Geordie masters of the darkness Venom, formed in 1978, have announced their first full-length album in eight years, ‘Into Oblivion’, due to be released on 1 May via the Noise/BMG label and including thirteen tracks. The album announcement is accompanied by a single ‘Lay Down Your Soul’. The record will be their sixteenth, despite only one original member, their vocalist and bassist Cronos, being present.
Cronos says of the album that “this album has really pushed the boundaries, but if you want to make a killer album, you pay for it in blood, sweat and tears.” Venom’s current guitarist, Rage, added that “I’m so proud of this album. It’s astounding! It feels so different, yet so familiar. The sonics are a step up, no song sounds the same, but they all work together.”
The single released is classic Venom – fast, edgy and dark. The title echoes their seminal 1982 album, ‘Black Metal’, which gave the lo-fi, satanic and explicitly blasphemous subgenre its name. “Lay down your soul to the gods, rock and roll!” exclaimed the original in a war cry that almost single-handedly birthed extreme metal, and Venom have picked up there, the track deliberately sounding like their older work and less like the out-and-out thrash metal that they toyed with in the later 1980s.
This lineup of Venom, consisting of Conrad “Cronos” Lant, Stuart “Rage” Dixon and drummer Danny “Dante” Needham, have been together since 2009. The band’s lineup changes have been frequent since their formation in 1979. Their golden-age lineup of Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon fragmented in the later 1980s as they were overtaken in heaviness by thrashers like Metallica and Slayer and death metal bands like Death and Obituary. Mantas and Abaddon were until 2018 touring in a separate incarnation of Venom, named Venom Inc., but have since fallen out again.
Their last album, 2018’s ‘Storm the Gates’, was released through the Spinefarm record label. Though some liked the album and enjoyed their harking back to their glory days, one reviewer said of the album that it carries “half its weight in strong songs, [but] the other half is largely made up of forgettable filler”, awarding it three stars out of five. Their album before that, 2015’s ‘From the Very Depths’, fared little better, awarded a measly two stars in Rolling Stone, dismissed as “a bit of a slog”.
Venom are no doubt one of the most important, if unsung, bands in heavy metal history. Inspired by the stage theatrics of KISS, the driving sound of Judas Priest, the speed of Motorhead and the aggression of hardcore punk, they spawned metal’s first subgenre before diversifying. Despite being cited as an influence by early thrash bands like Slayer, Megadeth and Metallica, they stand alone, entirely musically distinct with their original aggression.
