Handful of Hate - 1997 - Qliphotic Supremacy

 

Northern Darkness Records – NDR-CD 014  348.03MB FLAC

Qliphotic Supremacy arrives from the Italian black metal underground of the mid-1990s carrying an unusually crowded spiritual vocabulary. Its titles invoke the Qliphoth, Kundalini, the Egyptian goddess Nuit, astral generation, stellar sexuality, resurrection, lunar transformation, and the Night of Pan. This is not an album content to summon a generic devil, denounce Christianity, and disappear into a snow-covered forest. Handful of Hate were already attempting something more private and unstable: a form of black metal in which occult study, sexual energy, death, mystical ascent, bodily desire, and personal grief are forced into the same electrical system. The language is extravagant, occasionally difficult to penetrate, and often deliberately transgressive, but the music gives it a strong internal logic. Across forty-five minutes, the record repeatedly moves between speed and suspension, violence and contemplation, physical appetite and disembodied aspiration. It sounds like a young band trying to tear open every symbolic door at once, without yet knowing which chamber will become its permanent home.
Handful of Hate had been formed in Tuscany in 1993 by guitarist and vocalist Nicola Bianchi with bassist Ugo Pandolfini. The death of Pandolfini the following year permanently marked the project, and this debut was dedicated to him. That knowledge changes the emotional weight of the opening “Reborn from the Ashes (Phoenix Mass).” Rebirth in black metal is often treated as a declaration of superiority, the self rising beyond moral law, ordinary humanity, or religious restraint. Here it also carries the shadow of an actual absence. The band continued after losing one of the two people present at its creation, and the Phoenix image becomes more than occult ornament. The album itself is the thing raised from the ashes, not as a restoration of what existed before, but as a new creature formed around the space left by death.
The opening song immediately reveals the album’s most important compositional quality: Handful of Hate do not remain at maximum velocity simply because speed is available. The music erupts through raw tremolo guitar, rapid drumming, and Nicola’s harsh, elevated voice, but it repeatedly opens into slower passages, arpeggiated guitar, and spectral keyboard atmosphere. These changes are not polished enough to feel cinematic. They retain the unevenness of a band discovering its dimensions while recording them. A fast passage may collapse suddenly into shadow; a melody may appear before the rhythm has fully prepared its entrance. Yet that uncertainty gives the record vitality. Qliphotic Supremacy is not a completed temple whose architecture can be admired from a safe distance. It is a construction site at midnight, with arches, tunnels, flames, and half-finished symbols appearing wherever the musicians turn.
Nicola’s voice gives the album much of its feverish character. He does not sound like a grand satanic monarch issuing commands from an established throne. The vocals are strained, rasped, and urgent, sometimes seeming to pursue the music rather than rule it. This is important because the album’s occultism is not presented as calm possession of secret knowledge. It sounds like exposure to forces that remain larger than the person invoking them. The singer is not standing outside the ritual explaining what it means. He is caught within its effects. J.M.’s backing vocals occasionally deepen the scene, suggesting answering presences or a second consciousness entering the chamber.
“Erection – Delightful Rape of the Stellar Virginity (Dripping the Primordial Erotic Sperm Flow)” is an intentionally excessive title even by the standards of 1990s occult black metal. Its imagery is violent, sexual, cosmic, and generative, treating the universe as a body whose boundaries can be penetrated and transformed. The language is difficult because it collapses mystical union into domination, creation into violation, and spiritual expansion into bodily emission. Rather than smoothing those contradictions into respectable esotericism, Handful of Hate make them grotesquely visible. The track itself is correspondingly agitated. Riffs surge forward with little patience for elegance, while slower movements introduce a feeling of ritual concentration beneath the aggression. The music does not eroticize violence through seductive atmosphere. It turns sexuality into a dangerous current, something that destroys distinctions between sacred and profane, creator and victim, body and cosmos.
Nicola would later describe Handful of Hate’s lyrical direction as concerned with magia sexualis, the carnal dimension of evil, violence, power, submission, pain, iconography, and the deviant possibilities within human beings. Qliphotic Supremacy is the earliest major statement of that path. Its transgression differs from the vampiric eroticism, Gothic romance, or adolescent obscenity common elsewhere in extreme metal. The album treats sex as occult technology: a force that might awaken, corrupt, elevate, enslave, or annihilate depending upon its direction. This idea connects its apparently unrelated references. Kundalini is imagined as coiled energy rising through the body; Nuit represents the infinite celestial expanse; the Qliphoth are shells or obstructive powers associated in later occult traditions with the shadow side of the divine order. The record’s symbolic universe is therefore organized around energies attempting to pass through limits.
“Urdhva Kundali” makes that upward motion explicit. The title refers to ascending Kundalini, and the music is one of the album’s most expansive constructions. At more than six minutes, it has room to alternate between violent propulsion and slower, atmospheric concentration. The guitars are melodic without becoming graceful. Their lines climb, hesitate, twist, and resume, resembling energy trying to rise through a resistant structure. Clean arpeggios provide temporary openings, but they do not create peace. They feel like moments of dangerous clarity during an otherwise overwhelming process. The keyboards appear sparingly, which makes their presence seem less like decoration and more like a change in the air pressure surrounding the band.
The recording itself is crucial to this atmosphere. Zenith Studio gives the album enough clarity for the guitar lines and rhythmic changes to register, but it does not eliminate the rawness of the performances. The guitars retain a brittle upper edge, the bass supports the movement without becoming a separate melodic voice, and the drums occupy an unusual middle ground between physical attack and mechanical severity. Nothing sounds luxurious. The record’s occult vastness is produced with relatively narrow means, which forces the imagination to enlarge what the equipment can only suggest. A thin keyboard becomes a cosmic horizon. A clean guitar passage becomes a chamber opening within the wall. Reverb becomes distance, and distortion becomes metaphysical weather.
“Prophecy of a New Assiah’s Supremacy” places the language of revelation inside an adversarial structure. The unusual word “Assiah” appears connected to the Kabbalistic world of action or material existence, the lowest of the traditional four worlds and the sphere closest to embodied life. Whether every element of the title is being used according to a strict traditional system matters less than the direction of the imagination. Handful of Hate are attempting to draw occult hierarchy downward into matter. Supremacy is not located in a distant heaven but asserted through action, flesh, sound, and will. The song carries that material emphasis. Its riffs are among the album’s more forceful and immediate, while atmospheric interruptions suggest the invisible order supposedly operating behind them.
