The last lick of Execration Text sits at the very end of In Their Darkened Shrines (2002), and it does the thing Nile do better than anyone else. It is fast. It is brutal. And the notes do not come from the same vocabulary the rest of American death metal was using in 2002. That is the part that matters.
The technique
Dallas Toler-Wade calls it a “one string extravaganza” in the 2026 reaction video above. The mechanic is precise: alternate the same note across two adjacent strings to fake a tremolo at a velocity that pure alternate picking on one string cannot reach. It is a perceptual trick rather than a fingering trick. The ear hears continuous tremolo. The hand is actually playing a string-cross at half the effective rate.
The same approach turns up in Burning Pit of Daath on Annihilation of the Wicked (2005), as Dallas himself notes. It became a Nile signature.
The scale is the story
The reason this lick does not sound like a Cannibal Corpse or Suffocation closing lick from the same era has very little to do with the picking. It is the note choice. Karl Sanders had spent the band’s entire 1993 to 2002 run building a Nile guitar vocabulary out of scales that the American death metal scene was not touching — Phrygian dominant, Hungarian minor, Hijaz, and the various Maqam scales from the actual ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern musical traditions Nile draws their lyrical content from.
When Toler-Wade plays a string-cross tremolo at the end of Execration Text, the notes underneath that tremolo come from one of those scales. That is why it sounds Egyptian, not just brutal. Strip the same lick down to E minor and it would still be technical, still be fast, and would have lost the entire reason Nile exist as a band.
Why it matters
Two-and-a-half decades into Nile’s catalogue and the exotic-scale-on-death-metal vocabulary is still mostly theirs. Most American technical death metal still defaults to minor-key linear runs. Septicflesh do something adjacent from the Greek side. A handful of European tech-death bands have flirted with the idea. Nobody else has built an entire catalogue around it the way Karl Sanders and Dallas Toler-Wade did.
Put In Their Darkened Shrines on. Skip to the last forty seconds of Execration Text. Listen to the lick. Then listen again with the modal logic in mind. It is not a brute-force trick. It is exotic-scale composition disguised as a Guitar World “Betcha can’t play this” challenge.
