ViceCrown is the point where Handful of Hate stop sounding like a band refining influences and begin sounding like a system designed entirely around their own obsessions. The earlier records had already established Nicola Bianchi’s interest in occult hierarchy, sexual violence, submission, bodily desecration, and spiritual power, but ViceCrown gives those ideas a harder and more coherent musical body. The atmospheric openings and mystical detours of Qliphotic Supremacy are almost completely gone, while the compressed speed of Hierarchy 1999 has been strengthened by heavier production, more varied drumming, and riffs that retain melody without sacrificing brutality. The album’s title combines corruption with sovereignty. Vice is no longer an act committed against an external moral order. It has been crowned, institutionalized, and given the authority to establish an order of its own.
“I Hate” begins with a statement so blunt that it almost resembles a primitive slogan, yet the music beneath it is anything but simple. The guitars move through jagged melodic shapes, abrupt rhythmic cuts, and dense bursts of tremolo picking, while the drums continually shift the pressure beneath them. Hatred is not presented as one sustained emotional temperature. It contracts, accelerates, and changes direction. Nicola’s vocals are sharper and more controlled than on the earlier albums, sounding less like a participant being overwhelmed by ritual and more like the person presiding over it. His rasp occupies the upper edge of the mix without losing physical force, turning each line into something between accusation and command.
The production at Fear Studios is central to this transformation. Earlier Handful of Hate recordings gained atmosphere from roughness, narrow frequency range, and the instability of instruments colliding inside limited space. ViceCrown is cleaner, but not polished into sterility. The guitars have enough separation for their internal movement to be heard, while the drums possess a much stronger body. Bass contributes weight beneath the rapid passages, allowing the music to feel violent in three dimensions rather than merely abrasive at the surface. This increased clarity reveals how carefully the material has been constructed. What initially appears to be an uninterrupted attack contains numerous small decisions involving pacing, accent, repetition, and release.
“Beating Violence” gives the album’s brutality a deliberately repetitive shape. The title can describe violence as an action, a pulse, or a force that is itself being struck into existence. The song moves with a severe rhythmic insistence, repeatedly forcing the listener back into its central motion. Handful of Hate are not interested in chaos for its own sake. Their violence is organized. Even the fastest sections feel governed by a hierarchy in which every instrument has been assigned a precise role. The guitars slash outward, the drums impose momentum, and the vocals mark the structure with hostile authority.
This emphasis upon organization is what separates ViceCrown from the more openly mystical debut. The album still deals with taboo, spiritual inversion, domination, and flesh, but it no longer treats those subjects as distant mysteries. Everything has become practical. Desire is enacted through control. Hatred is converted into discipline. Blasphemy is no longer a door into the unknown but a means of building an opposing institution. The record behaves less like a grimoire opened in candlelight and more like a legal code issued by a regime whose laws have been written around appetite.
“Risen into Abuse” turns resurrection into entry into suffering. Rising usually carries triumphant or redemptive associations, but here emergence leads directly into coercion. The title suggests that abuse may be not merely endured but inherited as the condition into which one is reborn. Musically, the track is compact and merciless, moving through its ideas without lingering. The melodic content is present, but compressed into short phrases that appear and vanish beneath the attack. The song’s brevity gives it the quality of a sentence being carried out.
“Boldly Erected” is one of the album’s clearest examples of Nicola’s sexual symbolism becoming architectural. Erection belongs to the body, but the word also describes monuments, institutions, walls, and structures raised into visibility. The title therefore fuses sexual power with public authority. What is erected is both phallic and political, a visible announcement of dominance. At more than five minutes, the song has enough space to move between speed and heavier, more measured passages. The slower sections do not provide relief. They make the force feel more deliberate, as though the album’s hierarchy is pausing to display the structure it has built.
The sexuality throughout ViceCrown is rarely intimate. It is ceremonial, disciplinary, and tied to unequal power. The body becomes a territory upon which authority is demonstrated. This imagery can be disturbing because it often removes the distinctions between desire, consent, humiliation, punishment, and mystical transformation. Handful of Hate are not constructing a careful ethical account of erotic domination. They are using the language of extremity to imagine a universe in which power is proven by the ability to cross another being’s limits. The music reinforces this through its refusal of softness. Even moments of melody arrive sharpened and enclosed within aggression.
“Vexer’s Kult” is one of the shortest tracks and one of the album’s most concentrated. A vexer torments, troubles, or persecutes, while the deliberately altered spelling of “cult” turns harassment into ritual identity. The song feels like a miniature creed for the entire record. It is fast, direct, and uninterested in explanation. The cult is defined by action rather than doctrine. Its members become recognizable through what they inflict and endure.