The tension between scholarship and intuitive appropriation is part of the record’s identity. Qliphotic Supremacy does not read like a carefully annotated occult treatise translated into music. It behaves more like a private grimoire assembled from fragments that have attracted the author’s imagination: Hermeticism, ceremonial magic, Tantra, Thelema, Kabbalah, sexual mysticism, stellar symbolism, and personal mythology. Terms from different systems are brought together because they resonate, not because the album is trying to maintain academic boundaries between traditions. This may frustrate listeners seeking doctrinal precision, but black metal has rarely functioned as a university lecture. Its strength lies in symbolic combustion, the moment when borrowed images become psychologically real to the musician using them.
“A Red Moon Ariseth upon the Silvery Sky” is the album’s most immediately visual title and one of its strongest melodic pieces. The archaic phrasing may appear theatrical, but the music supports its ceremonial scale. The red moon intrudes upon a pale sky as a wound, omen, or transformation of the familiar celestial order. Guitars move through mournful figures while the rhythm alternates between urgency and stately progression. The track reveals an important aspect of Handful of Hate’s early sound that would become less prominent as the band grew faster and more punishing: beneath the hostility is a genuine attraction to melancholy. The melodies do not merely announce conquest. They carry loss, distance, and the awareness that transcendence may require the destruction of whatever previously provided identity.
The album’s Italian origin becomes especially meaningful here. Scandinavian second-wave black metal had made winter, darkness, pagan antiquity, and northern isolation central to the genre’s language, but Italian extreme metal possessed other ancestral shadows: Catholic ritual, martyrdom, reliquaries, Renaissance occultism, Roman ruins, funerary sculpture, plague imagery, monastic libraries, heresy trials, and cities where beauty and death remain physically layered. Qliphotic Supremacy does not yet draw fully upon the medieval iconography that would fascinate Nicola later, but it already feels culturally different from a Norwegian forest recording. Its darkness is warmer, more bodily, and more ceremonial. The moon is not merely cold. It is red. Spiritual rebellion does not escape the flesh; it enters the flesh more deeply.
“Nuit – Lustful Receptacle of Erected Power” continues the album’s fusion of cosmology and eroticism. In Thelemic symbolism, Nuit is the infinite night sky, the total field of possibility arching over existence. Handful of Hate convert that vastness into a sexual receptacle, using bodily language to imagine contact between individual will and cosmic infinity. The title is both devotional and objectifying, revealing the unstable gender politics embedded within much sexual occultism. The feminine principle is exalted as infinity while simultaneously framed as a vessel awaiting active masculine force. The track does not resolve that contradiction. It amplifies it through music that alternates between ritual atmosphere and aggressive penetration.
This is one reason the album remains interesting beyond its immediate historical setting. It exposes how transcendental language can carry ordinary structures of domination inside it. The desire to escape conventional morality does not automatically free a work from hierarchy, possession, or violence. Sometimes rebellion merely relocates those structures into a new sacred vocabulary. Qliphotic Supremacy is powerful partly because its contradictions remain raw and unhidden. The record wants liberation through excess, yet repeatedly imagines power through conquest. It seeks union with infinity while describing that union through violation. It rejects religious authority while constructing new occult hierarchies. Listening closely means recognizing both the imaginative ambition and the coercive forms through which that ambition is expressed.
“Undicies Ah-Qliphah” is a brief instrumental or near-instrumental threshold whose title appears to evoke the eleven Qliphothic powers or adverse spheres. In many Western occult systems derived from Kabbalistic concepts, the Qliphoth are understood as husks, shells, or distorted forces surrounding and obstructing divine light. The number eleven becomes associated with excess beyond the stable completeness symbolized by ten. The track’s compact duration makes it feel like an opening seal rather than a full journey through that shadow structure. It changes the album’s scale, briefly removing the more conventional song form and allowing atmosphere to exist as an object by itself.
The Qliphothic idea suits black metal because it offers a metaphysics of discarded matter. A shell is something left after life has departed, yet occult traditions may treat that shell as active, dangerous, or inhabited. Black metal has always been drawn toward such residues: ruins after civilization, corpses after identity, abandoned religions, damaged recordings, obsolete formats, and symbols separated from their original institutions. Qliphotic Supremacy imagines the residue becoming sovereign. The rejected portion no longer asks to be reintegrated into divine order. It declares supremacy from outside it.
“Astral Offspring of Abhorrence,” the album’s longest track, develops this idea of negative creation. Abhorrence does not merely destroy; it reproduces. Something born from hatred travels beyond the material world and becomes astral lineage. Musically, the piece contains several of the album’s most effective shifts between speed, melody, and gloom. The longer duration allows individual motifs to gather meaning through return. A riff heard first as aggression may sound mournful when it reappears after a slower passage. The track demonstrates that Handful of Hate’s early songwriting is more architecturally ambitious than the raw production initially suggests. These are not simple verse-chorus attacks disguised by occult titles. They are suites in miniature, using recurrence and contrast to create psychological movement.
Andrea’s second guitar is vital throughout the record because it prevents the melodic writing from becoming a single thin thread. At various points the guitars reinforce one another, divide into separate contours, or allow one part to maintain motion while the other introduces atmosphere. The playing is not technically pristine, and the ensemble can sound close to instability during rapid sections, but that tension produces urgency. Later Handful of Hate albums would become more precise, brutal, and professionally controlled. This debut preserves the moment before discipline completely conquered risk.
“Beyond the Ever-Widening Circles” suggests an outward journey with no final circumference. Each boundary reached reveals another outside it. The title could describe occult initiation, cosmic expansion, or the psychological consequences of pursuing knowledge that continually destabilizes its own foundation. The song is comparatively concise, but its motion feels centrifugal. Guitar figures appear to push away from a center that can no longer hold them. By this stage of the album, the listener has moved through rebirth, sexual violation, ascending energy, prophecy, lunar transformation, cosmic union, Qliphothic passage, and astral generation. The widening circles provide a fitting image for a record whose symbols refuse containment within one system.
