Band:	Caratucay
Album:	Nocturnes Of The Incarcerated
Style:	Melodic death metal, Progressive death metal
Release date:	February 2023

01. Captivi Te Salutant
02. Paralysis
03. Psychotorture
04. Plethora
05. Hiraeth
06. Sunken
07. From Abyss To Kingdom Come
08. Pathfinder
09. Deceptive Haven
10. Moonlight


Last year was an immense year for extreme prog metal, to the extent that not only was the category stacked in our awards, and not only did some killer albums just miss out, but some more great albums weren’t even really close to getting in. There is a rush of inspiration in the genre at the moment, one that raises the standard for all up-and-coming bands aiming to impress. With their sophomore album Nocturnes Of The Incarcerated, Caratucay hope to do just that.

The Germans aren’t necessarily new kids on the block, though; their first live show happened all the way back in 2009. It’s been a steady journey since, however; a couple of demos were eventually followed by their 2018 debut, Deranged Serenades, and a half-decade later, album number 2 has arrived. At 68 minutes in length, Nocturnes Of The Incarcerated is one of those albums where you can feel some of those years on display in the songwriting, which is expansive, ambitious and refined.

Musically, listeners of this album can expect a progressive death metal album that spills semi-frequently over into tech-death, but which also has its fair share of groove and melody. The first meaningful riff on the album is the one that opens “Paralysis”, a barrage of ominous tremolo. After a measured beginning, the song chops and changes between sharp-edged technical riffing, brute force blasting, gnarly grooves and scene-stealing melodic guitar soloing, with a tasteful clean interlude with jazzy bass topped off with a metalcore-worthy gang shout passage. Without having any of the album’s most memorable moments, it’s a solid initial encapsulation of Caratucay’s ability to shift between extremity, complexity, and pure riffing.

In terms of more memorable moments, subsequent track “Psychotorture” has a nifty lead guitar riff in the chorus that easily draws one’s attention, “Hiraeth” has some nasty basslines, and “Sunken” features intense but rich tremolo-driven textures in its stirring closing minutes. Also included in these closing minutes on "Sunken" are some faint but effective clean-sung backing vocals; clean singing takes a slightly more prominent role on subsequent track “From Abyss To Kingdom Come”, a shorter and softer song, but one with a powerful second half that finds the right balance between melancholic yet also menacing.

The aforementioned clean vocals on this duo of songs are still quite low in the mix, and only taking the form of wordless melodies. For the album’s two longest songs, “Pathfinder” and 13-minute closer “Moonlight”, the band dial up the progginess and bring the clean vocals slightly more into the fray. Opening with a very brief snippet (20 seconds, so very brief) of acoustic balladry, “Pathfinder” pushes the softer side of Caratucay to more delicate levels than arguably anywhere else prior to it on the album, while also featuring tech-death segments that rival the chaos on the album’s techiest song, “Plethora”. “Moonlight”, meanwhile, is clearly intended as the piece de resistance, packing all of the band’s extremity in alongside some instantly hooky melodeath guitar leads, and more notably a dramatically doomy detour at the two-thirds point, with pained dual clean vocal cries followed up by a super-hooky tremolo riff.

With all this array of riffing, soloing, screaming, (briefly) singing and everything else that’s going on, how does Nocturnes Of The Incarcerated stack up to the prog-death standard set by the class of 2022? Pretty nicely, it has to be said; I’m not sure they have either the reputation or the undeniable excellence to say with confidence they would have got a nomination, but this is certainly a sufficiently strong and satisfying record to go toe-to-toe with some of those records. Caratucay find a pretty good balance between the tech-death, melodeath, and plain death; the softer detours and interludes have room to become more memorable or moving, as the standout moments of the album predominantly lurk on the more extreme side of the record’s musical range, but on the whole this is a really decent album with the quality to draw attention even amidst so many other strong efforts.