For fans of Malevich, Scarcity, Thantifaxath, atmospheric black metal, and the old and significantly more brutal versions of beloved fairy tales, Scour Order by Krallice takes metal to the scales of classical mythology while avoiding mention of heroic redemption, leaving us in an unfathomably deep pit of despair. While others in the black-metal-adjacent space have used the genre’s combination of extreme intensity and orchestral expanse to take us to extreme heights of transcendental euphoria, Krallice ducks away from every opportunity to introduce the soaring chord progressions and open spaces required to reach catharsis. Instead, we find ourselves immersed in a tight labyrinth of mathy riffing only occasionally punctuated by the sweeping grandeur of those genre contemporaries, with this record’s sense of scale instead coming from an endless parade of twists and turns alongside the heart-pumping chaos of an extreme delivery. Those old heroic stories only make less sense as we experience more of the real world, leaving us with no fantasy but one of an even deeper, more intense state of despair than we find in the everyday mundane.
