KRALLICE - Scour Order

Krallice, from New York, are a very tight-knit band (the line-up has remained unchanged since their founding in 2007) and, as a result, tireless: “Scour Order” is their fifteenth album, and remarkably the eighth since 2020!
Their music has been hailed by a large crowd of extreme metal enthusiasts, but there's been no shortage of detractors who've branded them too complex and cerebral: indeed, anyone who doesn't appreciate dissonance, progressions or assorted technicalities can rightly look elsewhere.

It wasn't going to be easy to match the results of the recent “Inorganic Rites” (2024), yet the new album still delivers a solid hour-plus of quality material. It's often purely instrumental, since especially in the longer tracks there's little room for Nicholas McMaster's raw screaming (at times guttural): “Agonal Shining” or the never-ending title track that closes the record showcase constant tempo shifts, endless twists and turns, and a surgical precision where every piece of the puzzle finds its place. When the runtime shortens (“Grievous Corrector” or “Living Useless Ritual”), the substance doesn't change, because Krallice feed on avant-garde ideas and sudden progressions even when the task at hand seems less daunting.

If the early Voivod had played some primordial form of proto-black metal, they probably wouldn't have strayed too far from a track like “Kill The Guardian”. It's a fact that the influences running through “Scour Order” are firmly rooted in the past (think also of Ved Buens Ende…), a structural foundation that Krallice then reinvent and reshape according to the tenets of new-generation extreme metal.
It hardly matters if “Indecipherable Divinities” and “Her Green Arms” turn out less thrilling than the other compositions; there's a whole world here to explore, one you have to let swallow you whole without blinking (starting with the cover art: abstract but rather ugly to look at, yet perfectly in keeping with the sonic tangle the band puts forward). This is a cerebral record, for those who love losing themselves in the labyrinths of music.

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29/09/2026