Michigan bluegrass aficionado Billy Strings has showcased his numerous tastes and genre-shifting proficiency as a part of a brand new collaboration with Canadian dying steel outfit Cryptopsy.
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32-year-old Strings – who scored his third No. 1 on the Bluesgrass Albums chart in 2024 with Freeway Prayers – has lengthy been a famous fan of among the largest names on the planet of bluegrass and rock, although he’s steadily indicated that his tastes skew a bit heavier as properly.
That heaviness extends to Cryptopsy, the Montreal outfit who’ve been an energetic presence within the dying steel scene since their formation in 1988. Six years after their founding, the longer term Juno Award-winners launched their debut album, Blasphemy Made Flesh, with the file this yr receiving the reissue remedy.
As a part of mentioned reissue (which arrives on July 18), the album additionally contains reside cuts and a particular eight-and-a-half minute medley dubbed “Blasphemy Made Recent,” which incorporates visitor vocalists resembling Shadow of Intent’s Ben Duerr, Stabbing’s Bridget Lynch, Emasculator’s Mallika Sundaramurthy, and others, whereas Strings provides his personal guitar solo.
“We’re tremendous stoked at how excited every visitor was to be a part of this distinctive homage to Cryptopsy’s first basic,” vocalist Matt McGachy mentioned in an announcement. “We’re past happy with this medley and are so completely happy that we are able to now share it with our new and outdated followers.”
Per a press launch, the medley “sharpens and steels the album’s many surgical hooks and pathological rhythms,” with Strings additionally sharing his rabid pleasure at being concerned within the course of.
“Cryptopsy is my all-time favourite dying steel band,” he defined, earlier than recalling an evening in 2023 when each acts carried out in Boise, ID. Feeling “bummed” on the unlucky schedule conflict, Strings leaned on the Blasphemy Made Flesh observe “Open Face Surgical procedure” and gifted the group a cake that mentioned ‘Open Cake Surgical procedure.’”
A video of the group devouring the cake later made its method onto social media – a lot to Strings’ delight.
“It blew my thoughts!” he defined. “I used to be simply so completely happy I might no less than pay my respects within the type of frosting and that they didn’t assume I used to be a complete weirdo.”
“It was such an enormous honor for me so as to add this guitar solo to this insane medley by my favourite dying steel band,” he added in a post shared to social media. “This is sort of a dream come true for me and I need to thank the band for having me on it.”
The discharge of the Cryptopsy medley is the innovation reports addition to a month of ups and downs for Strings, who on Wednesday (July 16) received multiple nominations for the 2025 IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards – together with entertainer and album of the yr.
In late June, the musician revealed throughout a efficiency in Lexington, KY, that his mom had handed away simply hours earlier. “It was my determination to hold on with tonight’s present as a result of that’s what my mother would have needed me to do,” he advised the group. “The rationale I made a decision to not go residence and be with my household proper now’s as a result of I already am.”
Hearken to Cryptopsy’s “Blasphemy Made Recent” beneath.