Stream Krallice’s Roiling Experimental Metal Album Demonic Wealth
The members of Krallice work fast. The New York band combines black metal speed and atmospherics with tricky math-rock complexity, and they’ve figured out a frantic, dense, nonlinear sound that’s entirely their own. Their music sounds labor-intensive, but they make a lot of it. Just seven months ago, the band released a surprise album called Mass Cathexis, and Stereogum’s Black Market braintrust named it one of the year’s best metal albums. Today, Krallice has followed up Mass Cathexis with another full-length; this one bears the excellent title Demonic Wealth.
Krallice didn’t announce Demonic Wealth before releasing it, though they did tease it in a Bandcamp message last week. The band says that Demonic Wealth was “conceived, recorded, and executed in isolation,” and they make a point to say that the drums were recorded “on a phone” and that the vocals were captured “in the car by the swamp.”
On first listen, Demonic Wealth might be Krallice at their most approachable. The track lengths hover around the six or seven-minute mark, which is short for this band. The sound is bleary and ominous, and there are lots of ambient keyboard tones. It’s possible to listen to the album as background music, without the constant musical transitions breaking your concentration, but the incredibly busy and complex drum patterns might still fuck up your heartrate. Still, Demonic Wealth sounds very much like experimental black metal, and if you’re into that, you’ll find a lot to like here. Stream the album below.
Demonic Wealth is out now on P2.