Codex Crudelitas exists because of a single sound. Alice Simard had been singing in her various death metal projects for years without cracking one specific technique: the low, wet slam guttural, closer to plumbing than to vocal cords, that anchors brutal death metal's bottom end. She calls it, without much ceremony, "that very specific toilet sound." The day she figured out how to make it, she started the band.
That's the origin story behind Incongruent Vacant Forms, her debut full-length as Codex Crudelitas, released on 7 February. Simard, twenty-two and based in Québec City, plays and sings everything on it herself, which is standard practice across her large catalogue of solo projects but takes on a different weight here, where the whole point was proving she could do the one vocal style she'd never managed alone.
The record sits at the far end of her range from something like Luminesce. There's no concession to melody, no chorus to hold onto, nothing resembling a hook. The vocals are wordless throughout, grunts and gurgles rather than lyrics, and the guitar writing keeps its technicality without softening into anything tuneful. It's a lineage record, indebted to bands like Heinous Killings and Putridity, the sort of brutal death metal built for people who already know what they're listening for.
What distinguishes it within that lineage is restlessness.
Where a lot of slam-adjacent brutal death metal settles into a groove and stays there, Incongruent Vacant Forms keeps shifting its drum patterns underneath the slower, moshable sections, closer in spirit to Meshuggah's rhythmic dislocation than to the genre's usual steady crush. The effect is less controlled aggression than something instinctive and slightly out of hand, an album that sounds like it was written by feel rather than by plan.
It's Codex Crudelitas's second release, following 2025's Tongue, Boiled EP, and its titles alone signal where Simard's head was: "Floating and Portioned Dorsum Wedges," "Truncated Torso," "Transplanted Wings." Clinical and grotesque in equal measure, they match a record that treats the body as raw material rather than subject.
Among the twenty-odd names Simard records under, Codex Crudelitas isn't the one built to convert anybody. It's the one built to finally use a sound she spent years trying to make, and having found it, she used it without restraint.
