KOVENANT Animatronic Vinyl (1999)

1999 was a strange year to be a black metal band announcing you'd rather make sci-fi industrial club music instead, and The Kovenant did exactly that. Animatronic was the record that cost them half their fanbase and earned them a completely different one, and it remains one of the more genuinely strange pivots in the Norwegian extreme metal canon.

Coming off Nexus Polaris, Lex Icon and Psy Coma leaned all the way into futuristic electronics, anthemic hooks, and gothic metal grandeur, somewhere between electronic industrial metal and the kind of dark alternative music that was eating up dancefloors in the late nineties. It sounds like a band who'd been listening to too much Marilyn Manson and not enough Darkthrone, and meant every second of it. Divisive then, fascinating now, and absolutely the kind of record that belongs in an alternative and dark aesthetic vinyl collection worth talking about.

Vinyl full-length album. Country of origin: Norway. Genre: electronic/industrial metal. Format: standard LP.

Fans of: Samael, Graveworm, Emperor,.And Oceans, Hecate Enthroned, Arcturus.