See Tom G. Warrior Celebrate Hellhammer With ‘Massacra’ Live Video
It’s taken four years for Triumph of Death — the quartet that former Celtic Frost frontman Tom G. Warrior launched to celebrate his first band, Hellhammer — to release a music video, but they’ve done so just in time for Halloween. The clip presents a live performance of “Massacra,” a galloping black-metal blast off Hellhammer’s Apocalyptic Raids EP from 1984. “Away is the suuuuun,” Warrior bellows in the chorus. “Endless the night/Mankind’s massacra/Intelligence is dead.” The performance, which features on the band’s upcoming debut album, Resurrection of the Flesh, is one in which Warrior can take pride.
“[This is] the revivification of Hellhammer’s ‘Massacra,’ almost forty years after the song’s inception,” Warrior said in a statement. “The new single and first video clip to accompany Triumph of Death’s Resurrection of the Flesh, an immoderate onstage celebration of Hellhammer’s music.”
More from Rolling Stone
Enough Is Enough. It's Time for the Rock Hall to Recognize Metal
11 Big Reveals From Scorsese's David Johansen Doc 'Personality Crisis'
Resurrection of the Flesh features recordings from three concerts the band played earlier this year in the U.S., Germany, and Portugal. It’s set to come out in a variety of formats on Nov. 10.
Warrior launched Triumph of Death, named after another Apocalyptic Raids track, in 2019 to correct the history books since he felt music critics and fans didn’t take Hellhammer seriously in the early Eighties. A metal zine at the time compared Warrior’s singing to Motörhead’s “Lemmy with a mouthful of warts.” “We were ridiculed,” Warrior told Rolling Stone in 2019. “We weren’t taken seriously.” But outside of the band’s native Switzerland, the band became mythic, influencing death-metal and black-metal bands like Norway’s Mayhem, the United States’ Incantation, and Canada’s Slaughter, among others. Warrior’s next band, Celtic Frost, would prove to be even more influential.
“We were so shunned, so to stand onstage at festivals in front of 15,000 people and play these songs is mindblowing,” Warrior told Rolling Stone. “That’s more than the capacity of the biggest stadium in my hometown. If you would have told the people who were in Hellhammer in 1982, they would’ve never believed you.”
Resurrection of the Flesh track list:
1. “The Third of the Storms (Evoked Damnation)”
2. “Massacra”
3. “Maniac”
4. “Blood Insanity”
5. “Decapitator”
6. “Crucifixion”
7. “Reaper”
8. “Horus/Aggressor”
9. “Revelations of Doom”
10. “Messiah”
11. “Visions of Mortality”
12. “Triumph of Death”
Bonus seven-inch (super deluxe edition only)
13. “Decapitator” (Live in Houston)
Best of Rolling Stone
