A drummer stands on the cover of Pure Holocaust, the second album by Norwegian black metal band Immortal. His name is Grim, and he was in the group when the record appeared on November 1, 1993. The strange part is that Grim did not play a single beat on the album that bears his image.
The strange part is that Grim did not play a single beat on the album that bears his image.
Abbath behind the kit
The music was recorded at Grieg Hall in Bergen, Norway, and the job behind the kit fell to Abbath. On Pure Holocaust, Abbath handled vocals, bass and drums all at once, while Demonaz took the guitar. Grim joined Immortal only after the recording was already finished, which left the cover telling a slightly different story from the music inside.
What the listener actually gets is black metal pushed to a colder, faster extreme. The album moves quicker than Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism, the band's debut, and its lyrics stay locked in a world of ice, snow and fantasy landscapes. The opening track, "Unsilent Storms in the North Abyss", announces that frozen territory from the first seconds.
Credits, formats and reissues
Abbath wrote the music for all the songs, with Demonaz sharing credit on the first four tracks. Demonaz wrote every lyric. The title track, "Pure Holocaust", is the longest piece on the record, but the whole album is over quickly. The record came out on Osmose Productions and sits between Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism and Battles in the North in the Immortal discography. The record was produced by Eirik Hundvin together with the band itself. It appeared in several formats: a standard CD, a limited LP, and a limited picture disc. The picture disc edition came out in 1998, and the LP was reissued by Osmose Productions in 2005.
The title Pure Holocaust sounds like a provocation, but the songs stay closer to winter mythology than to history. Titles such as "Frozen by Icewinds" and "Eternal Years on the Path to the Cemetery Gates" sketch a landscape more than a story, a place where the cold is not a metaphor but the main character. The track list contains eight songs, all sung in English. After the opener comes "A Sign for the Norse Hordes to Ride", followed by "The Sun No Longer Rises". The sequence continues with "Frozen by Icewinds" and "Storming Through Red Clouds and Holocaustwinds". The sixth track is "Eternal Years on the Path to the Cemetery Gates", and the seventh is "As the Eternity Opens". The title track closes the record.
The album built a reputation slowly. In 2013, Decibel magazine ranked Pure Holocaust 25th among the 100 best black metal albums ever made. That recognition arrived long after the record's release, a sign that its fast, icy sound had become a reference point for the genre. The album's place of publication is listed as France, though the music itself was made in Norway. Its total running time in seconds is 2036. The work is classified as a studio album in the black metal genre.
The cover image of Grim remains one of black metal's odd little contradictions. The drummer fans saw when they picked up the record was not the drummer they heard. The man who actually played those parts stood behind the microphone and the bass as well, shaping an album that still sounds like a blizzard caught on tape. The release is catalogued in several music databases. It carries a MusicBrainz release group identifier, a Discogs master ID of 13076, and release ID 236 in Encyclopaedia Metallum. These entries confirm its place among Immortal's documented studio works.