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 “forward thinking,” “genre transcending,” and “pile of unlistenable hipster wankery,” 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?
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 (“Kill the Guardian”, “Her Green Arms”) 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 (“Grievous Corrector”) and creatively applied cymbal transitions (“Unceasing Path”) real life and energy under the alien soundscapes.
In a broad sense, Scour Order opts for oppressive atmospheres over straight lead-pasta1 or riffy assaults. Many dissonant chord progressions are prolonged with more repetitions than you’d 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. “Indecipherable Divinities” 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’s Absolute Elsewhere in mood if not in form. Title track “Scour Order” 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.
Though the production is unsurprisingly excellent, it does serve to emphasize the album’s 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’t save cuts like the needlessly empty and sustained tremming of “Her Green Arms” or the wandering “Unceasing Path.” Krallice is too technically proficient a band to declare something to be “badly composed” 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’s penchant for lasting impact. Highlights certainly exist; the aforementioned synth in “Indecipherable Divinities”, the crash-out solo closing “Agonal Shining”, the almost mournful ending of “Living Useless Ritual” chief among them. But Krallice at their best exude skill in exhausting, engaging longform journeys, and it’s almost a foreign concept to discuss any of their works in terms of “highlights” and not in terms of songs.
The most stereotypical conclusion here would posit that “If you’re a fan of Krallice, you’ll like this; if you aren’t, this won’t change your mind.” Unfortunately, Scour Order falls well below the peak of the band’s best work in the modern or vintage era, while having enough warts that it might convince those who already don’t 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 (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 “sounds like another Krallice album.” 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’s Law of Diminishing Recordings, but time will tell if this is just a fine-tuning of the band’s musical vision for the future, or if future works are doomed to go be forgotten.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Profound Lore Records
Website: Album Bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: September 18th, 2026