The concluding “La Notte di Pan” changes the language to Italian and invokes the Night of Pan, another concept associated with Thelemic mysticism. The Night of Pan represents dissolution of the individual ego into a state beyond ordinary duality, often symbolized through darkness, silence, terror, and ecstatic annihilation. Ending here gives the album a clear arc. The Phoenix rises at the beginning, the self gathers occult and sexual force, travels through widening cosmic structures, and is finally dissolved in Pan’s night. Rebirth has not led to a stronger permanent personality. It has led toward the destruction of personality itself.
Musically, the closer feels less like a victorious summit than an entry into another obscurity. The album does not finish by resolving its melodic tensions or proving the supremacy announced in its title. It disappears into the very darkness it has spent forty-five minutes trying to command. This is the record’s deepest irony. The human will imagines itself mastering shells, stars, bodies, gods, and magical energies, yet the final mystical gesture requires surrender of the sovereign self. Supremacy culminates in erasure.
The dedication to Ugo Pandolfini casts a quiet shadow over this entire movement. Without forcing every occult image into a biography, it is possible to hear the album’s fixation on rebirth, astral offspring, circles, stellar receptacles, and dissolution as ways of thinking around death. Extreme music often provides language for experiences that ordinary speech cannot contain, particularly when grief is too young, private, or culturally unsupported to be discussed directly. Handful of Hate did not make a conventional memorial album. They created a violent cosmology in which destruction generates new forms, absence remains active, and death becomes passage rather than conclusion.
This does not make the record gentle or consoling. Its emotional survival strategy is built from aggression, erotic power, blasphemy, symbolic domination, and the refusal of ordinary limits. Yet grief rarely chooses a clean vocabulary. The album dedicated to a dead friend does not need to sound mournful in recognizable ways for loss to inhabit it. Loss may instead appear as the compulsion to build an entire metaphysical machine proving that nothing truly disappears.
Within Italian black metal history, Qliphotic Supremacy belongs to a generation that followed the foundational work of Necrodeath, Mortuary Drape, Bulldozer, Schizo, and Necromass while developing during the international second-wave explosion. Nicola has cited Venom, Bathory, Darkthrone, early Immortal, early Marduk, American death metal, and later the impact of Greek groups such as Rotting Christ and Necromantia. Those influences can be heard, but the album does not reduce neatly to any one of them. The high-speed melodic attack occasionally anticipates the Swedish strain of black metal, the slower passages contain something of the occult Mediterranean underground, and the record’s physical aggression carries the residual force of death metal. Its identity comes from the friction among these sources.
Northern Darkness Records was an appropriate home for such a debut. The label belonged to the small Italian infrastructure through which underground bands could move from rehearsal rooms, tape trading, and local performances into internationally circulating CDs. Qliphotic Supremacy appeared before digital platforms made immediate global access ordinary. Its titles, artwork, dedication, production, and obscure references would have reached many listeners as a partially decipherable object, discovered through mail order, distro lists, zines, copied tapes, and recommendation. That scarcity amplified the record’s occult character. Information did not arrive separately from the music in searchable abundance. The disc itself was the sealed document, and listeners had to inhabit its uncertainty.
The surviving original edition therefore carries more than audio. It preserves a specific stage in underground production, when a debut could sound ambitious far beyond its budget and still retain every seam of its making. The later reissues, including the 2012 CD with newly recorded bonus tracks, the 2020 vinyl edition, and the later digipak, have helped keep the album in circulation, but the original ten-song sequence remains the clearest experience. Its final descent into “La Notte di Pan” should be allowed to end the work without a modern recording suddenly reopening it.
Nicola later acknowledged that there were many things the band could have improved, but also recognized the album as the first chapter that continued to receive strong responses over the years. That is an accurate description of its appeal. Qliphotic Supremacy is not compelling because it arrived fully perfected. It is compelling because so much is arriving simultaneously: compositional ambition, occult obsession, sexual provocation, technical hunger, grief, melody, and the desire to establish a distinct identity inside a rapidly expanding genre. The album occasionally overreaches, but underreaching would have destroyed its reason for existing.
Its strongest passages come when the melodic guitar writing and occult imagery stop feeling like separate layers. On “Urdhva Kundali,” “A Red Moon Ariseth upon the Silvery Sky,” and “Astral Offspring of Abhorrence,” the riffs themselves seem to perform ascent, mutation, and apparition. The ideas no longer need to be explained by titles because they have entered the movement of the music. Those moments reveal the central strength Nicola would carry through Handful of Hate’s later history: an ability to place memorable melodic figures inside extreme velocity without making the violence feel softened or sentimental.
Later records would sharpen the attack, remove much of the atmospheric hesitation, and push the band toward the faster, more punishing identity for which it became best known. Hierarchy 1999 would already sound more extreme and tightly controlled. ViceCrown would mark another rebirth, developing a more professional and personal language. Yet the later violence makes the debut’s strangeness more valuable, not less. Qliphotic Supremacy contains possibilities the band would not pursue in exactly the same way again. Its clean arpeggios, sparse keyboards, long occult titles, mystical synthesis, and uneven transitions preserve a younger project still willing to wander into chambers without knowing whether an exit existed.
The album’s title finally describes more than triumph of evil over divine order. It can also be heard as the victory of the discarded, wounded, marginal, and incomplete. The husk becomes active. The underground band becomes an enduring body. The death of a founding member does not erase the project. Imperfect recording becomes atmosphere, borrowed symbolism becomes private mythology, and a first album made in Lucca travels far beyond its original circle.
Qliphotic Supremacy remains an unusually revealing debut because it does not hide the process by which Handful of Hate were becoming themselves. The later band is present inside it, but so are other unrealized versions: a more atmospheric group, a more openly mystical one, perhaps even a more progressive black metal project built from long forms and esoteric transformation. All of those possible futures flicker through the record before being consumed by the harder identity that followed. What remains is a document of emergence, dedicated to someone who could not accompany the band into that future, and filled with symbols insisting that endings are only changes in the shape of power.

