Hierarchy 1999 sounds like Handful of Hate discovering that speed can be more than a measure of aggression. On Qliphotic Supremacy, the Italian band had constructed long, unstable occult ceremonies from melodic black metal, keyboards, clean guitar passages, mystical language, and abrupt changes of atmosphere. Two years later, most of that open space has been compressed into thirty-three minutes of fast, raw, and increasingly disciplined violence. The occult interests remain, but they have moved closer to the body. Spiritual ascent gives way to flesh, domination, submission, blasphemy, wounds, pleasure, and hierarchy. The album does not abandon the debut’s desire for transformation. It simply relocates transformation from the stars into the nerves.
“The XI Wings of Death” opens without an elaborate threshold. Guitars, drums, and Nicola Bianchi’s vocals arrive almost immediately, establishing a record that has little interest in ceremonial delay. The title retains the Qliphothic symbolism of eleven as a number of excess beyond sacred completion, but the music no longer pauses to contemplate the structure. It attacks from inside it. Tremolo-picked riffs move rapidly while the drums maintain a near-continuous forward pressure, giving the song the sensation of multiple wings beating inside a narrow chamber. Melody survives beneath the abrasion, but it is tightened into short, cutting figures rather than expanded into the long atmospheric passages heard on the debut.
This economy defines the album. Most tracks last between two and four minutes, and several seem to end at the exact moment another band might begin developing them. “Disparity” enters, establishes a violent imbalance, and leaves before the listener can become comfortable inside its rhythm. The title suggests inequality not as a social problem to be corrected but as a natural or desired condition. Handful of Hate’s hierarchy is built upon unequal power: ruler and subject, master and slave, violator and violated, sacred authority and the force that overturns it. The album repeatedly treats imbalance as the engine of experience.
The production retains the raw upper-frequency bite of late-1990s black metal, but the instruments are clearer and more concentrated than on Qliphotic Supremacy. The guitars form a harsh, narrow blade rather than a cloud, allowing individual riffs to remain audible through the velocity. The bass adds pressure without softening the edges, while the drums give the music a severe physical drive. Nicola’s voice sounds more commanding than before. On the debut he often appeared caught within the occult machinery he had activated. Here he seems determined to operate it, even when the lyrics describe submission, corruption, or ecstatic loss of control.
“Fleshcrawling Blasphemy” captures the new direction in its title alone. Blasphemy is no longer purely theological. It moves across skin. The sacred violation produces a bodily response, whether disgust, excitement, terror, or all three at once. The song’s speed creates the feeling of something passing over exposed nerves, while the riffs repeatedly tighten around a simple melodic center. Handful of Hate’s strongest writing often depends upon this relationship between immediacy and hidden structure. The first encounter feels like uncontrolled attack, but repeated listening reveals careful placement of melodic turns and rhythmic interruptions.
“Stifled into Extremism” presents extremity as the result of compression. Something denied air, speech, movement, or ordinary release eventually changes form. This is a useful description of the album itself. The debut’s wide occult landscape has been confined until its energy becomes more violent. The song does not sound liberated by extremism. It sounds forced into it, suggesting that excess may grow from confinement as much as from freedom. The riffs move with frantic insistence, but their repetition also creates claustrophobia. Every exit seems to return the music to the same sealed space.
“The Slaughter of the Slave-Gods” expands the album’s hierarchy into a religious struggle. The phrase is deliberately contradictory. Gods traditionally rule, while slaves submit, yet these deities have already been subordinated before their destruction. Handful of Hate imagine divine authority stripped of sovereignty and made available for execution. The song’s rapid attack avoids the grandeur such imagery might normally invite. There is no majestic confrontation between cosmic forces. The killing is swift, contemptuous, and almost administrative. Old gods are not granted heroic deaths because the new hierarchy defines them as unworthy of ceremony.
