BOKKERIJDERS have premiered "Calcination Pyre" at NoCleanSinging, the second track revealed from "Crush Kill Destroy", the Belgian band's debut album, out October 23 through Personal Records.
The name is worth knowing. The Bokkenrijders — Buckriders — were the gangs of thieves and extortionists who worked the Limburg borderlands between roughly 1740 and 1798, sending farmers brandbrieven demanding money under threat of arson. In the retelling they became something else: witches who flew at night on goats supplied by the Devil. The trials that followed killed around 450 people, considerably more than the region's actual witch trials had. It is a fitting inheritance for a band with a song called "Locked in Gilded Chains are the Guillotine's Blade" and another simply titled "Bokkerijders".
The band formed in 2021, put out a demo the following year, and followed it in 2023 with the EP "Silver Dust and Swords of Gold". They are filed as black metal and do not particularly accept the filing. By their own account they play metal, full stop, and list AURA NOIR, SLAYER and TURBONEGRO as reference points without treating the gaps between them as a problem to solve.
"Crush Kill Destroy" is built accordingly: short songs, riffs stacked several deep, solos used sparingly and placed where they count, and a production that manages to be raw and legible at once. NoCleanSinging describe "Calcination Pyre" as opening on "fast-punching rhythmic grooves" and "sinister, slithering, and grit-slathered melody" before the tempo climbs, the screams arrive, and the track resolves into an extended solo they call "the witchiest and most electrifying episode of the song yet".
The record is also an ending. Lead guitarist Wouter Lemmens died in September 2025, and "Crush Kill Destroy" is the last of his playing to be released. His bandmates will continue as a three-piece.
"Crush Kill Destroy" track listing:
- Ashen Scream
- Crush Kill Destroy
- Calcination Pyre
- Primordial Phosphorous Eclipse
- Locked in Gilded Chains are the Guillotine's Blade
- Bokkerijders
- Miracle Osmosis
- Fire Chaser
Listen: "Calcination Pyre" at NoCleanSinging · bokkerijders.bandcamp.com