In 1982, three musicians from Newcastle upon Tyne, in northeast England, brought a chainsaw into a recording studio. Their drummer had worked in a steel factory and knew what metal grinding against metal does to a listener, so they clamped chunks of steel into a vice, fired up the machine, and recorded the shriek. Then they put it at the beginning of their second album, Black Metal, so that the noise arrived almost as soon as the needle touched the record.
The musicians were Venom: bassist and singer Conrad “Cronos” Lant, guitarist Jeffrey “Mantas” Dunn, and drummer Anthony “Abaddon” Bray. They had a perfectly reasonable explanation. Cronos wanted listeners to think their stereos were broken.
He kept that appetite for mischief throughout his career. On October 1, 2026, Venom announced that Cronos had died at the age of 63. Five months earlier, the band had released Into Oblivion, their sixteenth studio album and his thirteenth with Venom. Its lead single, “Lay Down Your Soul,” reached back to the title track of Black Metal, the song that gave a genre its name.
Venom loved Motörhead’s accelerated rock and roll, punk’s confrontational attitude, and the theatrical possibilities of horror. Their chosen subject was Satan, and they approached him with the enthusiasm of people who had finally found the right character for the job. The Devil was already a familiar presence in popular culture. Black Sabbath had built their reputation on ominous riffs and supernatural imagery, while William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976) had made demonic terror a profitable subject for Hollywood.
Venom were interested in what happened when the terrifying figure became the performer.
That change of perspective traveled far beyond Tyneside. Some musicians inherited Venom’s riffs and recording methods. Others carried the Satanic imagery into territory its creators had never intended to enter. The genre named after a 1982 album from Newcastle acquired musical and ideological characteristics its original architects could scarcely have imagined.
The monster gets the microphone
Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath,” released in 1970, opens with rain, thunder, and a tolling bell. Then Tony Iommi introduces a slow riff built around the tritone, a dissonant interval that gives the music its unsettling character. Over it, Ozzy Osbourne’s narrator watches a mysterious figure approach, recognizes the threat, and begs God to save him.
The listener encounters evil through the eyes of someone desperate to escape it.
Cronos thought Ozzy had missed an opportunity. In a 2020 interview with John Doran for The Quietus, he remembered his reaction to the song. Why retreat from the demon when you could become it? As he explained, “I wanna be that fucking demon who you’re afraid of.”
That decision changed the grammar of Venom’s lyrics. The singer became the creature other bands warned their audiences about. On “In League with Satan,” the band’s first single in 1981 and later a track on their debut album, Welcome to Hell, the narrator presents his relationship with the Devil as settled business. He sounds quite comfortable with the arrangement.
The music sold the character. In a 2017 Guitar World feature, Mantas recalled bringing the song’s principal riff to rehearsal and expecting a straight beat. Instead, Abaddon began pounding the toms in what Mantas called a tribal way, and the song started to roll. The band added a reversed passage at the beginning to make it sound more evil, and Mantas built his solo from sustained single notes and feedback. The drums set up a procession; the guitar supplied the appropriate disturbance.
The band’s image took shape alongside the music. They had begun as Guillotine, a local group whose repertoire included covers of established hard rock bands, and becoming Venom gave their ambitions a new direction. Cronos pushed the lyrics toward occult subjects, while Mantas supplied riffs shaped by his love of traditional heavy metal, Judas Priest above all.
The members renamed themselves too. Lant, a Capricorn, chose Cronos in reference to the Greek mythological figure associated with the Roman god Saturn. Dunn and Bray found Mantas and Abaddon in Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible (1969), although Abaddon has an older pedigree as the Hebrew name of the angel of the abyss in Revelation 9:11. An earlier singer, Clive Archer, had performed under the considerably more ambitious name Jesus Christ.
Their rehearsal space added an unlikely detail to the mythology. Venom practiced in a church hall in Newcastle, rehearsing a Satanic repertoire under the roof of a Christian institution. Cronos was also still playing with another band that rehearsed in a different church, giving him an unusually ecclesiastical weekly schedule for someone planning a career as metal’s most notorious demon.
