Biography
German metal outfit Die Apokalyptischen Reiter, whose name translates roughly to “the Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” came together in 1995. The lineup of Patrick Fuchs, Skelleton, Volk-Man, and Dr. Pest committed its first recording, the demo Firestorm, to tape that same year, prompting Ars Metalli Records to issue an expanded version two years later under the title Soft and Stronger. Following the 1999 release Allegro Barbaro, the group moved beyond the melodic death metal of its earlier work toward the broader, more atmospheric sound that surfaced on the Hammerheart label’s 2000 album All You Need Is Love. Refinement continued with the band’s 2003 Nuclear Blast debut Have a Nice Trip, where Fuchs’s vocals were lifted higher in the mix and greater attention was given to tightly arranged melodies and rhythms. After completing its first headlining tour, the quartet headed to Denmark to cut the 2004 album Samurai. Strong sales for that effort paved the way for 2006’s Riders on the Storm, which entered the German Top 40. On the 2008 album Licht (Light), Die Apokalyptischen Reiter abandoned the bilingual approach of prior releases and recorded exclusively in German; the change again propelled the band up the domestic charts and was followed later the same year by the live set Tobusucht-Reitermania, a career-spanning retrospective. Following a two-year hiatus, the group returned with its first studio album in three years, 2011’s Moral and Wahnsinn, again on Nuclear Blast. The expansive twenty-track collection Tief/Tiefer (Deep/Deeper) arrived in 2014, and the stylistically wide-ranging Der Rote Reiter—its tenth full-length studio release—appeared in 2017.
Albums
