Are you a giant death metal nerd? Then you need to hear this very obscure demo from a great death metal band that never really got the recognition that they deserve… and then check out my full series on exactly this topic right here.
For every obscure death metal band where you can at least reconstruct a partial history, there’s a project like Croon — a near-total mystery whose music survives almost entirely without context. I know exactly three things about Croon: they’re from Finland, they released a single demo called #1 in 1996 on cassette, and more people really need to hear this thing.
Croon‘s sole demo feels like a product of listening to the groovier aspects of death metal at the time — namely Carcass — along with some straightforward rock, as evidenced by the second song “Irritate… Enjoy,” and anything from the Gothenburg melodic death metal scene of the time.
Just when you think you’ve got this demo pegged, Croon will throw something totally unexpected — like the Moog synth lines on the final track “Transcending Form of Innovation,” which sound like they could have been inspired by Cynic or Nocturnus.
Unfortunately, there’s just not much else out there about this band. Nobody in the band seems to have gone on to have a career in music aside from some scattered bands before and after Croon, there are no band photos that I could find, and there’s really no in-depth information beyond scans of the J-card from the cassette — and even that just has basic info like the track list, band name, demo name, and where it was recorded.
All that being said, #1 is still a fascinating little snapshot of what was going on in southern Finland at the time in terms of metal. If you’ve got 15 minutes and an appreciation for the stranger corners of mid-’90s melodic death metal, Croon is 100% worth your time.
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