Handful of Hate - 1999 - Hierarchy

Northern Darkness Records – NDR - CD 023  308.48MB FLAC

 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.

Handful of Hate - 2003 - ViceCrown

 

Code666 – Code020  614.09MB FLAC

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.

Handful of Hate - 2009 - You Will Bleed

 

Cruz Del Sur Music – CRUZ42  342.29MB FLAC

You Will Bleed does not continue Handful of Hate’s development by simply becoming faster, denser, or more technically extreme. After the sharpened professionalism of ViceCrown and the sustained velocity of Gruesome Splendour, Nicola Bianchi deliberately turns backward, drawing upon the primitive force of early black metal without abandoning the discipline the band had acquired over the previous decade. The result is not a nostalgic imitation of the 1980s underground. It is a mature group placing older forms of ugliness inside a modern, controlled recording. The riffs are broader, the tempos more varied, and the songs allow themselves more breathing room than the preceding album, yet every element remains governed by Handful of Hate’s familiar concerns with bodily degradation, suffering, domination, exclusion, and hatred converted into structure.
The title track immediately establishes this balance between old instinct and developed technique. “You Will Bleed” is not phrased as possibility or metaphor. It is a promise addressed directly to an unnamed body. The guitars move between rapid tremolo patterns and heavier passages whose slower impact makes the threat feel physical rather than merely atmospheric. Andrea Bianchi’s drumming retains tremendous speed, but he does not keep the album permanently locked into blast beats. Rhythmic shifts allow Nicola Bianchi and Deimos to give individual riffs greater mass, while Nicholas’ bass thickens the underlying movement. The band sounds less interested in proving endurance than in controlling when pressure is applied.
That restraint distinguishes the album from many black metal records that confuse extremity with continuous maximum velocity. You Will Bleed understands that impact depends upon contrast. A rapid passage can create panic, but a slower riff can create inevitability. Handful of Hate use both. Their violence has become less frantic and more judicial, as though each song has already decided the listener’s sentence and is now selecting the appropriate instrument.
“The Pest’ Son” extends the album’s language of inherited corruption. Pestilence is granted offspring, suggesting that disease is not a temporary invasion but a lineage capable of continuing itself through new bodies. The song unfolds over more than five minutes, allowing a larger arrangement than the compact attacks of Hierarchy 1999. Melodic guitar lines appear within the abrasion, but they do not soften the atmosphere. They give the disease a recognizable shape, something capable of returning after the immediate outbreak appears to have ended.
Handful of Hate’s melodies have always functioned differently from the sorrowful or heroic leads common to melodic black metal. Nicola’s writing rarely treats melody as escape. It behaves more like a scar, a line whose repetition makes violence memorable. On this album, the production allows those shapes to emerge clearly without polishing away their bitterness. The guitar tone remains coarse, but each movement can be followed through the mix, revealing how carefully the riffs are arranged beneath the hostile surface.
“Bliss Between Thorns” contains one of the album’s defining contradictions. Bliss is discovered not beyond suffering but inside it, surrounded and possibly produced by pain. The title could describe religious martyrdom, erotic submission, self-punishment, or the psychological habit of converting injury into proof of meaning. The music carries both exhilaration and abrasion. Its faster sections feel almost triumphant, yet the surrounding riffs keep that triumph trapped inside a hostile enclosure. Pleasure exists, but it cannot be separated from the thing that wounds it.
This relationship between pleasure and injury has run through Handful of Hate’s work since Hierarchy 1999, but You Will Bleed presents it with less occult ornamentation. Earlier albums surrounded domination and bodily extremity with crowns, rituals, Qliphothic imagery, and inverted religious hierarchy. Here the language becomes plainer. Blood, scars, pests, crawling bodies, pain, fault, and disease replace the elaborate mystical vocabulary. The album turns away from the stars and returns to the ground, where bodies can be marked, infected, crushed, and blamed for existing.
“I Gave You Scars” is particularly revealing because it presents injury as a gift. The speaker does not merely admit responsibility. He claims authorship. A scar becomes a permanent signature placed upon another person’s body, evidence that the giver has altered the recipient beyond the moment of contact. The song’s longer construction supports this idea of lasting damage. Riffs return after intervals, no longer functioning only as repeated musical material but as marks that refuse to disappear. The title’s intimacy makes it more unsettling than generalized fantasies of war or destruction. One voice addresses one wounded subject and takes pride in having become part of their physical memory.
“Earthly and Crawling” lowers humanity to the level of exposed matter. To crawl is to move close to dirt, deprived of height, dignity, and distance from the ground. Yet the title may also contain a rejection of spiritual pretension. Human beings are earthly organisms regardless of the gods, hierarchies, or eternal destinies they invent. Handful of Hate’s contempt operates in both directions: the flesh is degraded, but religious promises of transcendence are also stripped away. What remains is the body moving through soil, hunger, pain, and eventual decomposition.
The song’s compact structure strengthens this materialism. There is little ceremonial atmosphere and no need for an extended invocation. The instruments enter, establish their pattern of motion, and grind forward. Even the melodic elements feel earthbound, repeating within a narrow range rather than reaching toward some celestial conclusion. The track’s violence is not cosmic. It is close enough to smell the dirt.
“The March of Hate” transforms emotion into collective movement. Hatred is no longer confined to one consciousness. It acquires rhythm, direction, and the capacity to organize bodies. The martial title might suggest rigid repetition, but the track moves through several forms of propulsion rather than relying upon a single marching beat. This creates the feeling of a force gathering participants as it advances. Individual resentment becomes procession, and procession becomes institution.
This is where You Will Bleed’s tribute to early black metal becomes more than a matter of sound. The formative records of Venom, Bathory, Celtic Frost, Sarcófago, and Blasphemy often possessed a raw declarative quality, as though the musicians were not simply composing songs but announcing the existence of a hostile culture. Handful of Hate recover some of that quality here. The production may be clearer and the execution more precise, but the album still feels like an assertion of allegiance to an underground tradition built from provocation, physicality, blasphemy, and refusal.
“Between Pain and Perdition” places the subject in a corridor between immediate suffering and eternal ruin. Pain belongs to the body and present time; perdition belongs to theology and imagined infinity. To exist between them is to be attacked from both directions. The song’s movement between faster and heavier sections mirrors this confinement. One passage drives the body forward, while another seems to close the route ahead. There is motion, but no genuine escape.
The title also demonstrates how thoroughly Catholic imagery remains embedded within Handful of Hate’s rebellion. Perdition only carries force within a universe where damnation has been taught as a real and terrifying possibility. Nicola’s work repeatedly rejects Christian authority while preserving its language of punishment, flesh, guilt, blood, abasement, and eternal consequence. The sacred structure is inverted but not forgotten. Its stones are reused to build an opposing chamber.
“The Fault to Exist” is the album’s shortest and most concentrated statement. Existence itself becomes an offense requiring no additional action. This is misanthropy stripped of romantic solitude or aristocratic pose. The condemned subject is guilty simply for having entered the world. The track’s brevity makes the judgment feel immediate, with no trial, explanation, or opportunity for defense. A few minutes are enough to pronounce and execute the sentence.
Yet the title can also be heard from inside the condemned consciousness. The belief that one’s existence is a fault may emerge from shame, exclusion, abuse, religious guilt, or prolonged exposure to another person’s contempt. Handful of Hate do not clarify whether the phrase is accusation or internal wound. That uncertainty gives the song a darker psychological dimension beneath its outward hostility. The voice declaring another life mistaken may also be repeating a judgment once directed at itself.
“Extremism Made Fire – Cholera!” closes the album by turning extremity into both element and epidemic. Fire spreads through contact, while cholera moves through contaminated systems. One destroys visibly; the other enters invisibly and erupts from within the body. Joined together, they form an image of violence capable of passing through populations rather than remaining an isolated act. The exclamation point gives the final word the quality of an invocation or alarm, but the band does not end in uncontrolled collapse. The performance remains exact, demonstrating once again that this album’s extremism has been trained.
The rebuilt lineup contributes greatly to that control. Deimos’ second guitar gives Nicola’s riffs additional thickness and allows melodic contours to remain audible through the fastest sections. Nicholas provides a firm lower foundation, while Andrea Bianchi’s drumming combines aggression with enough variation to prevent the record from flattening into one tempo. Nicola’s vocals are characteristically rasped and venomous, but the delivery feels more measured than on the earliest albums. He no longer sounds trapped inside forces he has summoned. He sounds like their administrator.
That change may reduce some of the dangerous instability of Qliphotic Supremacy, but it produces a different kind of menace. You Will Bleed is disturbing because the band never appears to lose control. Its blood, scars, punishment, hatred, and disease are not emotional spills. They are arranged, recorded, and presented with the cold confidence of practiced craft. The music knows exactly how much space to leave around each blow.
The album therefore functions as both a return and a consolidation. Its older black metal influences are plainly honored, but filtered through sixteen years of Handful of Hate’s development. The primitive impulse survives inside a professional framework, while the band’s recurring themes are reduced to their most physical vocabulary. There are fewer mystical stairways, cosmic bodies, or ornate crowns here. The listener encounters wounds, crawling matter, infected lineage, and organized hate.
You Will Bleed may initially seem less distinctive than ViceCrown’s tightly constructed regime or Qliphotic Supremacy’s feverish occult labyrinth, but its strength lies in this deliberate reduction. Handful of Hate remove some of their decorative symbolism to expose the mechanism beneath it. The mechanism is repetition, control, bodily vulnerability, and the transformation of private hostility into disciplined form. The album does not ask whether bleeding will occur. It speaks from a world where the wound has already been selected and the blade is simply moving toward it.

