Death stalked Mayhem from the womb. Founded near Oslo in 1984, the black metal band cycled through a handful of temporary vocalists before meeting the Swedish teenager Per Yngve Ohlin in 1988. Ohlin went by the pseudonym Dead, and his self-destructive intensity onstage was the missing piece for this band bent on sonic and metaphysical annihilation. Dead died by suicide in 1991 without ever appearing on a proper Mayhem release. His voice only surfaced posthumously on a couple of live recordings, including one adorned with a gruesome photo of his corpse next to the shotgun he used to kill himself. Two years later, Mayhem’s charismatic guitarist Euronymous (born Øystein Aarseth) was murdered by Varg Vikernes, the musician behind competing black metal project Burzum. In 1994, Mayhem would finally release their debut full-length, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, featuring Euronymous on guitar and Vikernes on session bass in what might be the only musical collaboration between a murderer and his victim.
Thanks to a raft of books, films, and VH1 afternoon programming, that’s all become Rock History 101. What gets left out of most of those accounts is how Mayhem quickly regrouped, soldiering on with a series of lineups built around bassist Necrobutcher and drummer Hellhammer. De Mysteriis is one of black metal’s towering masterpieces, but the band has made plenty of interesting music in the decades since—the dark industrial oddity Grand Declaration of War, the violently atavistic Chimera, and a string of albums with De Mysteriis vocalist Attila Csihar. As they’ve aged, they’ve become more technically proficient, and their songs no longer sound like instinctive, nihilistic outbursts. They’re simply a black metal band, albeit one that was forged in a crucible of murder, suicide, and arson. The blessing and the curse of Liturgy of Death, the band’s seventh full-length and fourth since Csihar returned to the fold, is that having a new Mayhem album somehow feels commonplace now.
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As with 2014’s Esoteric Warfare and 2019’s Daemon, the Mayhem that appears on Liturgy of Death comprises Csihar, Necrobutcher, Hellhammer, and guitarists and co-songwriters Ghul and Teloch. That’s by far the longest run of lineup continuity the band has ever had, and it’s given latter-day Mayhem a signature style that earlier iterations never did. Liturgy of Death completes a trilogy of ritualistic, atmosphere-driven albums that nod heartily to De Mysteriis and other Norwegian Second Wave classics. That makes this version of Mayhem a less daring one than the experimentally minded group that came up with Grand Declaration of War, but Ghul and Teloch’s reverence for the fundamentals of black metal songcraft ensures that barnstormers like “Despair” and “Weep for Nothing” hit with appropriate force. On those songs—and pretty much every other song here—blastbeats churn and tremolo-picked guitars gnash their teeth. These guys know what they’re doing.
Liturgy of Death has its share of weirder moments, too. Csihar remains one of extreme metal’s most singular, colorful vocalists; no song can sound generic once he adds his demonic cackles, goblin shrieks, and incantatory low growls. The band shines when they match his expressiveness. Around the midpoint of “Realm of Endless Misery,” everything drops out of the mix except Csihar’s indecipherable gargling and a frantic, amorphous riff from Necrobutcher’s bass. The effect is deeply unsettling. In the back half of “The Sentence of Absolution,” a furious barrage of blastbeats is slowly supplanted by hypnotic, tribal drumming. It’s as though Sepultura’s Iggor Cavalera showed up during the session and jumped in for Hellhammer midstream. The album could have used a few more of these breaks with black metal orthodoxy.
