Black Metal

For the past 24 years, SATANIC WARMASTER has remained a highly revered name in the black metal underground: seemingly doing no wrong with converts, but forever riling detractors. Helmed by the tyrant Werwolf – whose involved in the black metal scene stretches back 20-some years, as the original vocalist of Horna – SATANIC WARMASTER have released classic album after classic album, from early essentials like Strength and Honour and Opferblut to relatively more recent monuments like Carelian Satanist Madness and Nachzehrer, and always at their own pace.

Black Metal

Originally released in 2003, Opferblut consolidated the massive momentum garnered by SATANIC WARMASTER’s influential debut album, 2001’s Strength & Honour, and truly cemented Finnish black metal as a reigning force in the underground for the still-new millennium. Cold and caustic but suffused with a burning passion that has marked the band from the beginning, Opferblut is pure, traditional BLACK METAL done the ancient way – in the glare of burning churches, when madness & mysticism still cloaked the scene.

Black Metal

2019 digipack reissue of the legendary split.

Black Metal

When Satyricon released their third album in 1996, their status as one of the most significant and creatively vital bands in Norwegian black metal was already beyond dispute, but Nemesis Divina was no ordinary record or just another step along the road to infamy. From its uniquely vibrant and impactful artwork, which broke every supposed rule in the black metal handbook with its vivid colours and refined aesthetic core, to the supremely confident and idiosyncratic songs and individual performances that heralded a newfound sophistication and a freshly incisive vision, Nemesis Divina almost single-handedly took black metal from its voluntarily shadowy and obscure origins into the glaring spotlight of the international metal scene. It showcased a band that finally had the skill and the musical intuition to back up the undeniable potency of their artistic vision. Sonically devastating and compositionally meticulous, songs like ‘Mother North‘ and ‘The Dawn Of A New Age‘ redefined what black metal was capable of, while proudly retaining the genre’s ageless essence and aesthetic values.

Black Metal

With Frost’s drumming a key component from the start, the Satyricon unveiled on The Shadowthrone is far closer to the unstoppable, obsidian juggernaut we know and hail today than anything heard on the seminal but occasionally guileless Dark Medieval Times. Informed by the tonality and textures of Norwegian folk music tradition but fuelled by Satyr’s unique vision of black metal, the propulsive, muscular forward grind of grandiose sprawls like In The Mist By The Hills threw down a formidable template, upon which Satyricon have continued to build for more than a quarter of a century.

Gatefold cover, printed inner sleeves