Artist

Behemoth

Polish metal band

Gdańsk, Poland · Formed 1991

Behemoth is a music group from Gdańsk, Poland, active since 1991. Their discography on Gatefold includes 24 records.

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Albums tracked

103

In collections

1991

Since

Biography

Nergal tracked early demos in basement rehearsal rooms on blown-out tape machines with nothing but buzzsaw guitars and raw spite. The early nineties Polish underground was suffocatingly purist, and Behemoth started out mimicking the Scandinavian frostbite with corpse paint and primitive blast beats. That lo-fi phase was necessary, but it was also a dead end. Nergal realized fast that tremolo picking in a blizzard was not going to take over the world. The real turn happened when drummer Inferno sat behind the kit and turned the engine into a precision-engineered military drill. They ditched the swampy pagan posturing for suffocating death metal, layering vocals into monstrous brickwalls and polishing the blasphemy until it gleamed like a razor. By the time they survived cancer scares and courtroom blasphemy trials in their homeland, they were filling festival stages with theatrical fire and high-gloss sacrilege that purists complained about even as they bought every single ticket.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of Behemoth

The pivots — what forced Behemoth to reinvent.

The Baltic Frost
Nergal and original drummer Baal Ravenlock spent the mid-nineties buried in raw cassette grit and Baltic folklore. Albums like Sventevith and Grom were built on primitive production, acoustic guitars, and pagan black metal tropes straight out of the European underground. It was rough, scrappy, and completely bound to the trends of its day before Nergal hit a wall with the sound.
The Death Metal Machine
Bringing Inferno into the band changed everything about the rhythm section and their sonic velocity. The shift on Satanica and Thelema.6 ditched the icy folk textures for surgical, suffocating blackened death metal riffs and wall-to-wall blast beats. By Demigod, Nergal was tracking his vocals through heavy pitch shifters and multitracking layers to sound like an ancient deity tearing through a wall of distortion.
Post-Leukemia Theatrics
Nergal was diagnosed with leukemia in 2010, which brought the entire touring juggernaut to a sudden halt. The band returned to the studio and dropped the hyper-compressed technical speed runs for the cavernous, ritualistic atmosphere of The Satanist in 2014. The guitars breathed again, the tempos dragged into massive stomps, and the live act pivoted from pure brutality to grand, ceremonial theater.

Influences

Morbid Angel — Nergal frequently cites Altars of Madness and Trey Azagthoth's guitar work as the primary blueprint for Behemoth's turn toward death metal. You hear it across Satanica in the frantic tremolo runs, off-kilter solo scales, and heavy rhythm accents. Without Azagthoth's occult riff geometry, Behemoth would have stayed a second-tier black metal clone.
Bathory — Behemoth covered 'War' on their Bewitching the Pomerania release as a direct nod to Quorthon. The mid-tempo pagan hymns and acoustic interludes on Grom are lifted straight from Bathory's Viking-era run. Quorthon provided the exact map for transitioning from primitive grime into massive, anthemic blasphemy.
Venom — Behemoth paid tribute to the Newcastle trio early by covering 'In League with Satan.' The swaggering, theatrical Satanism and heavy power-trio crunch directly informed the band's earliest demo years. Venom proved that comic-book-dark aesthetics and heavy riffs could shock the mainstream, a formula Nergal polished into high art.
Celtic Frost — Behemoth has covered 'Visual Aggression' and routinely cited Tom G. Warrior as a core inspiration. The thick, mid-tempo guitar chugs and guttural vocal phrasing across Pandemonic Incantations stem directly from To Mega Therion. Nergal borrowed Warrior's distinct grunts and eerie avant-garde weight to pull death metal out of standard speed boundaries.
Mayhem — Nergal credits Mayhem and the early Norwegian scene as the spark that convinced him to form Behemoth in 1991. The icy, piercing guitar tones and blast-beat chaos on early demos like Endless Damnation mirror the Euronymous style note for note. That raw Scandinavian aggression was the foundation Behemoth had to master before they could tear it down.