29 Years Ago: NIHILIST complete Only Shreds Remain demo at Sunlight Studio

Daily Noise - / 2017

29 Years Ago: NIHILIST complete Only Shreds Remain demo at Sunlight Studio

We used Sunlight only because Morbid had been there. But I was not pleased with the studio. I think the production on our second demo sucks. The drums, especially, sound awful. Skogsberg didn't know much about how to take care of death metal back then. The reason we got the great guitar sound was the Leif moved on to guitar, and came up with that fat sound. At that point, we didn't know how he did it - but we loved it!
- Nicke Andersson / Nihilist interview, Swedish Death Metal

This was the first time NIHILIST recorded at Tomas Skogsberg's Sunlight Studio; in fact they were one of the first to record at Sunlight at all. They followed TREBLINKA (Crawling in Vomits, November 1988) and MORBID (Last Supper, September 1988).

Recording began on 8 December and Only Shreds Remain was completed on this day in 1988.

For that recording, we hardly had any time at all. You had to pay for each hour in the studio, and we didn't have any money. And back then you didn't rehearse much before a recording, so it was pretty stressful.
- Johnny Hedlund / Nihilist interview, Swedish Death Metal

With their new lineup and improved material, Nihilist easily blew away their contemporaries and delivered what can be seen as probably the first 100 percent pure Swedish death metal recording. The precise riffing, the ghastly growls of Petrov - very unlike the screams delivered on the debut - and Andersson's drumming are all just incredible. This demo is also the first to feature the special ultra-thick Studio Sunlight guitar sound that would later become the trademark of Swedish death metal.
- excerpt from Swedish Death Metal by Daniel Ekeroth