Cynic

Though the words are thrown about too freely nowadays, the Floridian quartet Cynic fully lived up to descriptive words such as “anomaly”, “unique” and “inimitable” – and all of this within the course of eight songs. Few would ever have suspected that the four musicians from the Miami area would ever leave a lasting mark, especially in the dawn of the 1990s. The band’s history is a long and storied one, but telling it here would simply take up space on dry information that can easily be found online.
Picking up the story in 1991, the band had already grabbed a fair amount of attention after a pair of well-received demos, but this was a different era altogether, though, where several deserving, technical, death metal-rooted acts unsigned and seeking label deals – a few of these bands within Cynic’s homestate of Florida alone. The underground was a living, breathing entity in this era, full of hand-copied demos that could only be obtained via tape trading or mail-order from the bands themselves and read about within fanzines and import-only magazines. The Internet and changing musical attitudes would see a wholly different climate emerge a scant decade later, but at the time, few were certain that such a band might ever find a record label...