Handful of Hate - 2013 - To Perdition

 

Code666 – CODE091  346.09MB FLAC

To Perdition sounds like Handful of Hate taking the controlled violence of You Will Bleed and removing its final traces of hesitation. The 2009 album had deliberately reached backward toward the primitive foundations of black metal, allowing broader riffs, rougher instinct, and older influences to show through the band’s accumulated discipline. Four years later, To Perdition drives that history into a colder and more technically exact form. The guitars remain melodic, the vocals still carry Nicola Bianchi’s unmistakable rasped venom, and the lyrics continue to circle bodies, corruption, humiliation, disease, and spiritual punishment, but the machinery surrounding those elements has become tighter. This is not chaos spilling from an opened chamber. It is organized descent, every turn in the road already calculated to lead downward.
The title track enters without ceremony. A sharp guitar figure establishes the direction, the drums immediately begin applying pressure, and Nicola’s voice appears as though the sentence has already been pronounced. Perdition is not presented as a distant theological possibility awaiting the sinner after death. It is a destination being approached in real time. The song’s shifts between blasting speed and more measured rhythmic passages give that approach physical shape. Faster sections suggest panic and acceleration, while slower movements make the outcome feel unavoidable. Handful of Hate have learned that speed can frighten, but weight can condemn.
Andrea Bianchi’s drumming is crucial throughout the record. He possesses the endurance required for sustained black metal velocity, but the performance is more valuable for the way it shapes transitions. Blasts suddenly contract into precise accents, double-bass movement thickens the guitars, and brief interruptions create space for riffs to strike with renewed force. This is not percussion used merely to prove extremity. It governs the album’s internal hierarchy, deciding when each section may advance and when it must be brought to a halt.
“Cursed Be Your Breast” returns to Handful of Hate’s long-standing fusion of religious language and bodily fixation. A breast may represent nourishment, sexuality, maternity, vulnerability, or idealized femininity, but the curse contaminates every meaning simultaneously. The title has the rhythm of an inverted blessing, a sacred formula turned against the body it would ordinarily protect. Musically, the track contains some of the album’s clearest melodic guitar movement, with high lines cutting through the dense percussion. The melody does not provide tenderness. It sharpens the sense that something once associated with life and intimacy has been selected for desecration.
“Far Beyond All Scourges” pushes punishment beyond the instruments traditionally used to inflict it. A scourge is both a whip and a destructive affliction, so travelling beyond all scourges suggests pain surpassing ordinary physical or historical measurement. The song’s rapid movement creates that excess, but its strongest quality is the precision with which the guitars continue forming recognizable shapes inside the attack. Nicola and Deimos do not allow velocity to flatten the writing. Their riffs rise, turn, and return with enough clarity to leave marks after the percussion has moved onward.
“Swines Graced Gods” creates one of the album’s most revealing reversals. Grace traditionally descends from divinity toward imperfect humanity, but here the swine appear to grant grace to the gods. The hierarchy has inverted so completely that the despised animal becomes capable of sanctioning the sacred. Handful of Hate have always been fascinated by corrupted orders, crowns placed upon vice, masters ruled by appetite, and religious symbols dragged through flesh. This title condenses that entire history into three words. The music is darker and more atmospheric than the surrounding tracks, showing that the band’s brutality still contains room for shadows rather than operating through speed alone.
The brief “Caro Data Vermibus” interrupts the attack with Latin: flesh given to worms. The phrase reduces the body to its final material destination, stripping away identity, status, desire, and spiritual ambition. After decades of songs about domination and power, Handful of Hate place a small reminder at the album’s center that every ruler and victim eventually becomes food. The track functions as a hinge. It does not soothe the record or provide a beautiful interlude. It opens a grave beneath it.
“Larvae” emerges from that grave slowly enough for the listener to feel its change of temperature. The song uses a more spacious and ominous arrangement, including a midsection whose reduced pace allows the guitar lines to hang in the air rather than flash past. Larvae represent unfinished life, transformation not yet completed, and forms whose future appearance cannot be predicted from their current bodies. Within this album, however, development does not promise beauty. The larvae seem to belong to decay, feeding upon what “Caro Data Vermibus” has offered them. Life continues, but only because death provides matter.
The production allows every unpleasant detail to remain audible. The guitars possess a cold upper edge without becoming weightless, while the bass supports the lowest part of the structure rather than vanishing beneath the drums. Nicola’s vocals are placed clearly enough to maintain authority but retain their rough, corroded texture. The album sounds modern compared with Handful of Hate’s earliest work, yet it does not chase the enormous, polished density common to contemporary extreme metal. Its clarity serves the cutting edges. Each note is exposed enough to puncture.
“Ornaments for Derision” imagines mockery becoming decorative. Ornaments ordinarily beautify, commemorate, or display status, but here they exist for contempt. The victim’s humiliation becomes something worn publicly, perhaps by the oppressor or by the social order that enjoys the spectacle. The song moves with a controlled violence characteristic of the entire album. Stop-start changes and rhythmic cuts prevent the riffs from becoming predictable, while recurring melodic shapes bind the sections together. Derision is not spontaneous laughter. It has been designed and displayed.
“Ex Abrupto” announces suddenness through its Latin title, and the music follows with a sequence of sharp changes. Yet even these abrupt movements reveal the band’s discipline. Nothing sounds accidental. The song creates the sensation of surprise through careful preparation, making each cut feel like a trap whose mechanism was hidden until the instant it closed. This distinction matters. Handful of Hate no longer depend upon unstable performance to generate danger. They can manufacture instability deliberately.
“Words Like Worms” brings language into the album’s ecology of decomposition. Words crawl, enter wounds, consume from within, and multiply beyond the speaker’s control. They may be insults, doctrines, memories, accusations, or phrases repeated so often that they become internal parasites. The title recognizes that violence need not remain physical to alter a body permanently. Language can live inside its recipient long after the original voice has disappeared. The music’s repeated guitar figures support this idea, returning with the persistence of thoughts that cannot be expelled.
This track also connects the album’s bodily imagery to Nicola’s role as lyricist and vocalist. Handful of Hate use words to create wounds while simultaneously describing the wound-making power of words. The contradiction is productive. Extreme music can offer listeners a space in which hostile language is contained inside art, but containment does not make that language meaningless. The voice still acts upon the nervous system. It may repel, excite, disturb, or become attached to memories the writer could never have anticipated.
“Feeding Sufferings” is the album’s longest and most developed composition. Its grammar is deliberately strange, turning suffering into something plural that can be fed, maintained, and encouraged to grow. The song begins with greater patience than much of the record, allowing atmosphere to gather before the full assault resumes. This slower construction gives the track emotional depth. Suffering is not merely inflicted in one violent moment. It becomes an organism requiring nourishment. Resentment, memory, cruelty, shame, and repeated attention keep it alive.
The longer form allows the band to revisit several aspects of its history without losing the album’s concentrated identity. Melodic tremolo lines recall the more atmospheric early work, while the drumming and heavier passages retain the physical discipline developed through ViceCrown and You Will Bleed. To Perdition is strongest when these periods cease to feel like separate stylistic choices. On “Feeding Sufferings,” they become one language: melody as scar, speed as panic, rhythm as control, and atmosphere as the chamber in which damage continues breathing.
“Damnatio ad Bestias” closes the record by invoking the ancient Roman punishment of condemnation to wild animals. The victim was not simply executed but converted into public spectacle, placed before a crowd and destroyed by creatures whose violence could be presented as both entertainment and judgment. The title gathers many of Handful of Hate’s recurring concerns into one historical image: hierarchy, humiliation, flesh, institutional punishment, spectatorship, and the reduction of a person into an object upon which authority demonstrates itself.
The music refuses to turn that image into distant antiquity. The drums drive forward, the guitars retain their severe melodic edge, and Nicola’s vocals deliver the conclusion with no suggestion that the descent might be reversed. The album began on the road to perdition and ends inside an arena where punishment has become public ceremony. No supernatural demon is required. Human organization has already created the machinery.
This is where the Italian character of Handful of Hate’s black metal remains most compelling. Their music has long existed beneath the shadows of Catholic ritual, martyrdom, relics, crowns, bodily suffering, and Roman systems of authority. Even when the band rejects Christian morality, it remains fascinated by the physical and architectural language through which power becomes sacred. Latin titles appear not as exotic decoration but as surviving pieces of an inherited order. The band turns those pieces over, stains them, and rebuilds them into adversarial monuments.
To Perdition may not possess the youthful occult sprawl of Qliphotic Supremacy or the decisive rebirth represented by ViceCrown, but it captures Handful of Hate at a high level of compositional control. The lineup plays with unified intent, the production exposes rather than disguises the musicianship, and the record’s forty-five minutes contain enough variation to prevent the speed from becoming featureless. The slower sections matter because they create depth, while the melodies matter because they give each act of violence a recognizable outline.
The album’s greatest achievement is its refusal to romanticize descent. Perdition is not portrayed as heroic liberation or glamorous rebellion. It is populated by curses, swine, worms, larvae, derision, parasitic language, cultivated suffering, and public execution. The downward path does not reveal a magnificent infernal kingdom waiting to reward the outcast. It reveals matter consuming matter and institutions converting pain into order.
Handful of Hate nevertheless make that bleakness exhilarating through craft. Riffs cut cleanly, drums reorganize the air, and melodic lines burn briefly above the machinery before disappearing. The pleasure of listening exists in tension with the ugliness being described. That tension has always been central to extreme music: disciplined human creation used to represent degradation, suffering, and collapse. To Perdition does not resolve the contradiction. It sharpens it until beauty and cruelty travel down the same road, each making the other easier to see.

