Berserker

Berserker is the debut album, released on 3 November 2017 by Nuclear Blast. The band's name tells the story. In 2015 Anton Kabanen split acrimoniously from Battle Beast, the band he had led, and called his new one Beast in Black. Both names are tributes to Berserk, his favourite manga. The recruiting, ironically, happened on his last tour with the old band: he met bassist Máté Molnár in Hungary in late January 2015, and six days later, on the 31st, met singer Yannis Papadopoulos in Thessaloniki where Battle Beast were playing with Sabaton. Kabanen had contacted him online the year before, having found his YouTube channel and his band Wardrum. The band became official on 8 October 2015, the day the five of them first sat together in a small pub in Helsinki. The first public sign was a Facebook post on 5 September that year saying only "The Beast is back!" Between then and the debut they played three shows in total — two arena concerts and Tuska. Labels were circling anyway, on the strength of the members' histories, and the worldwide deal with Nuclear Blast on 31 August 2017 was announced almost together with the album. The video for the lead single "Blind And Frozen" was directed by Ville Lipiäinen, who had worked with Nightwish and Stratovarius. The record reached number seven in Finland and 25 in the UK, and was certified platinum by the IFPI. "End Of The World" became the one song that has never been dropped from a headlining set since.