Barbarian! Destroyer! Warrior!
The Return of True Power Metal
Unleashed from the darkest depths of Damnation
to bring forth the book of Armageddon ...
Barbaric black metal (NEAT 1015, that is) arrived on this day in 1984. VENOM's third album, At War with Satan!
You won't believe it, we had "At War With Satan" before we even started to record "Welcome To Hell". We had "Possessed" before we even started to record "Welcome To Hell", we had everything figured out. That's how you can see the "Possessed" lyrics on "Welcome To Hell", "Black Metal" and "At War With Satan" already. We had the whole thing figured out from day one we always said we got four studio albums and a live album and then whatever next...!
"At War With Satan" was "The Book Of Armageddon"... I mean, I've got in the house about another hundred pages, which is the entire story of "At War With Satan" and it was supposed to go out with the book as well. But it never did. We wanted the album cover to look as a book cover as it possibly could, that was the whole reason for the sort of leather-bound sleeve etc. But then again, we went over to America and we saw the "At War With Satan" cover sleeve and it was just a plain sleeve, and we went to Brazil and it was a fucking photocopy of a plain sleeve haha!
- Cronos / Venom interview, Voices from the Darkside, 1995