The musicians were assembling characters from religious language, horror imagery, and the conventions of rock performance. Their songs offered the pleasure of belonging, for the length of an album, to a world where the Devil was a far more attractive employer.
Cronos defended that freedom to play a role for decades. Horror films had shown that audiences could enjoy monsters without requiring the actors to share their convictions, and he saw little reason to treat a metal singer differently. In a 2015 interview with Guitar World, he put it in cinematic terms: Black Sabbath were Frankenstein; Venom were The Evil Dead. Sam Raimi’s 1981 film brings possession into the room, physical and excessive, and Cronos wanted to occupy that world from the monster’s side.
The idea was outrageous enough to sell records. It would eventually become complicated enough to start arguments about what black metal was supposed to mean.
Black metal: made in Newcastle
Venom arrived at a good moment for loud young bands in northern England. By the end of the 1970s, a loose collection of groups had been gathered under the name New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Iron Maiden and Saxon were building substantial audiences, independent labels and local clubs offered smaller bands a way to reach listeners, and punk had already shown that musicians could make records without waiting for the established industry’s permission.
Newcastle and its surrounding towns had their own scene, supported by Neat Records, an independent label operating alongside Impulse Studios in nearby Wallsend. The region was also living through industrial decline and rising unemployment, and for young musicians, making records offered an alternative to a future with few jobs in it.
Cronos understood those circumstances firsthand. After leaving school, he found work at Impulse, initially as a tape operator, and learned how valuable a few hours of recording time could be.
He had joined the group as a guitarist. When bassist Alan Winston quit a week before a gig, Lant borrowed a bass and plugged it into his Marshall stack through his Big Muff pedals. The resulting distortion persuaded him to keep the instrument. Its overdriven low frequencies and aggressive midrange gave Venom a bass that occupied much of the same space as Mantas’s guitar.
Their debut, Welcome to Hell, appeared through Neat in December 1981. Cronos later described it as essentially a collection of demos, with timing and tuning problems the band had expected to correct before the material became an album. The label released it anyway. The roughness became part of Venom’s reputation, although the musicians were less enthusiastic about those limitations than some later admirers might imagine.
For their second album, Venom prepared more carefully and received additional studio time. Black Metal, released in November 1982, allowed them to experiment with arrangements and recording techniques that had been beyond the reach of the debut.
The title track had a suitably undignified origin. In that 2017 Guitar World feature, Mantas explained that he had taken his guitar into the bathroom one morning, come up with a couple of riffs while sitting on the toilet, and recorded the ideas on a cheap cassette recorder. One of the most consequential titles in metal history thus began with a musician taking his guitar somewhere most people would prefer to be left alone.
The song acquired another detail during recording. Mantas noticed an empty space in the arrangement and had Cronos fill it with a declaration about surrendering one’s soul to the gods of rock and roll, modeled on the phrasing of a line in Judas Priest’s “Exciter.” Even Venom’s most notorious statements grew from affection for the genre’s established musicians. They took recognizable heavy metal materials and pushed them toward a faster, more abrasive form.
You can hear the difference in the title track itself. Rapid single-note guitar figures run against a driving drum pattern, sixteenth-note subdivisions give the riff an urgency beyond its tempo, and Cronos delivers the words in a hoarse bark. The vocal declaration interrupts the instrumental attack just long enough to become a slogan the listener can take away.
Other experiments were stranger. For “Buried Alive,” the musicians brought mud, cardboard boxes, and spades into the studio, placed microphones inside the boxes in a stairwell, and began shoveling earth onto them. Cronos wanted to recreate a burial from the position of the person being buried. The dirt strikes the enclosure at close range, turning an ordinary physical sound into the experience of confinement. The song then runs into “Raise the Dead,” and the burial becomes the beginning of another grotesque story.
The recorded funeral had an unintended comic element. Cronos remembered the participants struggling to contain their laughter while attempting to produce convincing sounds of mourning. On playback, the laughter resembled crying closely enough to stay in the final version.
These were practical experiments in making horror audible. Venom’s resources were limited, but the musicians understood that a recording could manipulate the listener’s sense of space and perspective.
