Samael

Samael, the Swiss extreme metal outfit, moved swiftly beyond conventional black metal roots to become one of their era’s most inventive and wide-ranging sonic adventurers, deliberately blending industrial, electronic, and gothic textures into an early foundation of black and death metal. Brothers Vorphalack on vocals and guitar and Xytras on drums, programming, and keyboards formed the group in the late ’80s with bassist Masmiseim; their initial direction stemmed chiefly from first-wave black metal acts such as England’s Venom, Sweden’s Bathory, and Swiss peers Hellhammer and Celtic Frost, a debt made plain by the raw, self-released Medieval Prophecy EP. France’s Osmose Productions took notice and issued the band’s debut album, Worship Him, in 1991. That record’s vigorous but ordinary black metal, hampered by modest production, failed to raise the group’s profile, whereas the slower, doom-inflected approach of the following year’s Blood Ritual revealed a rapidly widening songwriting scope and the first synthesizer experiments. Century Media signed Samael after they added keyboardist Rodolphe H.; working with producer Waldemar Sorychta, the band delivered their most striking work to date, 1994’s Ceremony of Opposites, whose malevolent atmospheres and keyboard lines intertwined with churning guitars to form what the members themselves termed “macabre operettas.”

The bar rose again with 1996’s Passage, on which Xytras—now simply Xy—assumed keyboard duties and programmed his characteristically restless drum parts. This unusual marriage of black metal aggression and synthesizers produced one of the decade’s most singular extreme metal albums and sparked extensive touring, including the group’s first U.S. dates. Xy’s standing at the time led to production work on two albums by labelmates Rotting Christ, yet 1999’s Eternal, featuring additional guitarist Kaos, felt creatively flat. The same shortfall marked the belated 2004 release Reign of Light; Samael’s growing immersion in electronic styles such as house and trip-hop crowded out the earlier extreme metal elements, prompting their label to drop them and estranging much of their core audience. Only modest nods to guitar-driven heavy metal appeared on the 2007 album Solar Soul, while a decisive return to pure black metal blasphemy arrived with 2009’s Above, initially tracked as a side project and finally vindicating longtime supporters. The single “Antigod” preceded the ninth studio album, Lux Mundi, issued in 2011 by Season of Mist; the band’s tenth full-length, Hegemony, followed in 2017 on Napalm.