Review: Krallice ‘Scour Order’
I spent a lot of time with New York’s progressive black metal kingpins Krallice in the late 2000s and early 2010s, indulging in their experimental and expansive take on a genre that is notorious for its rigidity at times, and I have a great fondness for that 09-15 era of the band.
Like many of that time, I fell behind on their work for a while, and when I revisited some of their 2020s material, I found a strangely synth-led, soundscape-drenched black metal that felt at odds with my memories.
However, when I learned of their new record Scour Order, commissioned by the legendary Roadburn Festival and first performed there in 2026, I was intrigued to see if this would make me fall back in with one of the genre’s most thought-provoking acts.
Coming back to a band you’ve loved in the past but lost touch with is not always an easy journey to make. Opening track Agonal Shining has much of the Krallice I remember but not as much of the atmospheric weight of, say Dimensional Bleedthrough. It feels more of a discordant, orthodox approach and yet allows an almost accessible streak to show through the spidery, proggy guitar melody lines. Perhaps that’s a result of it being a Roadburn commission. You can’t really expect their more expansive, synth-driven material to command the same live reaction as the insistence of virulent black metal.
It’s a fascinating experiment that becomes more and more evident as the album progresses; spaciousness is not an element that appears often; rather, Scour Order is an album that overwhelms and bombards you with black metal adventurism. Tracks like Kill The Guardian and Indecipherable Divinities feel like an effort to reach back to those early days but keep their evolution over the past fifteen years as part of that. The frantic guitars spiral and splice around Nicholas McMaster on bass, who is the lynchpin of most of these songs and remains steadfast above Lev Weinstein on drums, who is putting in the performance of a lifetime.
a shimmering blend of majestic atmospheric black metal and jagged, dissonant fireworks…
The sound is multilayered, oppressive and clattering and yet constantly moving towards something bigger than itself. When you get those touches of synth, they’re placed to enhance from the back rather than take over the whole song. They give a sense of scope that the black metal front and centre rarely allows. It leaves something like Her Green Arms as this sublime aberration of melody, a shimmering blend of majestic atmospheric black metal and jagged, dissonant fireworks that is impossible to let go of.
As the thirteen-minute track ebbs and flows between molten torrents, cold atmospheric spaces and serpentine, flowing fury, this isn’t an album you can assess easily on a first listen, providing a lot of complexity and expansive songwriting that takes time to really dig into. If you’re an old Krallice fan, like me, it feels jarring at first and then as time passes, it begins to seep beneath the surface and stroke odd synapses into a state of heightened tension. You’re never quite sure where it is going, but you remain transfixed on the journey.
It is both cutting-edge and, rarely for Krallice, an album that brushes with a nostalgia for their early sound, but make no mistake, they are still creating music that is beyond most of our reckoning. Scour Order is worth the investment, though, as Krallice prove once again that they are an essential band for the future of esoteric, progressive black metal.
Label: Profound Lore Records
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Sandy Williamson