The album’s title gave the approach a name. For Cronos, black metal initially described the aggressive music Venom were making, a broad category that set them apart from the more polished heavy metal around them. Other musicians would take it much further.
Heaven has a very bad day
By 1984, Venom had apparently decided that three-minute songs were insufficient for the forces of Hell. Their third album, At War with Satan, devoted an entire side of vinyl to a composition lasting almost 20 minutes, in which an uprising in Hell conquers Heaven and sends God into the infernal realm.
Cronos drew the narrative from a story he had begun writing at school. Musically, his model was Rush’s 2112 (1976), whose side-long title composition had shown that an extended rock piece could sustain a fictional narrative. It was an unexpected template for a band associated with short bursts of aggression, although Rush had long been among Cronos’s favorite bands.
He structured the piece as a succession of riffs, without returning to verses and choruses, which gave him room for a larger war. It also created problems. A long composition needs transitions that keep the drama moving and material contrasting enough to sustain it, and a large collection of riffs cannot guarantee either.
Mantas remembered the recording as an ordeal of endless revisions and tape splicing, and told Guitar World in 2017 that he was not a fan of the album. Cronos recalled that listeners were confused by the experiment and wanted the shorter songs that had made Venom’s name.
The narrative nevertheless contains one of the band’s best ideas.
In Revelation 12:7-9, the archangel Michael and his angels defeat the dragon, identified as Satan, and drive him out of Heaven. Divine authority prevails, and the rebellious forces are expelled.
Venom reverse the outcome.
Hell wins.
The premise belongs to a much older fascination with the Devil as rebel. John Milton’s Paradise Lost, first published in 1667, gives the fallen angel an extraordinary speaking role. Having lost the war in Heaven, Satan tries to persuade his companions that defeat can be transformed into independence. In Book I, he declares, “Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.”
The line sounds like magnificent defiance, but the poem also exposes the pride and self-deception behind it. Satan can make rebellion sound glorious while becoming ever more trapped by his own choices.
More than a century later, William Blake offered a provocative reading of Milton’s achievement. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, produced around 1790, he suggested that Milton was “of the Devils party without knowing it.” Blake’s argument concerned the freedom of Milton’s imagination: the poet, he believed, wrote with greater liberty of Hell and its inhabitants than of Heaven. The observation belonged to Blake’s larger challenge to conventional relationships between reason, authority, energy, and desire.
Venom’s approach was more straightforward. Milton’s Satan argues brilliantly for rebellion and still loses the war. Venom let the rebels win.
Milton, to be fair, had already armed his rebels well. In Book VI, Satan’s forces devise artillery during the night and turn it on the loyal angels when battle resumes, a striking intrusion of contemporary military technology into an ancient cosmic conflict. Venom simply brought electricity and distortion to the occasion.
There is no documented evidence that Milton or Blake inspired At War with Satan, and the comparison requires no such claim. Cronos described his approach in more practical terms. In a 2022 interview with Metal Hammer, he explained that he began with the Christian account of the universe, accepted its premises for the purposes of the song, and imagined events from the Devil’s position. The audience already knows the characters and the expected ending, which leaves Venom free to change the ending.
Milton gives the defeated rebel a persuasive voice. Blake challenges the imaginative authority of Heaven. Venom hand the Devil a military victory.
The title carried a joke Cronos enjoyed. People kept asking him whether At War with Satan meant fighting alongside Satan or against him, and he preferred to let them work it out. The ambiguity suited the band. Their mythology drew on centuries of religious associations, but the musicians kept the freedom to treat those associations as entertainment, and the audience could take the performance as seriously as it wished.
That freedom would be contested once black metal developed into a genre with its own ideas about authenticity.
When the Devil went abroad
Venom’s influence spread through the international metal underground in the early 1980s, carried by tape trading, concerts, and word of mouth. Cronos liked to tell the story of how he discovered Metallica: a friend brought him a video of an early San Francisco show featuring Dave Mustaine onstage in a Welcome to Hell T-shirt. In 1984, Metallica joined Venom’s Seven Dates of Hell tour, their first in Europe.
