The Guide to Getting into Celtic Frost

Swiss heavy metal behemoths Celtic Frost and their primordial predecessor, Hellhammer, have long been an immutable part of early extreme metal's most unholy triumvirate (alongside Bathory and Venom). From the earliest, messiest days of Hellhammer up to and including the band's weighty final statement, Monotheist, Celtic Frost consistently and fearlessly seared their black mark upon rock 'n' roll history. Whether they were busily introducing the avant-garde to metal or simply hammering out one of those goddamn riffs, it may sound hyperbolic to say, but there's no denying it: Celtic Frost changed the world.

Formed as Hellhammer in 1982 and solidified as Celtic Frost in 1984, the band was on the vanguard of heavy metal's newly evolving extreme side. The primal aggression reverberating from their early recordings may seem par for the course to anyone familiar with metal's current outliers, but back in the early 80s, what they were doing felt downright revolutionary. The band's uniquely harsh vocals, lurching, industrial-influenced tempos, air of gothic excess, and overall destructive, Satanic atmosphere set them apart from their scant contemporaries like Venom, Bathory, and Sodom, as did their immediate willingness to experiment, to twist and tease out the potential in what "heavy metal" could ultimately be. Sometimes this musical curiosity backfired (as in 1988's notorious Cold Lake fiasco); sometimes, it bore the sweetest, most fiendishly addictive fruit (see: basically everything else they've ever recorded).

To add to the drama manifest in their music itself, the band's core members – Ain and Warrior – were often at odds; the band broke up, reformed, broke up again, and reformed again; when Warrior announced his departure from the band in 2008, citing irreconcilable differences, it effectively hammered the final nail into the project's battered coffin. He went on to launch Triptykon, while Ain and then-drummer Franco Sesa pledged to form their own new project, which had yet to surface as of press time.