Handful of Hate - 2019 - Adversus

 

Code666 – code126  312.27MB FLAC

Adversus is built around opposition so completely that even its moments of forward movement feel like acts of resistance. The Latin title can be read as “against,” “opposed to,” or “facing,” and Handful of Hate use that position as both philosophy and compositional method. Six years after To Perdition, Nicola Bianchi returns with a record that does not attempt to rediscover the occult uncertainty of the band’s debut or the deliberate primitivism of You Will Bleed. Instead, Adversus gathers the precision, violence, melodic severity, and ceremonial imagery developed across more than twenty-five years, then directs them toward a single condition: standing against whatever claims the authority to define, govern, redeem, or absorb the individual. The album is not chaotic rebellion. It is hostility given discipline, heraldry, and architectural form.
“An Eagle Upon My Shield (Veteris Vestigia Flammae)” establishes that heraldic atmosphere immediately. The eagle is an old emblem of empire, vision, conquest, military authority, and spiritual ascent, while the shield turns identity into something carried defensively into conflict. The Latin phrase, drawn from the idea of recognizing traces of an old flame, introduces memory beneath the martial surface. Something once burning has left marks that remain active. Musically, the track is broad and carefully constructed, opening the album with more patience than a simple blast-beat assault would permit. Guitars establish severe melodic lines before the drums increase the pressure, creating the sensation of a banner being raised before the charge begins.
The production gives Handful of Hate’s music a sharp modern body without polishing away its abrasiveness. The guitars remain cold and serrated, but individual movements can be followed through the densest passages. Bass strengthens the lower structure, while the drumming combines sustained velocity with sudden changes of weight. Nicola’s vocals occupy the recording like corroded proclamations. He no longer sounds overwhelmed by the symbols he invokes, as he occasionally did on Qliphotic Supremacy. By this stage he sounds fully installed within the language he has spent decades constructing.
“Before Me (The Womb of Spite)” turns spite into a place of origin. The title suggests that whatever stands before the speaker has been born from resentment, opposition, and accumulated injury. A womb ordinarily represents protection and creation, but here it nurtures hostility. This reversal is characteristic of Handful of Hate, whose music repeatedly corrupts sacred, maternal, erotic, and ceremonial imagery by placing it inside systems of domination. The song’s riffs coil and release with remarkable control, allowing melody to emerge without weakening the violence. Spite is not an uncontrolled emotional outburst. It has gestated long enough to become a complete organism.
“Carved in Disharmony (Void and Essence)” treats conflict as an inscription placed permanently into being. To be carved in disharmony means opposition is not merely encountered from outside; it has entered the structure of the self. The parenthetical phrase joins emptiness and substance, two conditions that should cancel one another but instead become inseparable. The music mirrors this contradiction through dense attack interrupted by sudden spaces, rhythmic cuts, and melodic lines that appear to open the arrangement before being swallowed again. Handful of Hate’s writing has become especially effective at making absence feel active. The gaps do not offer relief. They resemble wounds cut into the surrounding sound.
The relationship between void and essence also captures the album’s spiritual position. Adversus rejects approved religious order, but it does not embrace simple meaninglessness. The record remains crowded with symbols, flames, shields, ruins, idols, redemption, psalms, and fallen figures. Its opposition to sanctity creates another sacred language rather than an empty world. Handful of Hate have always inverted hierarchy more often than they abolish it. Thrones are corrupted, grace is wounded, gods are humiliated, and vice receives a crown, but authority itself remains fascinating.
“Severed and Reversed (Feudal Attitude)” makes this fascination explicit. Feudalism organizes bodies through inherited rank, obligation, possession, and submission. The title imagines that structure being cut apart and turned backward, though reversal does not necessarily produce equality. The servant may become master while the logic of domination survives unchanged. The song is compact, violent, and rhythmically forceful, suggesting an overturning accomplished through physical action rather than philosophical debate. Handful of Hate’s rebellion rarely imagines a peaceful commons beyond hierarchy. It imagines the humiliated acquiring enough force to reverse the blade.
“Down Lower (Men and Ruins)” descends into one of the album’s most recognizably Italian landscapes. Ruins in this music are not distant fantasy scenery. They belong to a culture where collapsed empires, churches, fortifications, ossuaries, martyrdoms, and layers of political authority remain physically present. Men exist among ruins while also becoming ruins themselves. The song’s downward movement is both spiritual and historical. There is no promised ascent away from decay, only a deeper examination of what power leaves behind when its monuments outlast the bodies that built them.
This track also demonstrates how effectively the band now balances speed with weight. Earlier records sometimes treated acceleration as the primary proof of extremity. Adversus allows slower passages to strike with greater authority because they arrive after intense movement. The drums do not merely propel the riffs; they reshape the ground beneath them. A sudden reduction in speed can feel like a structure collapsing rather than the music simply relaxing.
“Celebrate, Consume... Burn!” provides the album’s most openly contemporary title. Celebration becomes consumption, and consumption ends in destruction. The sequence resembles a compressed portrait of a culture trained to experience desire through acquisition: obtain the object, display it, exhaust it, and discard or burn what remains. The song moves with startling speed, but its punctuation is equally important. The ellipsis creates a tiny pause between appetite and consequence. Burning is not an accidental ending. It is the final stage built into the ritual from the beginning.
Handful of Hate’s hostility here extends beyond religion into systems of social appetite. Consumption can refer to commodities, bodies, identities, ideologies, and even rebellion itself. Underground cultures are not immune. An image of transgression can be purchased, displayed, and replaced as easily as anything else. By placing celebration at the start of the sequence, the band suggests that participation may feel pleasurable even while it feeds destruction. The song’s exhilarating musical violence makes the listener part of that contradiction.
