Bethlehem

United in a grim obsession with suicide, insanity, illness, and mortality, the German outfit Bethlehem coalesced at the start of the 1990s as a severe depressive black metal act whose sound adhered strictly to the cold principles of doomy European black metal. Their first album, the starkly titled Dark Metal, appeared in 1994; subsequent works such as the 2010 release A Sacrificial Offering to the Kingdom of Heaven in a Cracked Dog's Ear incorporated industrial and post-metal textures, while Bethlehem (2014) and Lebe Dich Leer (2019) restored the glacial atmosphere of their formative recordings.

Bassist Jürgen Bartsch and guitarist Klaus Matton, weary of the thrash-oriented intensity of their prior band Dark Tempest, established Bethlehem in 1991 after Matton’s childhood losses of his father to suicide and his mother to cancer. Joined by vocalist Andreas Classen and drummer Chris Steinhoff, they poured their unrelenting pessimism into the bleak, atmospheric dark and black metal of the 1994 Thy Pale Dominion 7" EP and the landmark 1995 debut Dark Metal, whose vocals featured agonized screams. That bleak trajectory persisted through the 1996 album Dictus Te Necare, the 1997 record S.U.I.Z.I.D. (complete title: Sardonischer Untergang Im Zeichen Irreliogiosen Darbietung), and the 1998 Reflektionen Auf's Sterben EP, amid ongoing turnover among vocalists, drummers, and keyboardists.

The group repeatedly clashed with German officials over lyrics and imagery perceived to glorify death, including a provocative claim that former singer Classen had “offed” himself. Despite these legal pressures and Matton’s eventual exit, Bethlehem completed the ambitious, industrial-tinged double album Schatten Aus der Alexander Welt in 2001. By 2002 the lineup comprised Bartsch, vocalist Guido Meyer de Voltaire, guitarist Olaf Eckhardt, keyboardist Reiner Tiedemann, and drummer Steve Wolz, who were preparing the interactive project Suicide Radio. The fifth studio album, Mein Weg, followed in 2003, and the punishing A Sacrificial Offering to the Kingdom of Heaven in a Cracked Dog's Ear arrived in 2009.

Further experimentation marked the 2014 industrial release Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, whose title denotes fear of the number 666, yet the band returned to its suffocating, doom-infused black metal roots on the self-titled 2016 album. That same suicidal black metal direction continued on Lebe Dich Leer (2019), which introduced vocalist Onielar, previously of Darkened Nocturn Slaughtercult.