On 18 September 2026 Krallice put out a record on Profound Lore Records for the first time since the label issued the band's first three albums, with twelve self-released full-lengths and four EPs stacked up in between.
The quartet that spent its recent past hanging synthesisers off its own frame, Mick Barr and Colin Marston on guitars, Nick McMaster on bass and Lev Weinstein on drums, has gone back to the instrumentation it was built with, and on Scour Order Barr and Marston tear the cladding off the building and leave the steel standing in the open weather. Eight songs. Sixty-three minutes.
Marston recorded, mixed and mastered all of it himself in his rebuilt studio, the new Menegroth, The Thousand Caves, the first album to come out of the place, and he did it with a guitar in his hands rather than a keyboard, which is the first time that has been true across a whole record since well before Inorganic Rites went out in July 2024. There are two ways to hear the result. A band back at full powers, holding the counterpoint nobody else ever managed to copy, or one more album in a run that has never paused long enough for anyone to miss it. Both readings are looking at the same eight songs. The first one is the true one, and the reason is structural rather than sentimental.
Where the load goes
What comes back is the lattice: two guitars bolted into one another at every joint, a truss where most bands put a riff, each line holding up the weight of the other and neither of them worth much alone. The writing around it is tighter than it has been in years, tremolo figures cut down to what they actually need and repetitions taken out instead of counted off. "Agonal Shining" opens the door with more melody than this band normally spends on a first track, then walks out of it on a solo that crashes rather than resolves. "Living Useless Ritual", the first song let out into the world back in July and gone again in under six minutes, ends mournfully and makes that economy audible in a single stroke. "Kill the Guardian" does the dirty work: the most direct thing on the album, angular and hard-edged, the second song released ahead of the record and the one that argues the whole method in seven and a half minutes.
McMaster's bass is what makes the frame live, moving against both guitars rather than underneath them, and Weinstein works the kit the way a rivet gun works down a girder, a jazz player's snare fills and cymbal transitions turning corners no blast beat can take. The mix is where this record is genuinely arguable. Guitars forward and clean, drums clear enough to follow stick by stick, the bass set back far enough that some of the tensile pull between it and the guitars is lost on the way. Both of those things are true at once, and the second costs more than the first gains.
Three of the four men sing, and they do not sing the same way: a shriek in the high register, a growl well below it, and a flat shouted voice between the two that belongs to neither. It is the least remarked of this band's weapons and one of the reasons these songs never settle into a single colour. The synthesisers have not been thrown out either. "Indecipherable Divinities" keeps them, thinned down to a slow sci-fi glow hung on the structure instead of standing in for it, which is the whole difference between this album and the stretch that came before it.
The spans that carry nothing
Which makes the fault easier to see, because the fault is not minutes. "Her Green Arms" is where this record splits hardest, and the split is real: sustained passages with the tension let out of them, going nowhere a first listen would follow, or odd-timed and lacerating and paying out properly only on the third or fourth pass. Both of those are in the song. On any honest reading the first is what it does most of the time, and "Unceasing Path" holds open bars of the same empty kind, sustained because the shape expects something there. Girders riveted into position where no load ever arrives. Nothing rests on them.
Then the record answers its own charge. "Scour Order" runs thirteen minutes and goes up storey by storey, guitar layers and synthesisers bolted on as it climbs, a passage of cosmic drift near the top that ought by rights to sound like a different band and does not, the high shriek set against the low growl in the last third, black metal all the way up and still plainly the work of the four men who opened the album. It breaks the mould and reaches the summit in the same quarter of an hour. The longest song here is also the best one, which disposes of the complaint about sixty-three minutes and replaces it with a harder question about what the other fifty are holding up.
The longest song here is also the best one, which disposes of the complaint about sixty-three minutes and replaces it with a harder question about what the other fifty are holding up.
So the steel is back in the open and the steel holds. Anyone who lost this band somewhere in the keyboard years has the clearest way back in that has been offered in a long time, and anyone who came for the weather those keyboards were making will find it rationed down to one song and a coda. What it costs to skip is the closing quarter of an hour, the best structure these four have put up in years and the argument the whole album exists to make. The frame is bare again. Two spans of it carry nothing, and the rest of it carries everything.