OUR LIST OF 2017’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 9): KREATOR, HELLRIPPER, CONDOR

 

I had a whirlwind out-of-town trip that consumed this past weekend, which is why I was unable to continue the roll-out of this list on Saturday and Sunday. But I’m back home in the Seattle area now, and ready to pick up where I left off on Friday.

And speaking of whirlwinds, there are three of them in this 9th installment of the list. It won’t take you much time to figure out why I grouped them together.

KREATOR

Because thrash is the core of all three songs I’m adding today, and because all three bands are so good at what they do, all three albums were loaded with hellishly catchy songs I could have picked for the list. That was certainly true of Kreator’s latest full-length, Gods of Violence.

 

 

In his review for our site, TheMadIsraeli wrote: “Venomous, vicious, frantic, melodic, epic, and burning with Teutonic fire, Gods Of Violence is Kreator reminding the world that the Germans just flat-out own the European thrash circuit. One of the strongest records in their entire body of work, and likely to be one of the best thrash albums of this new year”.

He also disclosed that the first two singles from the album were “the album’s weakest songs in my estimation, which says something about the rest of the album, given how strong those two are are in isolation”. Nonetheless, it’s one of those two singles — the title track — that I picked for this list. There’s something about it that has a classic, timeless feel. It’s definitely a scorcher, with a made-to-shout-along chorus (WE SHALL KILL!) and a solo that will surely get lots of clawed fingers thrust toward the sky.

Cool video, too, which visualizes the birth of the Kreator demon and is NSFW (boobs and gore, displayed both separately and together, in orgiastic ecstasy). There’s also a sanitized version of the video, which may still be NSFW despite the absence of nipples. Below you’ll find both the uncensored and the censored versions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HELLRIPPER

Coagulating Darkness, the debut album by Hellripper, was a huge 2017 surprise. The creation of one James McBain from Aberdeen, Scotland, it was released last April and opened lots of eyes, very wide, with its hell-ripping fusillades of black thrash and speed metal rooted in the vein of old-school bands such as Venom, Bathory, and Sabbat (Japan).

We got to premiere a track from the album named “Demdike (In League with the Devil)”, but after much debating with myself, the song I chose for this list is “Bastard of Hades“, though I wouldn’t die fighting you in a ditch if you thought just about any of the other album tracks was more deserving.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONDOR

Last April we posted an interview by our Argentinian guest writer Matías Gallardo with guitarist Magnus “Magressor” Garathun of the Norwegian band Condor (he now lives in Australia). The interview revealed the unfortunate news (for fans) that Condor’s latest album is most likely their last one. But that album — Unstoppable Power — is very, very good.

Fully embracing thrash in the mode of such bands as Destruction, Evil Blood, Kreator, Razor, old Sepultura, Sodom, and Sarcofago, and largely shorn of black metal, the album is scorching, and fully earns its name.

Like the other albums featured in this edition of my list, you could almost throw a dart at the Unstoppable Power track list and just blindly add to this list whatever you spiked with the dart. I happened to pick “You Can’t Escape the Fire” — and no, you can’t.