(written by Islander)
I only had one song premiere to prepare for today and nothing else for us to share with you besides the review from Andy that opened our day. So I impetuously decided to pull together this roundup of new music.
The first two choices attracted my attention because their overlapping lineups include people who I think it’s fair to say are luminaries among discerning metal listeners, those of us who search for more than “the same old, same old”. These artists’ creative interests and impulses also often lead them in unexpected directions, so there was an important intrigue factor in making the choices.
The third choice was much more impulsive. I just decided to listen to the music of the last band to e-mail us yesterday, a band with no reputation I knew of, and only two demo songs to their name. I’m so glad I yielded to that impulse, and I hope you will be too.
KRALLICE (U.S.)
A new album is on the way from the Krallice quartet of Mick Barr (guitar, vocals), Colin Marston (guitar, vocals), Nicholas McMaster (bass, vocals), and Lev Weinstein (drums). According to yesterday’s announcement, the album’s intriguing name is Scour Order, and it’s set for release on September 18th by Profound Lore Records.
I read that the music for the album was commissioned and first performed at Roadburn 2026, so people who were there have a good idea of what’s coming. I was not there, and didn’t read any reviews of Krallice’s performance, so I have nothing but surprises ahead of me.
Along with that official album announcement yesterday came the album’s first single, its first surprise, “Living Useless Ritual“. Its rapidly vibrating guitars, both shrill and deep in tone, join together to create an impression of vast but unsettling magnificence, and the hurtling speed of the bass and drums adds to the music’s electrifying effects.
The riffing also quivers and contorts in ways that create even more distressing impressions; the bass bleakly throbs; and the vocals howl in madness. Ringing notes peal like chimes; deep buzzing motifs sound like some frightening beast feeding or tunneling toward prey or miserably moaning; monstrous growls maliciously roar; the guitars strikingly writhe and spiral; and the drum and bass patterns and speeds change constantly.
All the rapidly moving pieces create an intricate and elaborate spectacle, head-spinning and breathtaking but also unsettling. The unhinged raging vocals make it especially unsettling. Most people won’t be able to hear this just once and quickly turn away to something else, but are likely to return to it quickly, if only to better comprehend what has just happened.
Here are a few more details lifted from the album’s Bandcamp page: Mick Barr painted the album cover. “McMaster lyrics contain selections from the works of David Ferry & Aeschylus’ Oresteia. ‘Grievous Corrector’ is an interpolation of ‘Mnemosyne part 3’ by Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by David Ferry.”
https://linktr.ee/scourorder
https://krallice.bandcamp.com/album/scour-order
https://www.facebook.com/krallice/
BEASTLOR (U.S.)
Beastlor is the solo work of Krallice’s Mick Barr. Beastlor rears its head quite unpredictably. A first Beastlor demo appeared in 1998, followed by a second demo (album-length) 17 years later, and then followed by a debut album six years after that. That album, 2021’s Galaxies of Death, is how I caught on to Beastlor. I wrote about it here, and went on to include a song from it in my list of 2021’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs (here).
And now we have yet another surprise release from Beastlor, a second album that dropped without advance warning exactly two weeks ago. Its name is Allah, and it includes four new original songs (they appear to be songs either re-worked from or originally written for other Barr projects) and four cover songs, which draw upon originals by Moss Icon, Econochrist, Blonde Redhead, and Born Against). I wasn’t familiar with the original songs, or at least don’t have a good memory of them, but I doubt that matters because Barr has clearly put his own spins on them.
I won’t subject you to the tedium of a track-by-track review, even though the variations in the tracks create a great temptation to do that. But I will devote some specific attention to the way the album begins.
Two of the eight songs get very close to the 10-minute mark, and one of those — “Emptiness” — is what leads off. It’s described as a “reworking of ‘the great silence and emptiness’ by ocrilim, another Barr project). With drums feverishly hammering and the bass feverishly throbbing, the guitars create an uncomfortable but quite striking harmony of vividly ringing tones that seem to desperately pulsate and deeper tones that seem to dismally moan.
As those piercing, dissonant chimes continue ringing, the vocals wretchedly howl and other notes wail like a depleted warning siren that has lost everyone it cared for. Like the Krallice song above, “Emptiness” is elaborate and richly layered, and the vocals are shattering in their bloody-raw intensity.
As the song evolves, the riffing changes in ways that seem to channel even greater desperation and fear, as well as greater hopelessness. A spider-fingered guitar solo and another solo that sounds like a frantic violin performance make particularly striking impressions, but they also sound utterly distraught (though you might interpret them as utterly jubilant!), and there’s another solo which sounds even more instrumentally exotic that seems to introduce a Middle Eastern influence.
