When you zoom out, the history of extreme metal looks like an arms race. Black Sabbath wrote the urtext, Motörhead made it rowdier, Metallica and Slayer made it faster, Death made it more brutal, Mayhem made it more sinister, and so on. Anaal Nathrakh, the Birmingham duo of vocalist V.I.T.R.I.O.L. (aka Dave Hunt) and multi-instrumentalist Irrumator (Mick Kenney), fit neatly into that arc, but they also sought to blow it up entirely. Their 2001 debut The Codex Necro, which has received a new 20th anniversary reissue, pushed sonic extremes in uncomfortable, provocative ways that had no clear antecedent. Their sound was a nightmarish hybrid of black metal, industrial music, grindcore, digital hardcore, and IDM.
Like punk before it, electronic music developed in uneasy parallel to metal during the ’80s and ’90s. Metal’s obsession with musical virtuosity and its tendency toward walled-off hermeticism meant that, as the electronic scene exploded with creativity, relatively few extreme metal bands embraced it as an influence. Anaal Nathrakh were an exception. Where many drummers take pride in playing with superhuman speed, Anaal Nathrakh reveled in writing parts that no human drummer could conceivably attempt. “There is nothing to say we could never have a drummer, should an appropriately necrotic and unspeakable individual become available,” Hunt told the Chronicles of Chaos zine in 2002, and it sounded like a challenge. (They have since welcomed a handful of drummers to the live lineup, though the drums on their records remain programmed.)
By liberating themselves from the limitations of flesh and blood, Anaal Nathrakh opened the door to a whole galaxy of possibilities. They weren’t the first metal band to utilize electronics—Fear Factory and Ministry were early innovators, and the lone album by Norwegian band Thorns from the same year as The Codex Necro is another powerful collision of black metal and industrial music. But few bands in the genre have so fully embraced the potential of computerized sounds, a sonic element that can push an already horrific song to more distressing places.
In both the maximalism of its ideas and the punishing, blown-out production, The Codex Necro is one of the 21st century’s most extreme-sounding metal albums. The drum machine, as promised, pummels with impossible intensity. Humans have imitated these parts onstage, but their live drums have never sounded this deliberately insane. Kenney’s guitars and synths are caked in distortion and merged in mechanized lockstep, at times becoming indistinguishable from one another. Hunt’s throat-ripping vocals are the epitome of anguish, and they’re run through so much processing that he sounds like a Cronenbergian cyborg, crying out for merciful death.
Anaal Nathrakh’s reputation as a frightening band begins with The Codex Necro. The pushed-to-the-edge ethos of the album manifests in some legitimately unsettling moments: the first time Hunt’s strangled howl enters on album opener “The Supreme Necrotic Audnance,” the barked command of “Die on your knees!” from “Submission Is for the Weak,” the full minute of seasick electronics and Blair Witch-like field recordings that close the album. As far as they’ve strayed on subsequent albums from the sound of The Codex Necro, this aural terror remains the key to their work.
A lot of the thrill of The Codex Necro is witnessing Hunt and Kenney finding ways to make all that blood-curdling horror sound fun. The aforementioned “Submission Is for the Weak” is perversely motivating. For a track whose lyrics put the listener in the shoes of the victim, the music delivers some seriously empowering riffs. The most audacious song is “Paradigm Shift – Annihilation,” which starts in a swirling black metal vortex before moving to the dancefloor, with a breakbeat straight out of ’90s IDM. When you convincingly split the difference between Aphex Twin and Darkthrone, you’re operating in rarified air.
Along with the original album, Anaal Nathrakh have reissued Total Fucking Necro, a collection of chaotic, pre-LP demos. Taken as a whole, the music paints a picture of a band standing on the edge of a cliff, inventing themselves with reckless abandon. They don’t sound like a group who could settle into a long, steady career. But in the two decades since The Codex Necro, they have become precisely that. Hunt and Kenney have abandoned their pseudonyms, released 11 solid-to-very-good albums, and established themselves as a killer live act after an early-career aversion to stepping onstage. But The Codex Necro will forever live in a reality where none of that seems likely. It still feels as subversive, strange, and terrifying as ever.
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