01. Visions From A Past Life
02. Sovereign Blood
03. Burdened
04. Ashes Of Mine
05. When I Don't Remember You
06. Deafening
07. Sea Of Fangs
08. Dreamless Nights No Longer
09. Hollow Thresher
10. The Grand Design

It’s reliably satisfying to see one of the acts that we’ve covered in Clandestine Cuts take a step up and release a debut album, especially so if said album comes courtesy of a renowned label, as is the case here.

Canadian husband-wife two-piece Crown Of Madness turned several heads, including my own, with their second EP Elemental Binding in 2023; not only did the EP win that month’s Clandestine Cuts audience vote, but it also seems to have captured the attention of Transcending Obscurity, since their 2025 debut full-length Memories Fragmented is being released on the label. Elemental Binding was a sharp, fierce chunk of dissonant tech-death, and while I’ve generally become increasingly predisposed to enjoy disso-death, the execution on the 2023 EP was clearly above-average, with a good mixture of technical virtuosity, full-on extremity, calmer atmospherics and rewarding melodic touches. Intriguingly, however, while there’s a lot more content on Memories Fragmented, it actually feels more narrow in its focus than the preceding EP.

As mentioned before, Crown Of Madness are a duo, with Connor Gordon on drums and Sunshine Schneider handling the rest of the instrumentation and vocals. Both have ample opportunity to demonstrate their instrumental talents across the album, although opening instrumental “Visions From A Past Life” is a bit slower and more meandering than what follows. “Sovereign Blood” also exhibits restraint at the beginning; the shimmering guitar tremolo lingering over the first few seconds of the song is one of the few moments on the record that veers towards the melodicism heard in parts of the EP, but it’s not long before the full force of Crown Of Madness is unleashed, blasts, dissonant chords, janky technical riffs and all. The song is on the aggressive and discordant side overall, but there is a brief reprise of that melodic tremolo from the beginning towards the end.

There are further moments of downtime and shifts in tone as the record progresses, such as the subdued, haunting outro to “Burdened” and the bleak, crawling opening minutes of “Hollow Thresher”. That being said, the album is largely comprised of janky, discordant riffs and drums that are prone to erupting into blast beats at any moment. The band’s instrumental skills are very evident, and they do put those skills to good use on the record, although compared to recent records from other acts, the album arguably lacks the memorability of Sarcophagum’s The Grand Arc Of Madness or Scar Echoes by Dysgnostic, while also not possessing the sheer awe factor that Ulcerate manage to imbue into their maddening compositions.

That being said, there are highlights to be encountered across the record. “When I Don’t Remember You” is perhaps the peak of the album’s first half, reveling in slightly slower tempos and meandering through twisted grooves; the more measured pace of this song is highlighted by the contrast offered immediately afterwards by the fast and frenetic “Deafening”, which also grabs one’s attention with a chaotic solo midway through. Perhaps the standout song across the whole album is the one right at the end, as “The Grand Design”; after a blistering opening, it goes in a dirgelike direction around its halfway mark, and the dissonant arpeggiated chords give off a slightly erratic feel, but the mournful clean guitar passage afterwards does a great job of setting a melancholic tone for the song’s climax, which is elevated by really pleasant melodic guitar parts.

On the whole, I don’t think Memories Fragmented will be a landmark release in the flourishing modern disso-death scene, but it’s a very capable major label debut for Crown Of Madness that shows off many of the band’s emerging strengths.