Remnants of a species now forgotten

Musical approach

If you’re not one of the three people familiar with Krupskaya’s output or extreme music in general, you might find musing option the hows and whys of our sound somewhat redundant.

It’s loud, fast, bleak and thoroughly unpleasant – insert double entendre regarding my approach to romance here.

But there’s also a fair amount of thought and consideration that goes on under the hood. Making a racket is simple, but making a distinctly violent, physically arresting racket simply isn’t.

Alex (singer and engineer) invested a considerable amount of discussion and debate over how to structure each track and the album at large for maximum devastation. We wanted every track to have a distinct identity of its own while building on the successes and failures of the previous decade’s discography. Simliar in goal to the Sandokhan release, some ten years prior.

Utilising varied BPMs, conflicting time signatures and haphazard tonal changes, I generally consider Remnants Of A Species Now Forgotten to be the definitive Krupskaya record. There are certainly things that could’ve been executed better on the drums, but the overall result is an absolutely relentless, punishing violation of the senses.

Cover artwork

Krupskaya’s cover artwork is always fun. And by fun, I mean a ballache.

The execution has varied throughout our discography, but the method has often been the same – Alex and I both have ideas that are similar in the abstract, but varying opinions on the specifics.

We had some conceptual bits and pieces lying around from work I’d done toward a previous, unreleased record that made heavy use of branches, trees and other organic matter. Alex was keen on this and we spent several hours experimenting with different types of lighting, composition and emphasis.

Nailing a focal point was the difficult part and it wasn’t until we introduced the photograph of a model’s face that it came together. The depiction of humanity gradually being fractured and reclaimed by vague environmental forces naturally (if you’ll pardon the pun) worked thematically with many elements of the record.

Importantly though, it’s not an unattractive image. We wanted a sense of beauty in contrast to the atrocious noise listeners would find on the record itself. That juxdaposition of tone and subtle light amidst the engulfing darkness of our subject matter has been prevelant across all of our records. Here, we leaned into it far more heavily and I think the result is a cover which works symbolically as the culmination of Krupskaya’s output to that date.

Panel artwork

I wasn’t really interested in continuing that beauty inside the booklet and was essentially given free reign, creatively.

Alex handed me a several page word document which outlined the background narrative of the album itself. I wouldn’t describe it as a concept album, but there is a plot which each of the songs loosely tie into in addition to exploring themes/topics of their own.

My goal was to combine the underlying meaning of each song with visual associations I made with their general sound. Some of these work on individual panels, whereas others were better spread over two for a more panoramic, expansive feel.