Style: Avant-Garde Black Metal, Dissonant Black Metal, Progressive Metal (Harsh Vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Gorguts, Deathspell Omega, Blut Aus Nord
Country: USA (New York)
Release date: 18 September 2026

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Thump.

Cold, dark damp surrounds you. Trying to move your body, you’re met with resistance no matter the direction. Disoriented.

Thump.

Vibrations ripple all around you, through you, each accompanied by a muffled thud. They come at irregular intervals, but eventually you trace the point of origin, figuring that must be up.

Thump.

You start to dig, a whole body effort. Through trial and error, you realize wriggling provides the best results. The noise is closer now, the vibrations stronger.

THUMP.

WIth a final push, the front of your body pierces the firmament of your all-enveloping prison. Struggling, you pull yourself out into crisp air, onto soil, narrowly avoiding heavy footfall. Your eyes take longer to adjust to the light than you’d expect. You wish they hadn’t. Dreadful realization washes over every one of your senses: you’ve been turned into some grotesque worm-like creature. Primal fear jolts through your nervous system, an overwhelming longing for the safety of the earth below. 

Anyway, that’s kind of how Scour Order makes me feel when I listen to it. 

Krallice’s sixteenth(!) studio LP is something of an oddity in their discography, in that it’s a studio LP brought on by a live performance impetus. Commissioned by and first performed at Roadburn Festival 2026, Scour Order sees the band returning to their original line-up, dropping synths entirely, and fully leaning into the dense compositional abstractness which defined their initial records. For anyone who may be unfamiliar: Krallice plays a heady avant-garde style of dissonant black metal which they’ve evolved and refined for nearly two decades. Over the years, their style has stretched out to fill near twenty-minute song lengths, been condensed down to under four, injected with synths, recorded in a car with an Iphone; name a (big fuckin’) weirdo black metal technique, and Krallice have probably done it. Scour Order sees the band burn off all the acquired chaff, though, leaving just two guitars, bass, drums, and returning to their original instrument roles. Can Krallice maintain engagement with such a stripped back ethos, especially in the age of brain-rotted attention spans?

Well, let me turn off my Subway Surfers YouTube playlist on my second monitor, and let’s find out together. 

“Agonal Shining” kicks Scour Order off with deceiving straightforwardness: a march-like tom rhythm accentuates dual arpeggiated guitar lines, easing the listener into the crunchy harmonies and slippery melodies which comprise much of the album. Less than a minute into the track, blast beats and vocals interrupt the march, devolving fully into avant-garde black metal before returning right back to the opening idea not even thirty seconds later. Barely noticeable tempo shifts between such sections add a subtle vertigo, methodically disorienting the listener over the eight minute runtime. A call and response of sorts: “Agonal Shining” continues flipping between its marching advance and off-kilter detours, the latter becoming less and less ‘detour’ as the song goes on until—by the final third of the track—the avant-garde has fully assimilated any remaining notion of status quo. In this sense, the track is (relatively) something of a slow burn; instead of instantly throwing the listener off the deep end, Krallice are akin to an anglerfish patiently watching the listener drift into the pitch-black depths of its maw before snapping its jaw shut—a mercy, perhaps. 

The rest of Scour Order is not so kind. Dropping all pretenses of normalcy, Krallice weave through nearly an hour of labyrinthine dissonance, caring not if the listener is able to keep up. Winding riff passages brought upon by contrapuntal-esque guitar consistently deny any consistent aural landmark. As soon as one finds any semblance of footing, a violent deluge of detail knocks away all balance: melodies are alien and inhospitable, harmonies are dissonant and off-putting, and the way each instrument interacts with the other is less symbiotic and more antagonistic. Riffs seemingly crawl up out of some pit in the earth, eldritch and wriggling and formless until actually listened to, squirming under the harsh light of observation. The ear becomes accustomed to this sound over time, but Krallice saves the most challenging and rewarding listens for the last three tracks. “Indecipherable Divinities” opens with perhaps the harshest dissonance found on Scour Order, bringing to mind the harmonic hostility of Jute Gyte; “Her Green Arms” features a remarkably open arrangement which slowly constricts around the listener over its nearly 9-minute runtime: closer “Scour Order” is even longer, clocking in at thirteen minutes, and hearkening back to the drifting, meditative, and relatively consonant compositional ethos which defined the first four Krallice records—a wonderfully cathartic ending. 

Repeat listens here are undoubtedly a necessity, one which Scour Order rewards in spades. While devoting multiple hour-long listening sessions to a record as dense and adverse as this may seem daunting, Krallice are nothing if not considerate. Ok, that may be overstating things, but Krallice do do (heh) a great job at ensuring the listening experience itself is as smooth as possible. Scour Order boasts a wonderful production, one which many have come to expect from Marston’s studio: Menegroth, The Thousand Caves. Mids and highs are crystal clear, the low end has a satisfying heft, and the instruments blend in a texturally satisfying way while still allowing room for details of their interplay to be easily parsed. I’ve always particularly loved the way Lev Weinstein’s kick drum sounds: there’s a dry reverb which adds an extra textural dimension all its own, especially as it washes over each other instrument, and it just scratches some particular itch of mine. Additionally, Krallice does a stellar job of maintaining balance between dissonance and consonance throughout Scour Order’s runtime. Sure, there’s more dissonance by a longshot, but the brief pockets of consonance which do show up are precisely placed and necessary; each are doubly effective because of the other, simultaneously egging each other along while acting as dialectical respites of sorts. 

Scour Order is the strongest Krallice album since 2017’s Go Be Forgotten, and a large part of that success comes from the back-to-basics approach taken by the band here. After so many years of intense experimentation, Scour Order’s lack of massive synth soundscaping and re-focus on the dense, longform compositional thoroughness which defined their earlier works proves that sometimes it’s best to just keep it simple, stupid. Alright, well, Scour Order is anything but simple, but you get it. The fact that this record was composed specifically for a live performance setting, yet translates so well to being recorded is a testament to the band’s talent and experience. Krallice certainly have nothing to prove at this point in their career, but I’m sure glad they still have more to say. 

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Recommended Tracks: Agonal Shining, Indecipherable Divinities, Scour Order
You may also like: Yellow Eyes, Thantifaxath, Castevet, Anicon, Aosoth
Final verdict: 8.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Profound Lore Records

Krallice is:
– Mick Barr (guitar, vocals)
– Colin Marston (guitar, vocals)
– Nicholas McMaster (bass, vocals)
– Lev Weinstein (drums)