Photo by: Paul Verhagen Photography
Official press release:
Krallice will unleash their new studio album, Scour Order, on September 18th via Profound Lore Records.
Standing among the most prolific bands in black metal, Krallice is Mick Barr, Colin Marston, Nicholas McMaster, and Lev Weinstein. Their saga began in 2007 in Woodhaven, Queens, New York City as a two-guitar collaboration between Marston and Barr with the intention of making a black metal record. After recording the first album with Weinstein on drums in 2008, Krallice quickly became an actual band adding McMaster on bass/vocals and playing its first shows.
The collective continued to record nine albums and three EPs with Marston on guitar, Barr on guitar/vocals, and McMaster on bass/vocals. The style was always dense and polyphonic, but after Years Past Matter (2012) and the Hyperion EP (2016), there was an opening of the sound, with less focus on black metal and hypnotic long songs.
The period of Ygg Huur (2015) through Mass Cathexis (2020) tends to be darker and less predictable musically. By 2017, Krallice started a collaboration with Dave Edwardson of Neurosis on vocals. For the Loum album (2017) he contributed all lyrics, vocals, synths, and cover art ideas. Since then, he’s also appeared with vocals on Mass Cathexis and Mass Cathexis 2 (2023).
In 2021, the band released a pivot album in terms of the lineup/instrumentation with Demonic Wealth. This album features Marston on all guitars, synths and songwriting, with Barr as the standalone vocalist and lyricist. Its lofi production, inclusion of synths on every song (including half the songs on the record with no guitar at all), and alternative compositional approach opened the Krallice sound further.
The next four albums and EP saw a solid instrumentation change with Barr switching to bass/vocals, McMaster switching to guitar/vocals, and Marston on synths, additional drums, and vocals. Moving from a dual guitar sound to one heavy with synths and only one guitar pushed the sound in a more atmospheric direction, less dense and dissonant than before but without losing those aspects completely.
Of the band’s last full-length offering, Inorganic Rites, The Needle Drop hailed, “the most cohesive and grandiose offering that Krallice has given us.” Sputnik Music noted, “Krallice continues to reshape their sound into coherent and accessible extreme music… yet another essential Krallice album,” while The Progressive Subway lauded a record that’s, “wildly forward-thinking for metal.”
For this year’s Scour Order, Krallice returns to the old instrumentation with Marston and Barr on guitars and McMaster on bass, but Marston’s vocals have stuck around. The new album is raging and dark, dense but also expansive. The band also returns to working with Profound Lore Records (who released the first three Krallice albums) after 15 self-releases with help from Gilead Media and P2.
In advance of the record’s release, today Krallice unveils the first single, “Living Useless Ritual”.
Scour Order will be released on CD, LP, cassette, and digital formats. Find all preorders HERE.
Scour Order track listing:
- “Agonal Shining”
- “Grievous Corrector”
- “Kill The Guardian”
- “Unceasing Path”
- “Living Useless Ritual”
- “Indecipherable Divinities”
- “Her Green Arms”
- “Scour Order”
