[5] Croatoan features session work from bass player Liam Wilson (The Dillinger Escape Plan and Burnside) and guitarist Jim Winters (Believer, Earth Crisis, Turmoil, and The Promise)[3] and the cover art was done by artist Paul Romano, who also worked with Mastodon, The Red Chord, Trivium, Earth, and Godflesh.
Alex Henderson of Allmusic has described their music as "dissonant, jagged, angular, and discordant as well as abrasive, noisy, violent, claustrophobic, and dense" and an "extreme sensory assault".
[2] The band has an unusual and eclectic panel of influences; tapping into the more experimental, angular sides of hardcore and metal spheres as well as other genres.
Singer Rennie Resmini's main vocal influences are Sinéad O'Connor, Diamanda Galas, Björk, Michael Gira (Swans), Nick Cave (The Birthday Party), Rob 'The Baron' Miller (Amebix), and Jaz Coleman (Killing Joke) among others.
The band have acknowledged that some of their primary musical influences include Voivod, Celtic Frost, Gorguts, Articles of Faith, Watchtower, Metallica, Atheist, Minor Threat, Confessor, Morbid Angel, Prong, Fates Warning and Iron Maiden; and have also shown appreciation for avant-garde composers such as Xenakis and Penderecki.
"[9] Starkweather's musical contemporaries include a handful of 1990s hardcore groups that fused dissonant and melodic elements in an unorthodox, complex manner (Stigmata, Only Living Witness and Sam Black Church); as well as bands like Rorschach, Deadguy, Bloodlet and Converge, who played a similarly angular and unusual style of metallic hardcore.