Black Metal History Month

Essential Black Metal Listening: MARDUK's Panzer Division Marduk

Marduk_old lineup

Both black and death metal embody the most misanthropic, morbid, depressing, sickening, and rebellious traits of mankind—yet they are quite different from each other. While death metal is often cartoonish and easy to separate from reality, black metal is often grotesquely grim and starkly realistic. In particular, the war-obsessed brand of black metal popularized by Swedish black metal fireteam, Marduk’s iconic 1999 release, Panzer Division Marduk, fits the above description perfectly.

Although not a black metal band, Germany’s long-lived Destruction was probably the first underground metal band to utilize modern war-like imagery (such as their donning of bullet belts in their early days) and war-themed lyrics (although it was always about the pure pwnage of mankind and holy forces by unholy forces, and military jargon like “panzer” was never used). Panzerchrist from Denmark may be a younger band than Marduk, but they started peddling war-themed blackened death metal since their first full-length album, Six Seconds Kill, which was released in 1996—a good 3 years before Marduk’s first war-themed album, Panzer Division Marduk. Could these two bands have inspired Marduk to write this record?

Here’s the funny thing: Whether Destruction and Panzerchrist had inspired Marduk to write this album or not, both of them are not remembered by most extreme metallers for modern war-themed extreme metal music and imagery. Marduk is. (more…)