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Well, isn’t this a brutal exercise in ferocity, fury and all round filth. After a decade in the underground cesspit, old school black metallers Midnight unleash their Satanic Royalty debut on the world. And the world will never be the same.

Midnight’s unholy din is described as first wave black metal, but anyone who had a finger on the pulse of extreme metal back in ‘81/’82 will tell you the lines between black, death and thrash metal had yet to be as clearly established as they are now.


Back then, those genres – now so well-defined - were largely interchangeable. All we knew was it was faster, heavier and more downright nasty than anything else we’d ever heard.

As such, it’s no surprise when parts of this album prompts memories of early Death, Hellhammer and Bathory, as well as the Teutonic trio of Kreator, Destruction and Sodom before they grew up and learned to really play.

But above all, Midnight owes its very existence to only one other band: Venom. Devoted (anti)hero worship of Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon seeps from each infested pore of dirt-ridden ditties like ‘Lust, Filth And Sleaze,” “Savage Dominance” and, erm, every single other song.

The guitar tones, the gut-wrenching screams of despair and the endearingly hit and miss drumming all have their demonic origins in a post-punk north eastern England of the late seventies and the music is as grim and unforgiving as the era that spawned it.

If you feel black metal lost its way in 1990 when those damn pesky Norwegian church-burners got involved with their technically precise blastbeats and fancy-dan guitar solos, this album will be a feast of masochistic delights.

Raw, uncompromising and feral, Satanic Royalty is both simple and simplistic. It’s a limited record with many flaws and yet still manages to sound like the end of days soundtrack to the final battle between heaven and hell, where the horned one looks to be well ahead on points. Crushing.

(released November 8, 2011 on Hells Headbangers Records)

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