With New Era Viral Order the Italian band THEE MALDOROR KOLLECTIVE serve us their third album. A band, who I never heard anything about before. But you know, under the roof of code666 you can find a few interesting bands.

The info says the band is playing Black Ritual Metal. What is totally misleading in my opinion. It just has to do something with Black Metal in a special way. In fact it is an Industrial album with shredding guitars, which reminds me on Front Line Assembly's album Millenium or maybe old :Wumpscut: sound ( especially in Drain - Wounded Cosmosis). Staccatoresque guitars are ranging totally equally to typical industrial sonic outfits. Powerful double bass, hard beats and hypnotic bass lines support the concept.

New Era Viral Order is cut into three chapters - Analysis, Synthesis and Thesis - which includes 3 songs each. Opener Xeos DNA Released already offers you a perfect intersection of what the band is about. With Haemorrhage Transmission the only Black Metal relevant part comes to appear. Furious guitar lines paired with typical black metal-like singing offers you a rough approach. But you still have the synthie soundscapes alongside all the time. Those are in general very dark, oppressive, almost apocalyptic and schizophrenic. Drain even completely forgo guitars and it is in this way a pure industrial track with EBM influences. La Flamme Vivant and Epidemic Noise Age are actually tracks which are not regular songs, because they don't have any usual structures at all. That are more dismal and ominous smouldering noise fragments, partly with spoken words. Whereas the latter one acts as the outro. While listening to Rigid Pulse Starfire you clearly can refer to Das Ich. With that you have now some indices what the music sounds like. Direct comparisons you can't draw, because in this way THEE MALDOROR KOLLECTIVE has an autonomous style.

The singing is majoritarian ranging in Black Metal fields, but also drifts away in electronic deformed voices and clean parts. In a musical respect you won't find significantly differences between the 3 chapters. You just can locate something subtle and keen, when you are listening to this album several times and you get deeply into it. I don't know if there is a concept in text, no lyrics included and the official band page is still under construction.
If you have the feeling the staccato-like guitars are kind of one- dimensional and boring, you will notice the sense later. Complicated sound structures and guitar riffs would overload the whole album badly. Even the synth's don't depart too far away from the musical basic. So you have all the time clear lines and it doesn't get boring.

Upshot: A really well-done album and a band name you should keep in your mind. Fans of above mentioned music should definitely risk an ear. Black Metal purists should ignore the official description and better keep their hands off it!