The American thrash scene was building its own approach to aggressive metal, combining British heavy metal and punk with tighter arrangements and more precise playing, and Metallica and Slayer were among the bands that turned those influences into something new. In Switzerland, Hellhammer and Celtic Frost were working toward related forms of extreme metal, as was Bathory in Sweden.
The family tree is messier than it sometimes appears. Bathory’s Quorthon disputed the idea that Venom had shaped his earliest recordings. In a 2002 interview, he said he had heard only a handful of Venom songs and named Black Sabbath, Motörhead, and the British punk band GBH as his models. Musicians in different places can arrive at similar ideas through shared influences and independent experimentation.
In Norway, the traces were more direct. Mayhem, formed near Oslo in 1984, took their name from “Mayhem with Mercy,” an instrumental on Welcome to Hell, and their 1987 EP Deathcrush included a cover of “Witching Hour.”
The music Mayhem and other Norwegian bands made over the following years, however, moved far from Venom’s rock and roll foundations. Much of it relied on rapid tremolo-picked guitar, blast beats, shrieked vocals, and deliberately thin recordings. The name Venom had popularized now described music that could sound very little like their own early albums.
The transformation went beyond technique. Some individuals associated with the Norwegian scene were responsible for church arson and murder, crimes that attracted international attention in the early 1990s and complicated the relationship between extreme music, theatrical transgression, and criminal behavior.
Cronos rejected attempts to use Venom’s imagery to justify violence. He consistently described the band’s presentation as entertainment and argued that performers should be free to inhabit fictional characters without being held responsible for the actions of people who misunderstood them.
There was an uncomfortable irony in the situation. Venom had spent years constructing a Satanic performance convincing enough to disturb audiences. Some of the musicians who inherited their vocabulary wanted to remove the distance between performance and conviction altogether.
The resulting culture was neither uniform nor exclusively violent, yet the actions of particular individuals came to dominate international accounts of Norwegian black metal.
Cronos had his own reaction to the new scene. While touring the United States with his solo band, he heard recordings by Mayhem and Burzum, and what struck him was not their extremity but their looseness: young musicians who cared more about passion than precision, as Venom had at the start. In a 2022 interview with Metal Hammer, he recalled needing that time away from the band to see its place clearly.
The influence had traveled out of Newcastle, been transformed abroad, and returned to its source.
The Devil still has a sense of humor
The classic trio recorded four studio albums between 1981 and 1985 before their partnership broke down. Cronos left in 1987, and the band continued without him, with Tony “Demolition Man” Dolan singing on Prime Evil (1989), Temples of Ice (1991), and The Waste Lands (1992).
The original lineup reunited in 1995, but the reconciliation proved temporary. Cronos eventually became the only classic-era member in the band performing as Venom, while the others pursued their own versions of the group’s music and history. By 2026, three acts were performing under variations of the name: Cronos’s band, Dolan’s Venom Inc., and a reunion of Mantas and Abaddon celebrating the 45th anniversary of Welcome to Hell. The old arguments about ownership and authorship had never entirely gone away.
Cronos’s Venom, meanwhile, had settled into a stable lineup. Guitarist Stuart “Rage” Dixon joined in 2007, drummer Danny “Dante” Needham in 2009, and by 2026 the three had worked together for about 17 years, longer than any previous lineup. Into Oblivion, released through Noise/BMG on May 1, 2026, came from a band with its own established creative relationships.
I saw them in 2010, at Hole in the Sky in Norway, the country that had taken his band’s name further than he ever meant it to go. By then, metal seemed to have seen it all and to know it all, and it was easy to believe that nothing would ever feel as overwhelming, or as untouched, as it once had. Cronos played with real power and real emotion, and standing in front of that stage, I had the sense of watching history. It was fucking metal.
Into Oblivion took eight years to follow Storm the Gates (2018), delayed by the pandemic and by problems in the studio. Rage told MetalTalk that a faulty microphone had ruined the hi-hat on the drum recordings, sending the band back to material they had already finished. They also chose to record without a click track, so the tempo could sprint in the fast sections and drag in the slow ones, the way it does on stage. It was the same looseness Cronos had once heard in those Norwegian recordings, now chosen deliberately by musicians with decades of experience.