The brief “Scars of Damnation” operates like a wound between larger songs. It lasts under two minutes, but its brevity intensifies its impact. Scars are evidence that damage has ended while remaining permanently visible. Damnation, however, implies a condition without end. Joining them produces another contradiction: a healed surface marking an eternal injury. The music behaves similarly, arriving as a compact burst whose melodic residue remains after the track has finished. “Master’s Pleasure” then moves directly into the album’s developing fascination with domination and submission. Pleasure belongs to the master because the hierarchy determines whose sensations possess value.
These themes can be uncomfortable, particularly when the lyrics join sexuality with coercion, humiliation, or violence. Handful of Hate are not offering a careful exploration of negotiated erotic power. They are using domination as an extreme symbolic language through which spiritual, physical, and social boundaries can be violated. That does not make every image harmless or philosophically coherent. It does reveal the album’s central obsession: what happens when desire is separated from equality and reorganized entirely around force. The music reinforces this through speed and repetition, rarely allowing the listener the distance needed for calm reflection.
“The Bleeding Lips of Grace” is one of the record’s most vivid combinations of religious and bodily imagery. Grace traditionally descends as mercy, salvation, or divine favor. Here it has lips, and those lips bleed. The sacred has become flesh and can therefore be injured, desired, silenced, or consumed. The track preserves more of the debut’s melodic sorrow than much of the surrounding material. Beneath its velocity lies a mournful contour, suggesting that desecration and attraction are not completely separate. Handful of Hate do not merely hate the sacred object. They remain fascinated by it, perhaps because violation requires something valued enough to profane.
“Submission (The Fine Art of Sodomy)” is the album’s longest track and its conceptual center. The parenthetical phrase treats a sexual act as technique, ritual, and aesthetic practice, while the main title identifies the governing relationship. Yet submission can contain several meanings: forced subordination, voluntary surrender, mystical loss of ego, erotic trust, or defeat. The song refuses to separate these possibilities cleanly. Its extended running time allows the guitars to develop a more atmospheric movement, briefly reconnecting Hierarchy 1999 with the broader spaces of its predecessor. Even here, however, the music remains tightly controlled. The ritual has become more physical, and every transition returns attention to the body.
“The Rise of Abomination” closes the album with emergence rather than conclusion. An abomination rises because the structures intended to suppress it have failed, or because suppression itself created the conditions for its birth. This connects the final track back to “Stifled into Extremism.” The rejected, forbidden, and deformed do not disappear when denied recognition. They gather pressure beneath the hierarchy until they become strong enough to enter it. The song carries one of the album’s broader melodic movements, giving the ending an appropriately elevated shape without transforming it into simple triumph.
Hierarchy 1999 is frequently described as faster and more brutal than Qliphotic Supremacy, which is accurate but incomplete. The deeper change lies in the relationship between the music and its ideas. The debut looked outward and upward, drawing upon Kundalini, Nuit, the Qliphoth, astral generation, and cosmic dissolution. This album turns inward and downward. Its theology becomes anatomy. Lips, flesh, scars, pleasure, sodomy, slavery, and slaughter replace stars and ascending energies. The body becomes the ritual chamber in which supremacy is established and challenged.
The short running time makes the record especially effective. Its ten tracks do not linger long enough for their aggression to become ordinary. Each arrives like another instrument of pressure, performs a specific cut, and withdraws. Melody remains essential, but it is driven through the songs at such velocity that it may not become fully apparent until later listens. This balance between memorability and abrasion places Handful of Hate near the faster Swedish-influenced black metal of the period, while the Italian band’s carnal, occult, and Catholic-shadowed imagination keeps the result from becoming a simple stylistic copy.
Hierarchy 1999 is the moment when Handful of Hate begin to sound unmistakably like the band they would become. The atmospheric uncertainty of the debut has not disappeared completely, but it has been disciplined into a leaner weapon. Later albums would improve the precision, production, and physical impact, yet this record preserves the dangerous instant when those qualities first locked together. It is short, feverish, melodically sharp, and obsessed with the unstable exchange between power and surrender. The title promises an ordered structure, but the music reveals that every hierarchy contains the violence required to maintain it and the abomination already rising underneath.
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