“Carnal Spite (Held in Leash)” introduces one of the record’s most revealing contradictions. Carnal spite suggests bodily hatred or resentment expressed through flesh, while being held in leash implies control, restraint, ownership, and the possibility of release. The song’s tension comes from this relationship between force and containment. Its riffs repeatedly push forward, only to be tightened by rhythmic breaks or changes in emphasis. The leash does not eliminate violence. It makes violence useful by determining when and where it may act. This is the central logic of ViceCrown: uncontrolled appetite becomes power only after it has been disciplined.
The guitar work throughout the album deserves particular attention because its melodies are rarely presented as separate ornamental leads. Instead, melodic movement is built into the violence itself. Riffs climb, twist, and descend while maintaining their physical momentum. This prevents the music from becoming a featureless high-speed assault. The listener may first experience the songs as pressure, but repeated listening reveals individual contours and recurring gestures. Handful of Hate’s aggression is memorable because it is shaped, and its shape often carries traces of classical or ceremonial movement beneath the distortion.
“Hierarch in Lust” returns directly to the language of hierarchy, but places lust at the center of authority. The ruler is not governed by law, wisdom, inheritance, or divine mandate. He governs through appetite. This transforms desire into a political principle. The song’s longer form allows the band to emphasize both speed and command, with the drums repeatedly driving the guitars into new sections. Nicola’s vocal delivery is especially effective here because it avoids theatrical grandeur. He does not sound like a distant monarch. He sounds close, breathless, and actively engaged in maintaining control.
There is a distinctly Italian shadow behind this imagery. Handful of Hate’s world is not built from northern forests, pagan nostalgia, or frozen isolation. Its language is closer to Catholic iconography turned inside out: crowns, punishment, flesh, ritual, submission, wounds, authority, and vice. The sacred and obscene remain locked together because desecration requires an object carrying inherited power. Even when the lyrics reject religious order, they continue using its architecture. The crown is corrupted, but it remains a crown. The hierarchy is inverted, but hierarchy itself survives.
“Catharsis in Punishment” makes this dependence especially clear. Catharsis implies purification or release, while punishment imposes pain from outside. The title suggests that suffering may become cleansing, pleasurable, or spiritually productive. The music alternates between rapid pressure and broader, heavier movements, allowing punishment to function as both impact and process. The track does not ask whether the catharsis is chosen, imposed, or imagined afterward as justification. That ambiguity gives it psychological weight. People often create meaning around suffering because meaningless pain is harder to endure. ViceCrown darkens that impulse by imagining punishment as a ritual through which a new identity is manufactured.
The final “Vicecrowned Order (Dobermann)” brings the album’s entire system into one image. The Dobermann is associated with discipline, vigilance, controlled aggression, and service to authority. It is dangerous, but its danger has been trained. This makes it an ideal emblem for Handful of Hate’s new sound. The raw occult energy of the early records has been bred into a more precise and obedient form, capable of attacking on command. The song is short and forceful, ending the album not with mystical dissolution or emotional release but with an image of power standing guard.
The parenthetical reference also gives the title an almost heraldic quality. The animal becomes part of the crowned order’s identity, a living insignia representing loyalty, threat, and restraint. The album does not conclude by destroying hierarchy. It completes one. Every earlier track has contributed another law, punishment, bodily symbol, or relation of power until the final order can announce itself fully.
ViceCrown was a rebirth for Handful of Hate because it transformed their earlier themes into a stable language. The album is still rooted in black metal, but death metal weight and a more modern rhythmic attack have entered the structure. Speed is no longer the sole proof of extremity. Heaviness, stop-start control, physical percussion, and deliberate pacing now contribute equally. The record remains violent, yet its violence has become professionalized.
That development could have made the band less dangerous, replacing underground instability with competence. Instead, the increased control intensifies the discomfort of the material. On the debut, the listener could sometimes hear the musicians struggling to contain the forces they invoked. Here the band appears fully aware of what it is constructing. The songs do not spill outward. They close around their subjects with mechanical efficiency.
At thirty-five minutes, ViceCrown is compact enough to maintain constant pressure while giving individual tracks room to develop. It avoids the risk of exhaustion that accompanies many albums built around sustained extremity. Each song presents a distinct arrangement of hatred, lust, punishment, abuse, restraint, and hierarchy, then withdraws before its method becomes predictable. The result is one of the most focused records in Handful of Hate’s catalogue.
ViceCrown does not possess the spectral strangeness of Qliphotic Supremacy or the raw transitional urgency of Hierarchy 1999. Its importance lies in consolidation. The band has selected the strongest elements from its past, discarded much of the atmospheric uncertainty, and forged a language capable of sustaining everything that followed. Nicola’s later description of it as a new birth is accurate. This is the moment when Handful of Hate crown their own vice, train their aggression, and establish an order severe enough to survive beyond the ritual that created it.
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