Behemoth - The Satanist (2LP)

Some records feel like a rebirth the moment the needle drops, and The Satanist absolutely sits in that camp. Behemoth came back from the brink with this one in early February 2014, their first full-length after Adam Nergal Darski’s battle with leukaemia, and you can hear that fight carved into every bar. Released via Nuclear Blast in Europe and Metal Blade in North America, it arrived with the weight of expectation and somehow blew right past it, not just for extreme metal diehards but for anyone who likes their art sharpened to a point.

What jumps out first is the sound. Behemoth had been kings of precision for years, but here they chose heat and air. The mix breathes. Inferno’s drums don’t feel grid-snapped, they feel human, even when he’s rolling into blast territory. Orion’s bass growls in the spaces the guitars leave open, and Nergal’s vocals come off like a sermon delivered in a smoke-choked chamber. It is still blackened death metal at heart, but there’s an old world pulse running through it, a ritual stomp that harks back to classic heavy metal drama without softening a thing.

“Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel” kicks the doors in with a slow, ominous stride. That first riff takes its time, the horns and choral swells raising the temperature without turning the whole thing into symphonic fluff. Then “Furor Divinus” surges like the dam finally broke. “Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer” has become a live favourite for good reason, its Latin chant hooking into your memory by the second chorus. “Amen” is the shortest route to their feral side, while the title track coils and uncoils with a kind of poisonous elegance. “Ben Sahar” drips menace, all humid groove and shadow, and closer “O Father O Satan O Sun!” is the most triumphant thing they had put to tape by that point, a finale that feels earned rather than pasted on.

The art and the album are fused in a way you rarely see. Russian painter Denis Forkas Kostromitin created the cover using Nergal’s own blood mixed into the paint, and the image suits the music, a regal, haunted figure that suggests blasphemy as transformation rather than cartoonish shock. It ties back to the record’s themes of self-creation and liberation, ideas Nergal spoke about often in interviews around the time. Coming from Poland, where their videos and lyrics have stirred plenty of public debate, that stance lands with extra voltage.

The critical response was wild for a record this heavy. The Satanist scored in the 90s on Metacritic and popped up across year-end lists from places that don’t always make room for blastbeats, alongside the usual specialist mags. Metal fans were hardly surprised. This is the kind of album that recalibrates a band’s own catalogue. Play Evangelion before it and you hear the pivot toward atmosphere and feel. Play anything after it and you can trace a throughline back to the choices made here, especially the way the band let grit and space deepen the impact rather than chasing spotless perfection.

If you care about artwork and sonics, The Satanist vinyl is the way to live with it. The cover blossoms at 12 inches and the low end has a satisfying thump that suits those slower, ritual passages. Behemoth vinyl tends to hold its value because fans actually play it, and if you’re trying to buy Behemoth records online rather than trawling every Melbourne record store on a Saturday, you’ll still find plenty of new pressings floating around. For collectors who like a shelf with some heft, Behemoth albums on vinyl just look right, and this one in particular feels made for the format. It’s the sort of title that turns up often when people in vinyl records Australia circles swap favourites, because it does that rare thing of pleasing hifi tweakers and pit veterans at once.

A decade on, the record still hits like a revelation. Not because it reinvented the wheel, but because it trusted feeling over fuss without losing the band’s iron discipline. The songs burn, the performances are lived-in, and the whole package radiates conviction. If you’re building a heavy shelf and wondering where to start, start here. Then work backwards and forwards. The Satanist is the doorway that keeps swinging open.