Austrian atmospheric post-black metal iconoclasts Karg have set 18 April as the release date for their ninth album, Marodeur, which will come out through AOP Records. The band has presented the upcoming album's first track, "Findling".

Karg was founded in the summer of 2006 as a one-man project. Between 2010 and 2014, Karg was fully formed as a band to play gigs, formally in Germany, Austria, and Central Europe. In the years up until 2018, Karg was, like in its beginning, held as a one-man project and released two more albums. With the release of its sixth studio album, Dornenvögel, Karg celebrated its rebirth as a live band for a few special dates in 2018 and 2019. It did its first real tour supporting its seventh album, Traktat, in February 2020. Since then, and during the years of the pandemic, Karg recorded the EP Resilienz and the albums Resignation and Marodeur, the first album written as a collective.

The musical style of Karg is still a furious, hysteric mixture of atmospheric black metal and a huge load of post-punk, with significant influences also from grunge, shoegaze, and post-punk. In recent years, the influences from other genres outside of black metal have evolved more and more, but they have been there, in abridged form, since day one. Lyrically and texturally, Karg has always focused on the more melancholic side of life, such as broken relationships, lost love, estrangement, drug abuse, loss, or suicide thoughts and depression. In contrast to many other bands within the wider "atmospheric black metal" umbrella, Karg's lyrics are equally as important as the music and are written in the dialect near the Tennen Mountains, where frontman Michael J.J. Kogler grew up.

And although it's been three years since the preceding (and highly experimental) Resignation, Marodeur shows Karg at the height of their powers - and, in a sense, back to "classic" Karg territory. With eight songs across 55 minutes, it's easy to do the math and surmise that Karg is as epic as ever. But if there's one thing that's remained constant with the band, it's the emotion and urgency with which it plays, and Marodeur is both emotional and urgent to the extreme. Each of those eight tracks crests and crushes with heart-on-sleeve intensity, with the black(-end) metal moving at many tempos - ragged blasting, mid-tempo pulse, seasick stomp - and spellbinding melodies cruising atop, usually run through a delay or chorus pedal and played clean. Certainly, Marodeur will do nothing to quell the charges of "post-black metal", but Karg is nothing if not iconoclastic - a band of individuals writing and playing music unshackled by boundaries - and, in that simple fact, one could argue that the album is quite black metal by definition. No matter how you come at both band and record, Marodeur will provoke a strong response, and Karg wouldn't have it any other way.

To celebrate the release of Marodeur, Karg will play a short tour through Europe with labelmates Harakiri For The Sky and Swiss trio E-L-R. More dates will follow. Link