20 Years Later, Behemoth’s Demigod Still Reigns Supreme

Every once in a while, an album comes along that completely shakes things up and sets a new standard for everyone else to aspire to. A myriad of factors need to come together to make it happen, including simply being at the right place at the right time, but when they do, sparks fly, and a kind of magic happens that is all but impossible to ignore. Such was the case on this day twenty years ago, when a Polish black metal band who had been grinding away for years and making serious waves in the European market unleashed a truly monstrous album that would skyrocket them to international fame and set them on their journey to eventually becoming a household name.

I speak, of course, of the now-iconic 2004 album Demigod, a relentless 40-minute assault on the senses that feels like the aural equivalent of having a boot stamping down on your neck and grinding you into the pavement. When this thing first came out, I remember being nothing short of flabbergasted, having heard nothing even close to this caliber of heaviness up to that point, save for perhaps the first few Nile or Hate Eternal albums, but even they had yet to achieve that perfect balance between the ferocity of the music and crystal-clear production. It’s a never-ending wall of sound, and yet you can still hear every single instrument as clear as day, which gives the listener all the time in the world to sit back and appreciate all of the many elements and nuances that make this album what it is.

Demigod is filled to the brim with lightning-fast blast beats, multilayered vocals, and a veritable host of genuinely evil sounding riffs steeped in a sort-of-but-not-quite Middle Eastern vibe, which serves to add a generous layer of atmosphere that dramatically increases the impact of the music and gives it a distinct sense of personality, thereby allowing it to stand head and shoulders above its contemporaries. It might be dizzyingly fast and punishingly heavy from start to finish, but it also never feels like it’s overplaying its hand; the fast lane is simply where their comfort zone happened to be at the time, and so that is where they all collectively flourished.

Unsurprisingly, this album also ended up becoming something of a trendsetter, often being directly credited as one of the main catalysts for the “blackened”-everything movement that is highly prevalent in this day and age. Throughout all of their many iterations, Behemoth have always considered themselves a black metal band first and foremost, but they also very clearly dove headfirst into the death metal pool for a good stretch and found the waters to their liking, and so their unique blending of the two trains of thought worked like a charm, with its sizeable influence still being felt to this day. Nowadays it seems like every other band wants to add synthesized orchestration and dissonant tremolo picked chords to their death metal or deathcore and call it “blackened”, and we have Behemoth to tangentially thank for that (or blame, depending on how you want to look at it).

Also, while we’re on the subject of inspiration and being ahead of the curve, can we all agree that Behemoth already wrote the single heaviest breakdown that will ever exist in the beginning of “The Reign ov Shemsu-Hor”? Seriously, I don’t know why other bands even bother trying, these guys already reached the peak twenty years ago, and everything else just feels cheap and watered down by comparison. That shit makes me want to crowd kill someone, and I don’t even fuck with pits like that. But anyway, I digress.

To the band’s credit, Demigod was not some overnight fluke that saw them propelled to stardom with the release of one groundbreaking album. They had already been slaving away and putting in the miles for several years by this point, with half a dozen other albums under their belt and countless tours and festival appearances to support them. It wasn’t even their first time on American soil, having already shared the stage with the likes of Deicide, Amon Amarth, Nile, The Black Dahlia Murder, Danzig, and more, so they were already battle-worn veterans by the time they blew up to the level we’re accustomed to seeing them at now. This also wasn’t their first foray into death metal territory; previous albums like Satanica and Zos Kia Cultus were already showing signs of the band beginning to lean heavily in that direction, but Demigod was where it all came to terrifying fruition.

Tons of other timeless and respectably heavy albums had already been released by this point, with death metal, black metal, and grindcore having established a solid foothold in the underground, not to mention various magazines and the newly resurrected Headbanger’s Ball giving those bands a massive leg-up that they wouldn’t have had before. In fact, that was exactly where I first saw the music video for “Slaves Shall Serve”, and I remember thinking to myself “Jesus, I didn’t think this was possible, how are they getting away with this?” It may not precisely have been the first of its kind, but it was one of the most pristinely polished and flawlessly executed examples to date of what extreme metal had the potential to be. Not only does it still stand up to this day, but I would argue that it continues to outshine a significant percentage of everything that has come out since. I can count on two hands the number of albums that can stand toe-to-toe with Demigod in terms of sheer speed, unbridled ferocity, clearly defined personality, and cleanliness of production, and still have fingers left over. And the ironic thing is, most of those other albums, if not all of them, came about after the fact, so that tells you all you need to know about the monumental impact this album has had and continues to have on the modern metal landscape.

The Behemoth we have now is much different from the Behemoth that released this album twenty years ago, having undergone a slow but constant evolution that has since seen the band adopt a noticeably slower pace and more artistically minded identity, and that’s cool too. I enjoy pretty much everything this band have put out over the course of their career, from the raw, no-frills black metal of their formative years to the grandiose and highly theatrical entity that they’ve become, but this particular incarnation of the band is definitely my favorite by a long shot. This is Behemoth at their most ferocious, with fire in their eyes and blasphemy in their hearts, determined to take the world by storm and leave only smoldering ruins in their wake. They set out to conquer all, and damned if they didn’t do just that. Power to ’em. Be sure to crank the volume on this bad boy in honor of this most auspicious of anniversaries, and of course, hail Satan.