In short, “Emptiness” is anything but empty — it overflows with experiences, but with enough repetition of motifs to create a cohesive trip.
The rest of the songs warrant just as much attention and effort out of a writer (but won’t get that here), because each of them brings its own multitude of marvelous features, changing motifs, and altering moods. At least as I hear them, all of the original songs create breathtaking sensations of blazing delirium, extreme distress, ominous grandeur, and/or warlike ferocity.
Much the same could be said of Beastlor’s covers, though they also include moments of expansive sorrow, blood-rushing defiance, disturbing confusion, and astonishing wonder.
There’s really no relent in the music’s intensity anywhere in the album. For the most part, this is a head-long rush of elaborate black metal, with no real room for any settled breathing to be found anywhere, and likewise no calm space in which to let your brain stop spinning. I doubt you’ll mind that; I sure didn’t.
Allah is available as a digital download now. Mick Barr reports that a cassette version will be coming soon from Funeral Moon Records. At Bandcamp you can find the lyrics to all the songs, and the drop-down lyrics include the identification of where the songs came from.
https://beastlor.bandcamp.com/album/allah
https://mickbarr.info/
SEKTION VASORÉ (Germany)
Now we come to that band I mentioned in the intro, a band I knew nothing about who happened to be the last band who e-mailed us before I stopped looking at e-mail late yesterday afternoon.
Their name is Sektion Vasoré and they’re a trio who are located in Berlin. They’ve released two demo tracks of progressive black metal so far, one in April and one last week.
The first of the demo songs is “The Fallen Monarch“. Its eloquent but mysterious lyrics (available at Bandcamp) are in English. Based on the words, the fallen monarch seems to be a titanic tree, now decrepit and destroyed, now rotting and decayed, but the tree also may be a metaphor for every fallen monarch. The words end with praise for “the black swan!”
Musically, the song is as intriguing as the words. It’s built from slowly pealing notes that are a bit ragged around the edges and uncomfortably dissonant. That uneasy melody is backed by more rapidly cavorting drums and bass pulsations, which create a lively contrast to the stricken nature of the melody, and it’s fronted by harsh vocals that quickly shift from monstrous growls to mad screams.
That miserably chiming melody persists, but the band also introduce rapidly sizzling fretwork, furious drum outbursts, and riffing that insidiously slithers and furiously jabs, as well as glittering guitar solos that both exotically swirl and feverishly swarm. It’s a mind-bender, but simultaneously it’s also strangely dreamlike, a very colorful but unnerving hallucination.
Thankfully, the song is produced in a way that allows all the moving parts to stand out, which is ideal for such an elaborate, constantly morphing, and beautifully performed exercise (and believe me, I haven’t touched on all the ways in which the music morphs). In hindsight, although I didn’t know what to expect, this song is a natural fit for a collection that also includes the latest head-spinners from Krallice and Beastlor.
The more recent of the two Sektion Vasoré demo songs is “Im Fadenkreuz des Fleischgewehrs“, and its lyrics are in German. I ran everything through an online translator. It rendered the song’s title as “In the Crosshairs of the Flesh-Gun”. Like “The Fallen Monarch“, the lyrics also involve trees (rotting trees), but are more focused on something that lies beneath them, something pierced by the roots and coated by pollen. But the lyrics also shift into a mysterious depiction of “My warriors: The tip of the spear”, an army who stand in “the crosshairs of the flesh-gun”, and of the firing of those guns.
This song, like the one above, is very impressive. It begins with a frightening collage of indecipherable sounds and then takes off in a flurry of hammering drums, scampering bass tones, and deliriously swirling and shivering guitars. Again, the vocals seem to be coming for our throats, imperiously roaring and rabidly screaming.
And again, the music shifts like a rapidly spinning kaleidoscope. Some of the instrumental motifs quickly blare like fanfares; others maniacally squirm; and after a short pause, the song begins to sound like some kind of crazed orchestra performing at a mental asylum, with horns blazing and violins shivering (to be clear, this is just an impression, they’re not really using horns and violins); periodically, the drums explode in bursts of blast-beat ferocity, but mainly the drums and the bass are off on their own adventurous frolics.
I guess it’s obvious, but I found both of these songs to be enormous eye-poppers and jaw-droppers, and different enough from each other to prove that Sektion Vasoré are adventurous songwriters as well as exceptionally talented performers. I can’t wait to witness what they do next.
https://linktr.ee/sektion.vasore.official
https://sektionvasore.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/SektionVasore/