Horns up who was at Venom’s legendary Seventh Date of Hell gig at Hammersmith Odeon on June 1st 1984?
I was, and if you were as lucky as I was to be in attendance, you don’t really need me to tell you how important a band Venom were back in the day. I mean, back then, ‘Black Metal’ was all about one band and a word-of-mouth buzz between metal fans who liked their music sounding like it was spewing from the very depths of hell. It most certainly wasn’t the worldwide musical tour de force that it is today, one that even has its own sub-genres, and even managed to pop up as a topic for discussion on a celebrity travel show on TLC earlier this month (the Norwegian episode of Zero Stars in case you are wondering, starring Sarah Pascoe and Roisin Conaty).
That’s how influential Venom’s music was, and some might say still is.
Those heady and chaotic days of the classic ‘Black Metal’ line up are of course long since gone, but here I am in 2026 about to indulge myself in the band’s sixteenth studio record, ‘Into Oblivion’, featuring founding bassist/vocalist Cronos alongside Rage on guitar and Dante drums, this incarnation’s first new music since 2018’s ‘Storm The Gates’, promising to be their most “progressive” music to date.
Okay, let’s wind my neck in a second, this doesn’t mean that Venom have suddenly decided to go all Gryphon on us, and Cronos has dropped his bleeding cruciform bass for a crumhorn. No, what it means is that whilst the band recognises things from back in the day, they are looking to bring their new tunes into a whole new setting that gives their sound a whole fresh approach.
And I need look no further than the album’s opener and title track, ‘Into Oblivion’, to hear exactly what they mean by this. There’s a near power metal melodic guitar intro to the track before the double bass drums thunder out of the speakers, and Cronos bellows perhaps one of his most gutturally melodic vocal performances since the band’s ‘Calm Before The Storm’ days. By contrast, ‘Lay Down Your Soul’, which follows (and was the LP’s first single), is more pure old school Venom, packed full of lyrical nods to the band’s history and that gig I mentioned at the top of this review. This track will immediately have the Venom Legions worldwide windmilling like lunatics.
With eight years between studio albums Cronos and his bandmates have certainly had time to get this record sounding exactly how they want it to sound and it’s the guitars of Rage that delivers the monstrous chug that hammers home the likes of ‘Nevermore’ and ‘Man & Beast’, whilst the earthshaking rhythms of Cronos and Dante take the likes of ‘Death The Leveller’, ‘Legend’, and the awesome ‘Kicked Outta Hell’ to an all new level of intensity and have me screaming for ‘Metal Bloody Metal’, something I haven’t done in quite some time.
C’mon turn it up…‘Into Oblivion’ will be released on May 1st 2026 on vinyl, CD and digital formats and can be pre-ordered here.
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Author: Johnny Hayward
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