De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas

The writing started in 1987. The release slipped to May 1994 because the singer, Per "Dead" Ohlin, took his own life in 1991 and the guitarist, Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth, was murdered in 1993. The voice on the record is the Hungarian singer Attila Csihar's, and the bass is played, uncredited, by Varg Vikernes. Pytten produced. Some of the riffs in "From the Dark Past" were brought in by Blackthorn from the Grymyrk demo by his own band Thorns, and he wrote part of the lyrics too. It is the only studio album on which both Aarseth and Vikernes play, which by itself puts it somewhere no other record is. It is fast, raw, and the vocals are not decipherable as words. It has gone on being named the most important album in black metal: two decades after it was taped, Metal Hammer wrote that it was still the starting point for new bands whose members had not been born when it was made. The running order here is the original's as printed.