Bathory
Bathory began in 1983 in Vällingby, outside Stockholm, as the vehicle for Thomas 'Quorthon' Forsberg, a teenage songwriter who played nearly every instrument himself. Their self-titled 1984 debut and its increasingly extreme follow-ups fused Venom's blasphemous image with a rawer, faster, more chaotic attack — work now credited, alongside Venom and Celtic Frost, with inventing black metal outright, though Quorthon himself never fully embraced the label. He then pivoted hard: 'Blood Fire Death' and 'Hammerheart' traded Satanic shock for Norse myth and slow, martial grandeur, effectively founding Viking metal a full album ahead of anyone else attempting it. Bathory never played a live show. Quorthon died in 2004, having recorded the entire catalog essentially alone.
Quorthon said he built Bathory's sound from 'the atmosphere of early Black Sabbath, the energy of early Motörhead, and the pace of early GBH' — naming Sabbath specifically for its doom-laden, ominous mood rather than its riffs, a heaviness-as-atmosphere approach Bathory pushed into something far more extreme.
listen forPlay the title track 'Black Sabbath' next to 'Enter the Eternal Fire' — both open with a slow, tolling, almost funereal riff built to make dread arrive before the drums do.
In that same account of Bathory's formation, Quorthon credited Motörhead's 'energy' as a founding ingredient — the sheer velocity and distorted-bass push of Lemmy's band translated, in Bathory's hands, into faster tempos and a rawer, more chaotic mix than anything else in early-80s metal.
listen forCompare 'Overkill' with 'Raise the Dead' — both ride a relentless, barely-controlled double-time pulse that never lets up for breath across the whole song.
Quorthon completed his own account of Bathory's formative influences by naming 'the pace of early GBH,' recalling that he was listening heavily to the UK82 street-punk scene while writing Bathory's first songs — the band's buzzsaw tempo and stripped-down aggression giving Bathory's earliest material its unusually punkish, headlong charge.
listen forSet 'City Baby Attacked by Rats' beside 'In Conspiracy with Satan' — both strip a song down to a single fast, repeating riff and a shouted vocal, with almost no ornamentation slowing the sprint to the next chorus.