In the undercurrent of Lexington, KY’s heavy music scene, few bands hit as viscerally as CROP. Since forming in 2020, this four-piece—Marc Phillips (vocals), Zach Hunter (guitar), Braun Dabney (bass), and Andrew Beauvier (drums)—has crafted a sound that feels both dangerously raw and unflinchingly refined, grounded in the crushing gravity of 90s grunge but stretched into something darker, doomier, and entirely their own.
Their upcoming release, S.S.R.I, out August 22nd, 2025 via Third House Communications, is not just a sophomore album—it’s a psychological unearthing. Across 34 minutes and 46 seconds, CROP spirals through the internal wreckage of grief, acceptance, self-sabotage, and survival, wrapped in distortion thick enough to suffocate and lyrics sharp enough to bleed. The record opens with the instrumental “Flatline,” a bleak curtain rising on what feels like the soundtrack to a personal apocalypse. It quickly plunges into “Formaldehyde,” a brutal retelling of witnessing someone’s decline into suicide. Though written about another person, the song’s crushing weight comes from how that loss imprinted itself on the narrator. “We barely impacted each other in life,” Marc Phillips says, “but in death, he left a mark that felt deeper than final.”
From there, S.S.R.I never lets up. “Goddamn” captures the exhausting rhythm of living on a cycle of hope and collapse—a furious, almost desperate search for something real in the chaos. On “10-56,” the theme turns inward. It’s a song about getting what you always thought you wanted, only to feel it destroy you from the inside. “It’s everything I needed,” Phillips explains, “and that made it worse.”
But it’s “Alone” that feels like the album’s emotional core. Rooted in the moment of a breakup, it’s less about heartbreak and more about clarity—the realization that sometimes the loneliness you feel with someone is more suffocating than the loneliness without. In that recognition, there’s peace, but it’s the kind of peace that leaves scars.
The band returns to instrumentals with “Breath,” offering a sliver of space before the final blow. The closer, “Break,” is both an anthem and an epitaph—an existential gut-punch that challenges the very idea of what it means to pursue a dream that might be killing you. “Life isn’t supposed to be safe,” the band insists. “Find what you love and let it kill you.”
Produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered by Jason Groves, S.S.R.I is a wholly realized vision—uncompromising, loud, and emotionally devastating. The artwork, created by Josh Flowers, reflects the stark internal landscape the album traverses: raw, unfiltered, and impossible to ignore.
CROP has been making noise far beyond their Kentucky roots, with appearances at Ohio Doomed and Stoned, Maryland Doomfest, LegalizeLex, Magbar Musicfest, Holler of Doom, and RPM Fest. They’ve toured alongside HASHSTRONAUT, HORSEBURNER, TEMPLE OF THE FUZZ WITCH, and SHI, and shared stages with genre-defining acts like WEEDEATER, CONAN, REZN, BONGZILLA, and more. It’s no surprise LEO Weekly hailed them as “one of Kentucky’s best metal bands,” or that Riff Zealot called their music “a beautiful cacophony of pleasure and pain.”
As S.S.R.I prepares to launch, CROP will hit the road again with shows stretching from Asheville to Baltimore, culminating in a homecoming album release show in Lexington on September 5th at Al’s Bar.
To hear CROP is to feel something uncomfortably human—something bruised and bleeding, but still standing.