SARCOFAGO: I.N.R.I. Vinyl LP

Before there was black metal orthodoxy, there was Sarcofago making a mess of every rule anyone had bothered to write down. I.N.R.I. landed in 1987 out of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and it was arguably more extreme than anything coming out of Scandinavia at the time, rawer, nastier, faster, and completely unbothered by your opinion about it. Wagner Lamounier and Antichrist didn't build a cult record on purpose. They just played like the world owed them something.

This is the album that plugged directly into the nervous system of the second wave black metal scene before that scene had a name. The corpse paint, the inverted crosses, the barely-contained chaos of tracks like Satanic Lust and Nightmare, it all pointed somewhere genuinely dark and genuinely Brazilian, which is a distinction worth making. Venom and Bathory get cited constantly. Sarcofago gets slept on by anyone who didn't do the digging. If you did the digging, you already know.

Vinyl LP reissue. Genre: Black Metal, Death Metal, Thrash Metal. Origin: Brazil. Original release: 1987.

Fans of: Bathory, early Sepultura, Beherit, Hellhammer.