“Lay Down Your Soul” returned directly to the band’s formative vocabulary. The title recalls the declaration from “Black Metal,” and Rage confirmed that the song also contains references to “Witching Hour” and Welcome to Hell. He described them as a message to longtime listeners, delivered with a distinctly British, tongue-in-cheek humor.
That humor often disappears from historical accounts of Venom, particularly those invested in black metal as an uncompromising artistic or ideological position.
Mantas remembered it. In his tribute after Cronos’s death, he acknowledged the band’s turbulent history, but what he chose to recall was the friendship of the early years and old video recordings of the three of them laughing, sometimes for no particular reason. Their sense of humor, he conceded, “was an acquired taste.” Cronos, in what turned out to be his final interview, given to Classic Rock in May 2026, remembered those years differently: there had been no camaraderie, he said, and the band had split on bad terms. The two memories need not cancel each other out. A band can be miserable together and still find the same things funny.
In the same interview, Cronos ranged well beyond his stage persona. He talked about Kate Bush, birdwatching, and Edgar Allan Poe, whose writing inspired “Nevermore” on Into Oblivion. The man who had spent decades portraying an infernal monster still kept the poster Kate Bush signed for him in 1980, and could name the goldfinches, robins, and wrens that visited his garden in Northumberland.
His stage character remained convincing. It was simply one of the many things that interested him.
That summer, he was still on stage. At Luppolo in Rock in Cremona, Italy, on July 19, Venom opened with “Lay Down Your Soul” and closed with “Black Metal.”
The record has since acquired an unexpected place in Venom’s history as the last studio album released during Cronos’s lifetime. Its title may sound suggestive in retrospect, but nothing establishes it as an intended farewell. Rage explained in May that the title track had been written about five years earlier.
The return to “Black Metal” in its lead single is more revealing.
In 1982, a young guitarist brought a couple of riffs into the studio, and the band needed something to fill a gap in the arrangement. Mantas suggested a declaration about surrendering one’s soul to rock and roll, and Cronos gave it his voice.
Forty-four years later, the same invitation became the title of a new Venom song. It was still doing its job: giving Cronos something outrageous to shout, and everyone else a reason to shout it with him.
When Venom announced his death, his son Nathan reached for that line one last time. His father, he wrote, “has laid down his soul.”
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Sources
- Forging Black Metal: Cronos of Venom Talks About the Genesis of a Genre, The Quietus, 2010
- The Last Laugh: Cronos of Venom Interviewed, The Quietus, 2020
- Venom’s Cronos: The Guitar World Interview, Guitar World, 2008
- Venom’s Cronos Reflects on the Band’s Career and New Album, ‘From the Very Depths’, Guitar World, 2015
- Jeff ‘Mantas’ Dunn on the Very Best of Venom, Guitar World, 2017
- Venom Inc.’s Mantas Discusses ‘Avé’ and the Toxicity Surrounding the Venom Name, Guitar World, 2017
- How Venom made their unholy masterpiece Black Metal and changed the course of metal, Metal Hammer, 2011 (online 2024)
- Venom frontman Cronos: ‘Metallica have had some shit albums’, Metal Hammer, 2022
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I (1674), Representative Poetry Online
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VI, Christian Classics Ethereal Library
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ed. David V. Erdman
- Interview: Quorthon (Bathory), Death Metal Underground, 2002
- Mayhem biography, Peaceville Records
- Mayhem, Deathcrush, Bandcamp
- Venom, Into Oblivion, Noise Records
- Venom / Inside Into Oblivion – Rage on Writing, Chaos and Comeback, MetalTalk, 2026
- Venom Isn’t Concerned About Lamb of God ‘Into Oblivion’ Album Title Coincidence, Blabbermouth, 2026
- Luppolo In Rock – Day 3 @ Cremona, 19 luglio 2026, Metal Hammer Italia, 2026
- Cardio, corpse paint and Carolina Reapers: Venom frontman Cronos on his brilliantly bizarre double life, Classic Rock, 2026
- Venom Frontman Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant Dead at 63, Blabbermouth, 2026
- Original Venom Guitarist Jeff ‘Mantas’ Dunn Pays Tribute to Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant, Blabbermouth, 2026