Mayhem, Mortiis, Imperial Triumphant, New Skeletal Faces. Masquerade (Heaven). Atlanta, Ga. Mar. 17, 2025

3 days ago

Black Metal wasn’t born. It clawed its way out of Norway’s frozen bosom like a feral beast. Hungry, frostbitten, and hellbent on tearing through the fabric of everything polite society holds dear. Fueled by the chaotic workings laid down by luminaries Venom, Celtic Frost, and Bathory, the rejection of Christianity’s dominant hold on Norwegian sentiments and an overall disgust of mainstream norms. It’s raw, ugly, and unrepentant. Black Metal unleashed into the world a maelstrom of unhinged vocals, tormented lyrics, breakneck guitar riffs, and blast-beat drum bursts. For nearly 40 years, no band has embodied that spirit more. A group that lives up to the name they bestowed upon themselves as usurpers draped in myth, madness, and a legacy that refuses to die.

Mayhem.

Spring arrives, but it brings no renewal—only the ever-forward march of entropy and distortion. The legendary Mayhem have embarked on a pilgrimage of sound and desecration that will traverse the North American continent, their presence harrowing the banner of Decibel Magazine’s twelfth metal tour, a grim procession across twenty-four cities. Joining the journey are nocturnal newcomers New Skeletal Faces, the avant-garde dissonance of Imperial Triumphant, and the enigmatic, dark lord of synth and sin known as Mortiis.

The first show of the tour takes place in the Masquerade of Atlanta, a venue whose name belies the absurdity of its chosen stage: Heaven. A cruel joke for music born from the abyss. Outside it’s St. Patrick’s Day, but within these walls, there is no green, there are no shamrocks, no lucky charms, or gold. Only black. And it is Monday, the most punishing of days. And as the night unfolds only the truly devoted arrive. The ones willing to endure and bear witness to the raw, unrelenting spectacle that will soon consume them.

Twitchy and expectant, the crowd stood waiting. Suddenly, Four figures dressed in black leather and eyeliner, boots heavy on the stage, trotted up to their instruments with road-worn nihilism radiating from them. Then came the sound. A dance of distortion and dread, figures of old records reanimated through amplifiers. Guitars shimmering with unmistakable gothic melancholy, a bassline sounding like it had been dredged from the bottom of a lake, every so often interrupted by thunderous double pedal blasts.

Helming the vocals at the center of the stage was frontman, Errol Fritz. Spinal column affixed to his mic stand, he howled into the void with a voice of despair and anguish that called back the tortured echoes of Christian Death, Southern Death Cult, while the sound accompanying this distraught voice harkened to a sound similar to the Chameleons and Venom. It was over as quickly as it began. Brief and brutal. The band thanked the crowd. Waved. Disappeared. But silence had no place here. The house speakers surged back in a relentless cacophony of throat-tearing screams and blast beats.

Imperial Triumphant. A name evoking opulence, prosperity, and power. But beneath the facade of such a name, lies the rotting truth of the decadently diseased nature of society spelled out for the ears by their punishing sound and dismal lyrics. On stage, three figures stand adorned in golden masks, their robes draping like vestments worn by some ancient echelon order. Their masks invoke eerie familiarities of the looming spires of Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1927 vision of a world enslaved by its own ambition.

The music begins. No. Not music, but an onslaught. A furious audible depiction of a nightmarish M.C. Escher painting with no exit. The crowd doesn’t resist and bends and churns with every sweep of the maelstrom wrought before their eyes. Zachary Ezrin, beckoned ears to bleed as his gut-wrenching growls rattled the room and his guitar, a weapon forged in suffering. Steve Blanco, lurches and writhes, tormenting his bass that was wrapped in LED lights. Performing a trombone solo using only half a trombone to scrape and scratch the strings on his bass and later throwing it to the ground only to strike and slap at it, as if to conjure more doom-ridden notes from it. Drumsticks are a blur and each strike is part of an exorbitant equation of calculated violence. A mathematician of destruction. Kenny Grohowski is on drums. A sound of joyful desperation roars from the audience once it’s over. Not in relief, but in agony. “One more song! One more song!” Having enjoyed the aural cataclysm, the moment was swept away as they made their way off stage, hopefully, to be seen again someday, soon.

A dark ambient lull wafted throughout the building from the house speakers as everyone waited for the next performance to commence. An ominous figure took the stage and stood above the crowd. A small casket of what one can only imagine housed cauldrons and incantations of unknown origin laid at their fingertips. Joined at their side was a companion standing amongst a small, but boisterous-sized set of tabors.

Mortiis, covered in ash, brandished a mask that appeared to have once belonged to a goblin-like being. Whether it was a spoil of a battle that predated time or a trophy unearthed from an ancient crypt only deepened the mystery of its purpose. Gothic hymns and synth-inspired horns rose and fell as he churned and twisted his fingertips inside Pandora’s box of melodic myth. Drums marched us on, elevating our transcendents toward whatever journey on which we were about to embark. The crowd stood solemn as they beheld Illustrations filling the back wall with various landscapes, creatures, specters, and lore. All the while, Mortiis stood as firm as a pillar of salt, occasionally adding harmonious chants along the transcendent aurora that filled the room. By now the room had doubled in size from when it first began and the devoted concertgoers stood in awe after having been a drift of the astral plane for the past hour. Mortiis had just ushered us across the river Styx to the mayhem that was waiting for us ahead. This was the point of no return.

A chill swallowed the air as the lights overhead died. Arms shot up in applause, as a screen flickered to life giving a short compilation of the forty years of carnage, chaos, and turmoil left in the wake. Then. Pure Armageddon. Hellhammer. Necrobutcher. Teloch. Ghul. All took the stage to slaughter and kicked out Malum from 2019’s Daemon. Arriving shortly behind the four was frontman Attila brandishing corpse paint and a pentagram smeared across his forehead, his voice twisting between guttural croaks and shrieks of the damned.

Flesh-ripping guitar riffs sliced through the thick tension courtesy of Teloch and Ghul, while the crowd threw Hell back at them matching the unbridled raw power bellowing from the stage. Psywar, My Death, and Ancient Skin are among some of the tracks keeping the crowd blood-thirsty. Necrobutcher, the last original member of the band, glared into the mass of bodies piercing their souls, his bass rumbling with unbridled brutality. The energy in the room mutated feeding on the chaos as the pit consumed itself forming a whirlpool of bodies possessed by its energy. Somewhere behind his fortress of cymbals, Hellhammer orchestrated with explosive precision as blast beats and crash cymbals shattered eardrums.

Suddenly, the band vanished. All eyes turned attention to the screen once again as grains of the screen faded in a tribute page to past members no longer part of this realm. Original vocalist Dead, who took his own life in 1991, and founding member and black metal trailblazer Euronymous, whose life was taken in 1993 by a previous band member whose name is better left forgotten. A roar from below the stage. Strong enough to pierce the veil between the living and the dead.

The five figures that first met us on stage were not the same men who left before. Now cloaked, and hidden in fog, the transformation into something more malevolent and darker returned. The set took a final and more violent turn. Heavy hitting tracks Freezing Moon, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, Deathcrush and Chainsaw Gutsfuck were some of the tracks gifted to us in appreciation for harrowing the call of black metal all these years. As the silhouettes wove in and out of the fog that overtook the stage, the sound became an organism all its own. Surrounding my ears with its noisy caress. Becoming white noise that emitted a strange calmness over my body I gave myself over to it completely. Comforted by the static of such brutal music that could level cities. The others and I, succumb to the raw energy that black metal stands for. No Gods. No masters. Just the beautiful fury of it all.