Krallice, as a rule, do not look back. The prolific New York quartet has long been identified with the experimental black metal movement—that is, black metal carried out as a series of experiments, yielding a rich body of empirical evidence that’s been folded into their ever-evolving sound. Lev Weinstein has drummed on each of the band’s albums since 2008’s introductory Krallice, but that’s been their only true constant. Mick Barr, Colin Marston, and Nicholas McMaster have all switched instruments and traded off on vocal and songwriting duties. Dave Edwardson from Neurosis was welcomed into the fold for a few albums. Synthesizers showed up one day and, for stretches, supplanted the guitars entirely. Every step Krallice have taken has felt like a step into the unknown, until now. Scour Order, the band’s synth-free 16th full-length, returns the band to its original configuration, with Barr and Marston on guitar and McMaster on bass. It plays like Krallice’s first-ever concession to nostalgia.

That isn’t a bad thing. Krallice might come off like nerdy purveyors of what was once called “thinking man’s metal,” but on their first few albums, they stacked flurries of frenetic guitar riffs and barrages of blasting drums into songs that were engaged with black metal’s original texts. Before Krallice, Barr and Marston were best known for playing in obtuse, math-y instrumental bands; they teamed up because they thought it would be fun to channel Darkthrone. As they drifted from those founding principles, the music, while always compelling, could occasionally lose some of its blood-pumping immediacy. Scour Order returns black metal to the core of Krallice. Its songs are tightly wound and doggedly riff-oriented, the sense of spaciousness on the synth-era albums all but obliterated. The compositional cleverness and destabilizing use of counterpoint that have always buoyed Krallice’s music is still evident, but it’s also clear that they’re having a blast just letting it rip.

That feeling arrives early and doesn’t let up. Opening track “Agonal Shining” builds to a magisterial peak, with trebly, ascending riffs darting through the gaps left in Weinstein and McMaster’s tricky rhythmic interplay. Then, at the five-minute mark, the guitarists hold onto a quavering high note while Weinstein pushes the tempo. When the riffage returns, it’s in thrash time, with Barr and Marston galloping at full speed for the remainder of the song, trading crunching riffs and warped leads with evident delight. Repeatedly, the brief pockets of air in these songs seem to exist primarily to set the stage for the heavy bombardments that follow, and Marston’s clear, unfussy production ensures that every note is heard, no matter how dense the playing gets. On 2024’s Inorganic Rites, Krallice’s last proper LP, the band frequently leaned into vast, minimal expansiveness, with extended slow sections and kosmische synth drones. Scour Order runs a similar length at 63 minutes, but it stuffs that space with what feels like thrice the riffs.

Scour Order was written to fulfill a commission from the Netherlands’ venerable Roadburn Festival, which may suggest why it turned out the way it did. Past Krallice albums were studio creations, and the experimental impulses they captured didn’t necessarily have to be recreated onstage. In writing explicitly for a live show for the first time in their history, Krallice seem to have reminded themselves what works best in that environment—pulse-pounding riffs, molten solos, moments of big emotional payoff. The band’s eccentricities are still here, but they’re sublimated into songs like the furious “Living Useless Ritual” and the crookedly melodic “Her Green Arms” that are satisfying on a primordial level. The Roadburn set that became Scour Order, one of three temporally themed performances the band gave at the fest, was billed as “Krallice: Future.” With their surprising move to reconnect so explicitly with their origins, they’ve collapsed time.