Krallice are one of the most prolific black metal bands of the last two decades. Scour Order is their latest LP, released via Profound Lore Records.
KRALLICE
There is something almost obsessive about the artwork of Scour Order. Drawn by Krallice guitarist and co-founder Mick Barr, it looks at first like one huge black shape against an almost completely empty white background. Look closer and it becomes something else: thousands of tiny marks, scratches and lines packed so tightly together that they eventually form one solid mass. It reminds me of the work of a tattooist, or a wood carver spending hours over the same piece, making one tiny incision after another until the individual marks disappear into the larger image. The more you stare at it, the more you find.
It took me some time to properly get into Scour Order. This is certainly not an easy-listening album, and I think you really need to look at the cover while listening to it to understand what the whole work is doing. At first the music can feel like one enormous, impenetrable block, but after repeated listens the smaller details start appearing. Guitars twist around each other, rhythms break apart and reform, vocals disappear into the distance and suddenly something you hadn’t noticed before becomes impossible to ignore.
YEARS PAST MATTER
My first encounter with Krallice was Years Past Matter, and my immediate reaction was something along the lines of dentist drilling during an earthquake. Guitars drilling into each other, drums going completely feral, everything happening at once. Total chaos. I didn’t necessarily understand what Krallice were doing at the time, but I remember the physical reaction to it. There was something abrasive, almost painful, about the music, yet there was clearly some kind of order buried underneath all that noise. Scour Order brought that feeling back, although this time the chaos feels more controlled and at the same time more vicious.
The title says a lot about what is waiting inside. To scour is to clean or rub something hard, usually with an abrasive tool, scraping away dirt, rust or unwanted layers. Order is the structure already in place, the established state of things. Put the two together and Scour Order sounds like a violent attempt to scrape away what has already been built. There is also something much older underneath the record: human hubris, fate, memory and retribution. The idea that humans can keep pushing beyond their limits, believing they can escape the consequences, only for something greater to eventually come along and correct them. That sense of consequence runs underneath the music, giving all the violence a reason to exist.
AGONAL SHINING
The title, Agonal Shining, is basically what you need to prepare yourself for. Agonal breathing describes an abnormal pattern of gasping or snorting that can happen when the brain is critically deprived of oxygen, and the title couldn’t feel more appropriate. For more than eight minutes the track is claustrophobic and syncopated, the guitars constantly tightening around the rhythm while the drums keep shifting underneath them. The vocals are pushed far back, little more than distant echoes, which makes the whole thing feel even more enclosed. It is not a song that invites you in; it feels as if you’ve been dropped somewhere inside it and left there.
Around the centre, the pressure suddenly drops. Everything becomes quieter, almost restrained, giving the impression that the struggle has stopped. It is a false truce. For a moment there seems to be enough space to breathe, but you already know it isn’t going to last. When the track comes back, it isn’t simply heavier. It becomes neurotic and syncopated, twitching and jerking towards the end as if the music itself is struggling to regain control. The calm only makes the final section more uncomfortable.
GRIEVOUS CORRECTOR
Grievous Corrector takes the idea of hubris and turns it into something physical. The title sounds like the force that arrives when human arrogance has finally gone too far, the inevitable correction waiting for anyone who believes they can ignore the rules.
There is something almost onomatopoeic about the song. The guitars and drums sound like impacts, collisions and things being violently pulled apart. It is strangely cinematic too, and I could easily imagine it accompanying a silent film. You can almost see some doomed character walking towards their fate while the soundtrack is already telling you that there is no way out. There is no need for a narrator; the music does all the talking.
SCOUR ORDER
And then there is the title track, Scour Order, which feels like the point where everything finally comes apart. The word scour stops being an idea and becomes something you can actually hear. The guitars sound abrasive, as though they are scraping against the inside of your skull, and there is a kind of obsessive rage running through the whole thirteen minutes. It isn’t simply anger. It sounds like a need to keep scraping, rubbing and stripping away until whatever is underneath finally appears.
Buried somewhere in the track is that deep, cavernous voice, barely emerging from the mass of sound. It sounds as if it is coming from somewhere underground, something old and unpleasant speaking from inside a cave. By then the album has become so dense that the voice feels less like another vocal performance and more like something that has been hiding underneath the whole record.
WHAT LIES BENEATH
This is where the artwork comes back into my mind. The tiny marks on the cover could be the work of a tattooist’s needle, patiently building a new image one scratch at a time. The album feels similar. Each song adds another mark, another layer, another incision, until everything eventually becomes one enormous black shape. What begins as meticulous work ends in something much more ferocious, as if the needle has stopped drawing and started scraping the skin raw.
Scour Order took time to reveal itself to me, and I think that difficulty is part of its character. It isn’t supposed to be comfortable or immediately accessible. Beneath all the drilling guitars, fractured rhythms and distant voices is an older idea: hubris eventually meets its correction. Humans build their orders, believe in their own permanence, and then something comes along and tears through them. Krallice have turned that idea into sound, and by the end, there isn’t much left standing.Is Scour Order another cosmic album? Another star in the firmament? Perhaps. But this time that star feels less interested in distant galaxies and more interested in what happens underneath them
Krallice: Bandcamp