“Toward the Fallen Ones (Psalms to Discontinuity)” turns attention toward those who have dropped out of accepted order. The fallen may be defeated figures, rejected angels, lost companions, historical failures, or people unable to maintain continuity with the world around them. The parenthetical phrase imagines psalms written not for eternal unity but for interruption. Discontinuity becomes worthy of ritual address. Something has broken between past and present, body and identity, belief and experience, yet the break itself produces a new form of song.
This is one of Adversus’ deeper ideas. Opposition does not always create a coherent alternative. Sometimes it produces discontinuity, a refusal or inability to remain connected to inherited narratives. Handful of Hate do not repair that break. They honor it. Their psalm belongs to those whose lives, beliefs, and histories no longer form a smooth line.
“Thorns to Redemption (Gemendo Germinat)” places pain inside the route toward salvation. The Latin phrase suggests growth through groaning or lamentation, as though suffering itself germinates. Christian symbolism frequently joins thorns, blood, agony, and redemption, but Handful of Hate rearrange those materials until it becomes unclear whether redemption is being sought, mocked, or replaced. The music carries one of the album’s strongest combinations of melody and severity. The guitar lines rise with something approaching grandeur while the vocals and drums prevent the movement from becoming consoling.
This ambiguity is central to the band’s relationship with religious imagery. Nicola’s work rejects Christianity while remaining intensely engaged with its physical language: wounds, flesh, crowns, grace, damnation, relics, punishment, and salvation. Hatred does not erase fascination. The rejected system continues supplying the architecture through which rejection is expressed. Adversus is therefore not spiritually empty. It is a long argument conducted inside a cathedral whose altar has been overturned but whose stones remain standing.
“Idols to Hung” strips worship down to punishment. The unusual grammar makes the phrase feel blunt and foreign, but also gives it the quality of a command or inscription. Idols are ordinarily raised, displayed, and adored; here they are selected for hanging. Yet destroying an idol can become another ritual that confirms its power. People rarely execute symbols that mean nothing to them. The song’s heavy rhythmic sections give the act a public, almost processional force. This is not private disbelief. It is iconoclasm performed as spectacle.
“Icons with Devoured Faces” completes the album by attacking the part of the sacred image through which recognition occurs. A face allows an icon to look back, identify, judge, comfort, or command. Once consumed, the body of the image remains but its authority becomes unreadable. This is more disturbing than simple destruction. A ruined icon can still be recognized as holy, but an icon whose face has been eaten occupies an unstable space between reverence, corpse, and empty object.
The closing track therefore gives Adversus an appropriate final image. The album does not merely oppose authority from outside. It enters the image, removes its identifying center, and leaves the remaining structure standing. That process mirrors Handful of Hate’s entire musical history. The band has taken black metal, Catholic symbolism, occult hierarchy, erotic domination, historical ruin, and inherited forms of punishment, then repeatedly consumed and rearranged their faces. The underlying materials remain recognizable, but they now belong to a private language.
Adversus may not contain the youthful strangeness of Qliphotic Supremacy or the decisive transformation of ViceCrown, but it presents Handful of Hate at an unusually complete stage of development. The musicians no longer need to choose between raw instinct and technical precision, melody and violence, primitive black metal and modern production. Those elements have become integrated enough that the band can concentrate on shape, pacing, and symbolic continuity.
The album’s ten songs also benefit from their distinct identities. Each approaches opposition through a different object: shield, womb, carving, reversal, ruins, consumption, fallen bodies, thorns, idols, and faces. Together they form a sequence in which resistance moves from defense toward desecration. The record begins with an emblem held before the body and ends with the opposing emblem’s features consumed.
Adversus is therefore less a manifesto of freedom than a study of confrontation. It recognizes that prolonged opposition changes both sides. The enemy supplies language, symbols, and structure; the adversary sharpens identity through resistance. After decades of writing about domination, flesh, heresy, and punishment, Handful of Hate sound fully aware that hatred can become a bond as powerful as devotion. To stand permanently against something is still to face it, measure oneself by it, and carry its outline upon the shield.

Grabesmond - 1999 - Xenoglossie

Draenor Productions – DPR 007  285.80MB APE

 Xenoglossie feels like a book of short supernatural scenes whose pages have been scattered across several languages, centuries, and states of consciousness. Grabesmond’s second and final album is rooted in the Austrian black metal underground, yet very little of it behaves like a conventional metal recording. Guitars appear only as one possible color among synthesizers, bells, sampled voices, martial rhythms, choral textures, and small neoclassical figures. Most of its fifteen tracks are instrumental, and many last less than two minutes, giving the album the structure of an occult cabinet rather than a continuous symphonic journey. Open one drawer and there is a blood-dark procession; open another and a music box is turning inside an abandoned nursery; the next contains a ruined city, a black angel, a wolf, a dead god, or dancers moving around a grave.

The title refers to the supposed ability to speak or write in a language one has never consciously learned. That idea provides a useful way into the album. Xenoglossie does not settle into one stable musical vocabulary. It moves among English, German, Swedish, Latin, medieval imagery, Norse myth, Gothic horror, dark ambient, neoclassical composition, and the residual atmosphere of black metal without treating any single language as its permanent home. The album seems to speak through borrowed tongues, but those tongues emerge from one imagination. Lucia-M. Fåroutan-Kubik composed and performed everything, transforming the project from its earlier underground origins into a highly personal form of miniature musical theatre.

“Screams of the Past” opens with less a scream than the afterimage of one. Bells, echoes, and distant synthetic tones create the impression of sound surviving after its source has vanished. The past is not presented as a sequence of remembered events. It is an active acoustic presence, returning through architecture and repetition. The piece lasts under two minutes, yet it establishes the album’s entire method: suggest a location, allow a few details to become visible, then close the scene before the listener can determine exactly what happened there.

