Venom: Possessed [BMG]

Why you'll love it

This reissue comes in a gatefold jacket. Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon go back to the short, fast songs that made Venom the blueprint for thrash and black metal.

This edition

• Gatefold jacket

About the album

The two children on the cover are family. The boy is the son of drummer Abaddon and the girl is producer Keith Nichol's niece, and their wide-eyed portrait makes for one of the most striking sleeves in the band's catalogue, a quiet calm before a very loud record from the Newcastle trio. By the mid-80s they were headliners on both sides of the Atlantic, taking Slayer and Exodus out on their North American Combat Tour.

Much of the material was written before At War with Satan, and it was also the first Venom album made outside Impulse Studios. Cronos snarls and thunders on bass, Mantas whips up riffs and Abaddon pounds away on "Powerdrive," "Satanachist," "Burn This Place (To the Ground)" and the title track, "Hellchild" and "Suffer Not the Children" keep the pace up, and "Too Loud (For the Crowd)" says exactly what it means.

Mantas stepped away from the band the following year, so this is the classic trio's closing statement of the decade, and a loud one. Keith Nichol produced and engineered it all, and we assume the niece was paid in sweets.

Also at Kops: more Venom on vinyl · browse Metal

Tracklist

Listen

On Neat / BMG (cat# 964255181), a reissue of the 1985 album.