Pleasure to Kill

A year after the debut, Kreator went into Musiclab in Berlin and worked with Harris Johns. He had already produced Helloween, Grave Digger, Coroner and Celtic Frost. He was the first professional producer the band had, and his method — making them play parts again and again until the take was right — gives the record a definition the debut has not, without sanding the violence off it. Noise International released it on 1 November 1986 as N 0037. When it arrived says a good deal about where it sits: eight months after Metallica's Master of Puppets, one month after Slayer's Reign in Blood. Petrozza has said the band were deeply taken with Possessed's Seven Churches and set out to make something heavier still. The quiet opening of "Choir of the Damned" collapsing into "Ripping Corpse," and then the title track, "The Pestilence" and "Under the Guillotine," are the passages that musicians in both death metal and black metal have gone on naming as a point of origin. Michael Wulf, formerly of Sodom, is credited in the sleeve but does not play on the recording. The running order here is the nine-track original of 1986; masters from the CD era onwards append the three songs of the Flag of Hate EP, released that August.