In March 1993, four Swedish musicians walked into Studio Rockshop to record their second album. The band was Hypocrisy, and the record they made there, Osculum Obscenum, would be released on 12 October 1993. It was a death metal album, and it arrived at a moment when the genre was moving from underground tapes to international labels. The group had already put out Penetralia the year before, but this new record was where their sound hardened into something more direct and more dangerous.
Lineup and production roles
The lineup was compact and focused. Masse Broberg handled the vocals, while Peter Tägtgren played guitar and keyboards and also produced the record alongside Markus Staiger. Mikael Hedlund played bass, and Lars Szöke sat behind the drums. Broberg wrote all the lyrics, and the music was composed by the members of Hypocrisy themselves. That division of labor gave the album a unified feel: the words and the riffs came from the same small room, from people who had been playing together long enough to know exactly how far they could push each other.
The album opens with Pleasure of Molestation, a six-minute track that sets the tone immediately. The title song, Osculum Obscenum, runs five minutes and seven seconds, and it sits at the center of the record like a statement of intent. There are nine songs in total, and the whole thing lasts just over forty-two minutes. It is not a long album, but it does not need to be. Every track is built to hit hard and leave a mark, from the opening riff to the closing notes.
A Venom cover in the tracklist
One of the most telling choices on the record is a cover of Black Metal by Venom. Hypocrisy did not just pay tribute to their influences; they pulled that song into their own world and made it sound like one of their own. The original Venom track was already raw and confrontational, but in the hands of Hypocrisy it became something even more feral. That cover sits among the band's own compositions without any drop in intensity, which says a lot about how fully they had absorbed the sound they were now helping to define.
Hypocrisy did not just pay tribute to their influences; they pulled that song into their own world and made it sound like one of their own.
The artwork came from Wes Benscoter, who is credited as a guest member responsible for the design. His cover gave the album a visual identity that matched the music: dark, detailed, and slightly wrong in the best way. Nuclear Blast, the German label that released the record, put it out on compact disc and vinyl. That physical presence mattered. Death metal in the early nineties was still a tactile culture, built on record sleeves and liner notes as much as on the music itself.
The album did not arrive quietly. It was the second Hypocrisy full-length after Penetralia, and it set up what came next. The following year, the band returned with The Fourth Dimension, a record that would push their sound in new directions. But Osculum Obscenum remains the moment when Hypocrisy proved they were not just another Swedish death metal band. They were a group with a clear vision, a strong lineup, and the nerve to put something this ugly and this compelling on a major metal label.
Critics noticed. The album has been reissued several times, often alongside the band's other early death metal records, and those reissues have drawn moderately positive reviews. Reviewers have given it scores of seven and eight out of ten, which for a record this extreme is a sign of real respect. The songs are sung in English, which helped the band reach listeners far beyond Sweden. Three decades later, the album still sounds like a band discovering exactly how heavy they could be, and deciding to go all the way.