“Multiscum Lacrimis” introduces a more mournful and classically shaped melody. The Latinized title appears to invoke many tears, and the music carries grief without becoming grandly tragic. Its keyboard line is small, almost intimate, as though sorrow has been reduced to a private ritual repeated in an empty room. Grabesmond’s synthetic instrumentation is important here. The sounds do not convincingly imitate a real chamber orchestra, but that slight artificiality creates emotional distance. The music resembles an old ceremony reconstructed from fragments rather than performed intact by living musicians.

“Night’s Dominion” is one of the album’s longer vocal pieces and gives darkness something resembling political authority. Night does not merely fall across the landscape; it governs it. The rhythm grows more forceful, and the layered voices make the track feel populated by figures moving beneath a single nocturnal law. Yet even at its most dramatic, Grabesmond avoids the massed grandeur of symphonic metal. The arrangement remains strangely hollow, leaving enough space around its components for the listener to feel the darkness between them.

The brief “Isis-Noreja” adds another symbolic system without explaining how it connects to the others. This refusal to create a clean mythology is part of the album’s fascination. Egyptian, Germanic, Christian, folkloric, and invented images coexist like objects collected by a dream rather than organized by a historian. Xenoglossie is not a lesson in comparative religion. It is an atmosphere produced when unrelated sacred languages begin echoing inside one another.

“Min svart ängel,” or “My Black Angel,” gives the album one of its most recognizably Gothic forms. The black angel can be a fallen protector, an intimate embodiment of death, a corrupted guide, or the shadow side of the self. The music does not settle the image. Melody and darkness remain balanced, with enough beauty to make the figure attractive and enough unease to prevent trust. This ambiguity is central to Grabesmond’s work. Horror is rarely presented as pure ugliness. It arrives beautifully dressed, carrying a familiar face.

“D’helle phat wirt im entrant” is another tiny doorway, its archaic or deliberately distorted language adding to the album’s linguistic dislocation. Words throughout Xenoglossie often seem less important for their exact translation than for their age, texture, and foreignness. They behave as sonic relics. The listener recognizes that language is present but may not possess the key to unlock it, reproducing the condition suggested by the album’s title.

“Spectacle of Death” gives mortality a public stage. The piece is stately rather than savage, suggesting procession, display, and ritualized observation. Death becomes something arranged for witnesses, perhaps a funeral, execution, dance, or theatrical pageant. The music’s synthetic dignity recalls the old danse macabre tradition in which every rank of society is eventually drawn into the same procession. Grabesmond repeatedly treats death not as an isolated biological event but as a social and aesthetic structure built around the dead.

“Blodström,” or “Bloodstream,” is among the album’s darkest passages. Deep synthesizer tones and more abrasive textures create the sensation of movement through an interior channel. The title turns blood into landscape, allowing the listener to travel inside the body rather than merely observe it from outside. Its darkness is unusually physical for an album often concerned with ruins, myths, and spectral distance. Here the environment pulses, circulates, and carries life while remaining inseparable from injury and death.

“Fabula” briefly opens a lighter medieval space. Its melody resembles a tale told in a few illuminated panels rather than a full narrative. The Latin word can mean story, fable, or dramatic plot, and the track feels aware that the entire album may be a collection of fabricated histories. Grabesmond does not ask the listener to believe these scenes literally. Their truth lies in how quickly they produce an emotional world.

“Vom Wolfe” summons the wolf through another compressed instrumental. The animal is never fully pictured, but its cultural weight enters immediately: wilderness, appetite, danger, exile, pack loyalty, and the boundary between human settlement and whatever watches beyond it. The piece works because it does not overdescribe. The wolf remains partly outside the music, moving parallel to it in darkness.

“Obscene Obsession” is the album’s longest track and one of its most developed vocal compositions. The title joins fixation with violation, suggesting desire that has crossed beyond socially permitted form. Its length allows the arrangement to gather dramatic weight, and the vocals give the obsession a human center absent from many of the shorter instrumentals. Yet the song remains less confessional than theatrical. The speaker appears as another figure in Grabesmond’s gallery, consumed by an appetite whose object is never fully revealed.

“At the Edge of Our World” creates a threshold rather than a destination. Its placement late in the sequence suggests that the preceding tracks have gradually carried the listener toward a border where ordinary geography and language begin to fail. The piece is brief and suspended, offering no assurance about what exists beyond that edge. It may be death, dream, myth, or simply the point where known forms no longer organize experience.

“Totgeboren,” meaning stillborn or born dead, gives that threshold a brutal human image. Birth and death occur in the same word, eliminating the interval in which identity ordinarily develops. The instrumental treats this contradiction with restraint. It does not become melodramatic or graphically horrific. Instead, the music creates a cold vacancy, a place prepared for life that remains unoccupied.

“Balder’s Sturz” invokes the fall of Balder, the radiant Norse god whose death signals cosmic disorder and contributes to the coming of Ragnarök. At barely more than a minute, the piece does not attempt to narrate the myth. It presents the fall as a symbolic flash: beauty struck down, divine immunity failing, and an apparently stable world revealing the fatal weakness already hidden inside it. The use of Balder also connects Grabesmond to the mythological interests of the Austrian black metal circle, but the musical treatment remains more like dark chamber music than metal.

“Totentanz” closes the album with the dance of death. After so many isolated images, the finale gathers them into movement. The dead are no longer silent objects arranged in crypts and memories. They dance, and through dancing briefly regain social form. The melody is dark but not hopeless, carrying an almost bittersweet quality. Death becomes the one language every preceding fragment has been approaching, the common tongue beneath Latin, Swedish, German, English, mythology, and dream.

That conclusion clarifies the title. Xenoglossie may describe speech in languages never learned, but music itself is the album’s deeper foreign tongue. Synthesizers allow Lucia-Mariam Fåroutan-Kubik to speak as choirs, bells, orchestras, ghosts, wolves, gods, dancers, and ruined architecture without requiring those things to exist physically. The artificial sounds do not conceal their artificiality. They transform it into evidence that imagination can inhabit forms unavailable to the body producing them.

Compared with Mordenheim, this album is darker, more fragmented, and more willing to approach ambient unease. It retains the earlier record’s medieval and neoclassical beauty, but that beauty is repeatedly interrupted by harsher rooms. The short tracks make the experience resemble turning through an illustrated manuscript whose pictures have been damaged, reordered, and partially translated. There is continuity, but it comes from mood rather than narrative.

Xenoglossie also captures a particular late-1990s underground freedom. A project connected to black metal could release an album largely composed of keyboards, programmed textures, and miniature instrumental scenes without needing to resolve whether it belonged to dungeon synth, darkwave, neoclassical music, dark ambient, or something else. Those categories can help listeners locate it now, but the record itself feels less interested in genre than in permission. It uses whatever sound will open the next chamber.

Grabesmond ended after this album, leaving only a small body of work. That brevity strengthens Xenoglossie’s aura. There was no long career in which its strange decisions became ordinary habits, no sequence of later albums explaining what every symbol meant. The record remains a closed object filled with partial languages. Its ruins have not been restored, and its dead have not stopped dancing. Listeners who know more about the recording, the titles, the Austrian circle around the project, or the exact meanings hidden in its multilingual fragments may be able to illuminate further rooms, but some doors are probably better left half-open.