mixed by Iver Sandøy at Solslottet Studio, Bergen, Norway.
Mastered by Magnus Lindberg, Stockholm, Sweden
Additional mixing by Pieter Rietkerk at Chapel Studios
Produced by Justin Greaves
Artwork by Erebus Art (Thanasis Stratidakis)
Thank to everyone who helped and supported this venture.
BIG thankye! to Kurt Ballou for his input and work on this album.
All CBP music published by Season Of Mist Publishing.
Lyrics for “No Epitaph, “The Precipice”, “Vampire Grave”, “Beautiful Destroyer”
Copyright 2026 Ryan Patterson (BMI)
Follow Crippled Black Phoenix:
Bandcamp: https://riseupandfight.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CBP444/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cbp_444/
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/artist/crippled-black-phoenix/251718934
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6WEyPcf9ezhNLm1xOBjbwH
Tidal: https://tidal.com/browse/artist/3607159
Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/artist/391823
Click image to watch the video
Metal Shock Finland (World Assault ) 