{"id":603344,"date":"2026-09-17T15:28:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T15:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/603344\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T15:28:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T15:28:11","slug":"krallice-scour-order-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/603344\/","title":{"rendered":"Krallice – Scour Order Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"It only takes the opening 1-2-3-4 salvo of Scour Order to dare believe the eternally divisive Krallice are trying to make a return to their roots. Ever shifting, ever evolving, the dimensional bleed-triggering outfit have spent their entire career contorting black metal into their spacey, math-infused vision of weird. Receiving affirmations as conflicting as \u201cforward thinking,\u201d \u201cgenre transcending,\u201d and \u201cpile of unlistenable hipster wankery,\u201d the band have spent the last eighteen years with a constant stream of activity and output, answering to and guided by no one but the calls of their own internal demonic wealth. Album fifteen, Scour Order arrives offering something of a constructional throwback, with the band returning to a two-guitar approach, as co-founder and studio producer extraordinaire Colin Marston returns to the strings after a long stint at the keys. Does this rebuild promise a return to the Cascadian expansiveness of yore, or to still more confusing territories ahead?<\/p>\n

In tone and timbre, Scour Order tries to fuse the epic, treble-heavy canvas of Years Past Matter with the slightly thicker progressions of Ygg Huur. Excised are most of the synths and the rawer tones of records like Psychagogue, with the fractal-imploding counterpoint of the returning twin guitars used to immediate effect. Across the album, Colin and fellow guitarist\/vocalist Mick Barr carry the listener from diseased harmonies to tense, sudden stutter-start riffing (\u201cKill the Guardian\u201d, \u201cHer Green Arms\u201d) where certain progressions seem to linger just a few measures longer than they should, bolstered by the fantastic drumming of Lev Weinstein. His performance is of extra note, with the clarity of the mix (particularly after the more traditionally blackened mix of more recent fare) allowing his delightful snare fills (\u201cGrievous Corrector\u201d) and creatively applied cymbal transitions (\u201cUnceasing Path\u201d) real life and energy under the alien soundscapes.<\/p>\n

\ufeffScour Order by Krallice<\/a><\/p>\n

In a broad sense, Scour Order opts for oppressive atmospheres over straight lead-pasta or riffy assaults. Many dissonant chord progressions are prolonged with more repetitions than you\u2019d expect from modern Krallice, with a heavy emphasis on tension-building terms which get rode out to the breaking point. Unfortunately, this has the side-effect of rendering the release as more meandering than thrilling, though focused listens allow bright spots to crash through the surface. \u201cIndecipherable Divinities\u201d breaks out the synth for a brief time while the chords seamlessly transition into something almost spaced out and optimistic, having much in common spiritually with Blood Incantation\u2019s Absolute Elsewhere in mood if not in form. Title track \u201cScour Order\u201d manages an excellent fusion of its old-school vastness of vision with modern-day sheen and adventurousness, with vocals which could pass for death metal and an extended instrumental closing which rings of glorious catharsis.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Though the production is unsurprisingly excellent, it does serve to emphasize the album\u2019s weaknesses as well. Bassist Nicholas McMaster is given tons of breathing room for his perpetual twanging to glide under the current of notes, though his own virtuosity can\u2019t save cuts like the needlessly empty and sustained tremming of \u201cHer Green Arms\u201d or the wandering \u201cUnceasing Path.\u201d Krallice is too technically proficient a band to declare something to be \u201cbadly composed\u201d without sounding stupid, but much of Scour Order is spent being taken on a journey of musical virtuosity with little in the way of the band\u2019s penchant for lasting impact. Highlights certainly exist; the aforementioned synth in \u201cIndecipherable Divinities\u201d, the crash-out solo closing \u201cAgonal Shining\u201d, the almost mournful ending of \u201cLiving Useless Ritual\u201d chief among them. But Krallice at their best exude skill in exhausting, engaging longform journeys, and it\u2019s almost a foreign concept to discuss any of their works in terms of \u201chighlights\u201d and not in terms of songs.<\/p>\n

The most stereotypical conclusion here would posit that \u201cIf you\u2019re a fan of Krallice, you\u2019ll like this; if you aren\u2019t, this won\u2019t change your mind.\u201d Unfortunately, Scour Order falls well below the peak of the band\u2019s best work in the modern or vintage era, while having enough warts that it might convince those who already don\u2019t like them to like them just a little less. There really is plenty to enjoy for the seasoned fan in terms of familiarity of mood and presentation. Despite this, I cannot escape the fact that while albums like Crystalline Exhaustion<\/a> (to say nothing of works like Dimensional Bleedthrough) pulled me in by virtue of their pillar-to-post sense of discovery, Scour Order sits in the respectable, yet disappointing tier of \u201csounds like another Krallice album.\u201d The peaks are very high indeed, and the bookending tracks deserve to be included in playlists for newcomers to the band for the rest of forever. I have too much faith to declare this the first real assault of AMG\u2019s Law of Diminishing Recordings, but time will tell if this is just a fine-tuning of the band\u2019s musical vision for the future, or if future works are doomed to go be forgotten.<\/p>\n

Rating: 3.0\/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Profound Lore Records<\/a>
Website: Album Bandcamp<\/a>
Releases Worldwide: September 18th, 2026<\/p>\n

\n\tGive in to Your Anger:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It only takes the opening 1-2-3-4 salvo of Scour Order to dare believe the eternally divisive Krallice are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[2246,9654,155380,842,24614,156,297268,157,111,139,69,297269,762,763,297270,289388],"class_list":["post-603344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-2246","tag-3-0","tag-american-black-metal","tag-black-metal","tag-blood-incantation","tag-entertainment","tag-krallice","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-profound-lore-records","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-scour-order","tag-sep26"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}