Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire

Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire, released by Victory Records on 11 November 1997 as VR063CD, is Hatebreed's debut: fourteen songs inside about thirty minutes, on an extremely pared-back plan. The title states the idea outright — satisfaction is the death of desire — that the moment you are content you lose the force to keep moving. The thinking that runs through the band's entire catalogue is already flying as the name of the first album. "Empty Promises", "Burn The Lies" and "Before Dishonor" open the record at roughly two minutes a song. An official music video was made for "Before Dishonor" years later, and it is treated as one of the early signatures. Titles like "Prepare For War", "Betrayed By Life" and "Driven By Suffering" name the material: the experience of being betrayed, and the will to stand up out of it. Metallic riffing and hardcore singability are already fused at this point. What the later albums renewed was density and recording, not the design itself — and the fact that this record sits comfortably beside albums made more than twenty years afterwards is the measure of how finished it already was.