IMMORTAL Pure Holocaust (1993) CD

1993 in Scandinavia was a genuinely alarming time to be releasing black metal records, and Immortal responded by making one of the genre's most extreme and uncompromising statements, then somehow making it about winter.

Pure Holocaust strips everything back to ice and velocity. No keyboards, no atmosphere in the traditional sense, just Abbath and Demonaz locked into blast beats and tremolo riffs that sound like a blizzard with a grudge. Where contemporaries like Burzum and Darkthrone were going for atmosphere, Immortal were going for extinction-level weather events. The album's mythology, Blashyrkh, the eternal frozen kingdom, is one of the more genuinely strange and committed worldbuilding exercises in the history of heavy music. This 2013 pressing makes it accessible without making it convenient, which feels right.

CD in jewel case. Full length album, originally released 1993, this pressing 2013. Black metal, Norway. Tracklist: Unsilent Storms in the North Abyss, A Sign for the Norse Hordes to Ride, The Sun No Longer Rises, Frozen by Icewinds, Storming Through Red Clouds and Holocaustwinds, Eternal Years on the Path to the Cemetary Gates, As the Eternity Opens, Pure Holocaust.

Fans of: Darkthrone, Burzum, Mayhem, Emperor, Bathory