Scarcity – The Promise of Rain (Review)

Scarcity are a black metal band from the US and this is their second album.

The successor of 2022’s well-received Aveilut, The Promise of Rain contains 40 minutes of new material from Scarcity. Brought to us from a band that features members of Anicon, Glorious Depravity, Krallice, Pyrrhon, Seputus, Weeping Sores, and Woe, Scarcity have a wealth of experience in the realms of extreme metal that they bring to bear here to good effect.

The Promise of Rain takes a bit of a different route to extremity than its predecessor did. The best way I can describe a good chunk of Scarcity’s sound on their new record is if you sped up Khanate and added a blackened veneer and some unusual leads. It’s actually more complicated and intricate than that description would lead you to believe, but it serves as a good way to briefly introduce The Promise of Rain.

This is a contemporary extreme metal album that’s harsh and urgent. It’s avant-garde, dissonant, and driven by an unconventional power that propels it into esoteric waters of a modern nature. The black metal influence is felt, but combined with non-blackened elements, (including things like drone, noise rock, experimental, progressive metal, ambient, and more), to create music that’s a hybrid entity all of its own.

The songs shift and squeal, lashing out with piercing vocals. The music is almost feral, but in a controlled way that paradoxically also feels formless. The songs sound both written and not, as if a structure was created, but fleshed out with an intensity that’s felt more than designed. Reading the promo blurb, this might not be too far from the truth. In this way it reminds me of the latest from Sumac, while obviously sounding very, very different.

Many of the guitars sound almost like electronic sounds or alarms, like something you’d find in a manufacturing context, only pressed into musical service. It’s an interesting and atypical approach, but one that works surprisingly well when combined with every other aspects of the band’s non-standard sound. This approach is frequently twinned with dark synths to produce something greater than the sum of its parts. Tense and unnerving, yet not without an emotive component at key moments, the album is both a trial and a gift.

Each track has its own personality though within the whole. The alarming guitars are not omnipresent, and on some tracks are absent completely. Subduction, for example, offers a compact and contained doom landscape, and Venom & Cadmium is the most conventional track here, presenting as a straightforward modern black metal song.

The Promise of Rain is a more varied and well-rounded release than its capable predecessor. It’s definitely not an album that’s for the uninitiated though, as the music is of a style that’s fractured and jagged, riven with tocsins and damaging in a way that industrial sabotage is. Scarcity’s second album is a compelling journey, if also an unforgiving one. Connoisseurs of extreme metal’s multifarious boundaries would do well to explore this irregular gem.