Bathory

Bathory is the debut studio album by Swedish extreme metal band Bathory. It was released in October 1984, through Tyfon Grammofon. It is considered by fans and critics to be one of the contenders for the first black metal record. Background and recording Bathory was formed in 1983. The band's frontman, Quorthon, worked part-time at the small record label Tyfon. In late 1983 and early 1984, the label was putting together a compilation of songs by Scandinavian metal bands. However, at the last minute, one of the bands backed out. Tyfon agreed to let Bathory appear on the record as a replacement, and the band recorded two songs for the compilation—"Sacrifice" and "The Return of the Darkness and Evil"—in January. The album, Scandinavian Metal Attack, was released in March 1984 and was Bathory's first appearance on record. To everyone's surprise, over 95 percent of fan mail sent to the label after the record's release was dedicated to Bathory. Tyfon asked the band to record a full-length album. His bandmates having moved away, Quorthon recruited Rickard Bergman as bassist and Stefan Larsson as drummer. On 22 May 1984, they had their first and only rehearsal together before recording the album. Here they recorded the songs "Satan My Master" and "Witchcraft", which would later appear on the compilation album Jubileum Volume III. On 14 June the band entered Heavenshore Studio in Stockholm—a converted garage—to record the debut. The studio had a homemade eight-channel tape recorder. Due to the band's tight budget, they ran the recorder at half-speed to fit everything on one master tape. They also had to work quickly – the recording and mixing were done in somewhere between 32 and 56 hours. Album artwork The album was originally to be named Pentagrammaton and to have a pentagram on the cover, but this name was scrapped when several people misread it as Pentagon. The pentagram was moved to the back and replaced with a re-touched portion of a drawing made by Joseph A. Smith in 1981 for the book Witches by Erica Jong. For the writing on the back cover, Quorthon bought a set of rub-on letters in the Old English font; however, he was one letter short ('C'), and as a result, the second 'C' in "Necromancy" was replaced with an 'S'. The introduction, "Storm of Damnation", and the outro was also mistakenly left off the track listing.