Electric Scythe
Artist: Flahoola
Release Date: 31 October 2025
You ever listen to a new album and just know the band had a blast recording it?
Feral arpeggios, a flutter of bass and a flash of drums and the opening track “Age of War” drops the listener straight into a boss fight, unarmed and comically disoriented. Picture your disproportionately ginormous monster enemy rising on the horizon. Picture the rolling red clouds and bursts of lightning. Picture vocalist and bass guitarist John Napier narrating it all into a microphone from a safe yet windblown distance.
Within 20 seconds, Electric Scythe rocks, rules, pays homage to many of the greats of the past century of the AC/DC variety and proclaims itself as a a bewilderingly self-assured self-knowing album.
Denver’s Flahoola of course are no newbies. The confidence they exude speaks of tried-and-tested veterans of the live rock’n’metal circuit of the US of A, where crowds are both eager to support and way harder to impress. This comes through in the technical prowess of guitarist Cole Helman, torchbearer of that great American tradition of killer solos, and the album’s cohesiveness as a whole. The band is of one mind, one vision, and that vision is a boiling cauldron of mosh pits and crowd surfers.
Take “Cosmo Dust”, with its main riff reminiscent of Clutch’s best album, Blast Tyrant. You can practically hear the crowd jump in unison. Or better yet, take “Exhume”, my favourite piece coming in just before the halfway mark. It goes so heavy – on the knees, on the corners of a mouth, on any neck unwise enough to headbang to it. If we stick with cinematic imagery, this is the slow pre-battle montage song, where our techy sidekick reveals the sickest fastest sexiest motorcycle ever built to kick up dust in perfectly spun circles.
High adrenaline cinema à la Hot Fuzz is where you’d hear Flahoola on the soundtrack. Their lyrics speak of cocaine-loving aliens, of gods arming themselves for war, of anxiety and thrill-seeking, of “demon eyes blazing through” (see, I told you this is a boss fight). We’re given small pockets of reflection on “Town of Bodie”, which also grants Jaydon Kershner on drums a moment to breathe between tight grooves and explosive climaxes, but then you have the devilishly punk instrumental interlude “Ripper” going 100mph. It’s chockfull of riffs and Flahoola respect the riff.
You can hear its essential alchemical heart: Electric Scythe was tracked live. Just like sea shanties cannot and should not be recorded voice by voice, music crackling with such intense octarine glow can only come to life in that magic circle of people listening intently to one another and hyping each other up. Recorded and mixed by Chris Beeble at The Blasting Room, the band also had the benefit of Grammy-award winner Jason Livermore on mastering. All that experience shines through: the heaviness slams, the voice fills, it’s crisp, big and hits just as good in headphones (when you need a pick-me-up) as it does cranked into loudspeakers (when the hermetic gremlin tucked deep in your inner ear needs a pick-me-up).
With a sound as big as the Rocky Mountains and just as sharply tuned, Electric Scythe is so effortless an electrifying debut, Flahoola seem to have casually found lightning in their pockets.