In a Brooklyn metal scene that can sometimes seem too precious, drunk on high drama and revisionist approaches, Krallice have emerged as workaday heroes. In only eight years, they've issued five LPs, a single, and an EP of sometimes absurdly rich, long-form black metal. Krallice’s records have served as their manifestos, their music as their answer to every online "hipster metal" kerfuffle in which they’ve been unwillingly implicated.
This isolationist approach came into focus last July, when Krallice self-released the excellent and compact Ygg Huur online with no advance notice or industry assistance. Though the move felt logical after 2012’s independently issued Years Past Matter, Ygg Huur’s hype-free entry still felt like a statement about the ability of signal to transcend noise. The new Hyperion, actually recorded two years before Ygg Huur, supplies the exclamation mark for that thought. Issued suddenly through Bandcamp on New Year’s Day, the three-song follow-up is a succinct, explosive encapsulation of Krallice’s evolution and progression during the last decade. The EP format prevents the band’s trademark intricacy and density from ever crossing into exhaustion; from the feedback-laced beginning to, 24 minutes later, the celestial end, Hyperion always thrills.
Taken together, these three songs speak to vastly different approaches to the band’s black metal background. "Assuming Memory" recalls Krallice of yore, its 10-minute expanse sweeping from a ruminative opening to pirouetting solos to a soft-focus close that drifts into a shoegaze haze. The title track, on the other hand, mirrors the concision of Ygg Huur. Krallice ricochets between sets of complementary riffs and rhythms, as though trapped among the overclocked paddles of a pinball machine.
But it’s between these two bookends, during "The Guilt of Time," that Krallice hits a new compositional apex. It's so sly and subtle that it's easy to miss it. After about three minutes of rather conventional surges and stops, the band settles into a drift and lingers there before emerging above a sustained blast beat, Colin Marston and Mick Barr's guitars soaring above the rhythm section as though it were a ski jump. The guitars hold that position, locked inside a piercing little back-and-forth riff; meanwhile, Weinstein breaks his beat to pound out syncopated drum phrases that suggest warped snippets of military marches or maybe even a funk band. What sounds like a sustained, full-band blast beat, then, is actually a reinforced feint. This is a new level of hyperactivity for Krallice and one of the most thrilling, difficult two-minute clips of the band’s career. After you notice it, you have to hear it again and again, standing back to marvel at the sheer audacity of the moment.
A little less than three years passed between the release of Years Past Matter in 2012 and Ygg Huur last July. It was the longest break in Krallice’s career, as they’d issued at least an album every year (except 2010) since their self-titled debut. Now, though, they appear to be back on pace, and the consecutive successes of Ygg Huur and Hyperion reinforce what (aside from the songs themselves) has long been most admirable about Krallice. This band keeps improving incrementally, avoiding major statements of reinvention or re-emergence in favor of doggedly refining what it is they’ve done from the very start. Hyperion’s lyrics are loaded with references to astral objects, solar bodies, and mythological figures. But this is the work of a delightfully earthbound and centered band—part of a scene, sure, but apart from it, too, more focused on the work itself than the worry around it.
