This time, the sheen only highlights what’s beneath the surface, revealing these songs’ eccentricities and thrills rather than buffing them out. The Satanist doesn’t give up on high-end recording in fact, with its occasional exultant choirs, horn fanfares, and acoustic interludes, it’s a complex and deliberate affair. This didn’t necessarily make for bad albums as much as it did middling ones, records that you could hear twice and move beyond. During the last decade, a bright studio gleam has often made their material feel cold and polished, as though the execution had superseded the core. The Satanist is Behemoth’s 10th album, and in many ways, it reflects a synthesis of their stepwise, two-decade journey between atavistic black metal, expert death metal and a mid-career hybrid of the two. Even the precipice of death, Nergal implies, didn’t soften his sacrilege. “I witnessed tribes of Judah reduced to ruin.” Rather than emerge as though they have something to prove through speed and precision, one of heavy metal’s most popular bands elects to return with something to say that’s as vile and startling as most any moment in their previously impious two decades. But really, Behemoth want to make sure you can hear Nergal and understand him when he opens with purely heretic invective: “I saw the virgin’s cunt spawning forth the snake,” he hisses, clearly audible in his sibilance. It feels like the preamble of a classic rock anthem, perhaps the sequel to “Hells Bells”. The drums march rather than maraud, while the bass pads the pocket. But they begin slowly, a sinister riff cutting patiently through open air.
Given that The Satanist is not only the first album by Polish firebrands Behemoth in five years but also their first since frontman Nergal was diagnosed with leukemia in 2010, you might expect them to be restless at the start, to burst open in a characteristic tangle of extreme metal.
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