Tsjuder streams full album “Helvegr”

Black Metal legends Tsjuder are now releasing their newest vigorous album “Helvegr” in advance of the release date. Their gem will be released onto this desolate planet via Season of Mist on June 23, 2023, but can already be listened to via Black Metal Production here.

The band comments:

‘Helvegr’ is raw Norwegian Black Metal. No synthesizers, no wimpy vocals, NO FUCKING COMPROMISES!

The bonus album “Scandinavian Black Metal Attack” (a special ode to Bathory) will also be available on all digital platforms here and can be viewed on the official Season of Mist Youtube here.

Tsjuder comments on this special release:

It’s so great to be back to bring you five new evil recordings with Tsjuder, from some of the gruesome material Quorthon, Jonas, and I played when we started Bathory in our dark cold cellar rehearsal room back in 1983.

Copies of “Helvegr” are available here, while the album can be streamed here. (Some vinyl’s are already sold out.)

Artwork: Jonas Svensson and Laura Nardelli

Tracklist:

1. Iron Beast (3:37)

2. Prestehammeren (4:01)

3. Surtr (6:59)

4. Gamle-Erik (3:46)

5. Chaos Fiend (4:02)

6. Gods of Black Blood (5:19)

7. Helvegr (7:36)

8. Faenskap og Død (3:08)

9. Hvit Død (2:52)

Since their inception in 1993, Oslo’s Tsjuder have been responsible for some of the most hate-filled ferocity perpetrated under the banner of true Norwegin Black Metal.

The band’s unholy fire was initially lit when founding members NAG (vocals/bass), BERSERK (guitar) and DRAUGLUIN (guitar) grew weary of playing death metal and sought out engorged levels of extremity to sate their increasingly profane ambitions. The time was ripe to inaugurate a ceaseless campaign committed to an uncompromising strain of brutally raw black metal, influenced by the primal thrash blasts of Sodom, Kreator, Destruction, Sarcófago and early Sepultura; black metal first wave trailblazers such as Bathory and Hellhammer; and, most vitally, Mayhem’s seminal “Deathcrush”, and Darkthrone’s game-changer, “A Blaze in the Northern Sky”.

Assuming the Tsjuder name, a moniker plundered from a mythical, murderous Northern tribe, various embryonic line-ups gathered around the all-conquering core of Nag and Draugluin, laying the fearsome foundations for what was to follow with two demos – “Ved Ferdens Ende” and “Possessed” – recorded between 1995-96. But it was with 1997’s EP, “Throne of the Goat”, that the black metal underground really began to sit up and take notice, the release establishing Tsjuder’s reputation as a blasphemous bulldozer hellbent on crushing the insipid and nostalgic in relentless blizzards of sub-zero riffage, punitive blast beats and blood-curdling screams.

Recordings for an inaugural full-length in 1999 were lost to a computer virus, but from the scavenged remnants of these sessions would emerge the “Atum Nocturnem” demo, an obnoxious foretaste of the group’s debut album, “Kill For Satan”, an international breakthrough slathered in slime-encrusted sacrilege. That damnable release saw the aptly-named Anti-Christian open his Tsjuder account, the drummer blasting a succession of gateways though the underworld, pulverising a punitive march to the band’s malevolent maelstroms.

“Demonic Possession” (2002) and “Desert Northern Hell” (2004) sustained the band’s focus on death, devils and destruction, while ratcheting up the production levels on a barbaric brace of flesh-strippers conjuring a landscape of frost-bitten wastes and foul abyssal realms. With the music press busy dishing out plaudits, the band’s burgeoning confederacy of fanatics were becoming desperate for some Tsjuder live action. Heeding the clarion, the band embarked on a full European tour with fellow countrymen Carpathian Forest. They also recorded a pair of gloriously powerful live performances in 2005, in Norway, which would subsequently be documented on the group’s “Norwegian Apocalypse” DVD.

Tsjuder would take a deserved hiatus in 2006, with members finding other musical outlets for their creativity; Nag launching heretical black metal outfit Krypt; Draugluin and Anti-Christian doing time with the thrashier Tyrann.

But it wouldn’t be long before the irresistible call of Tsjuder would exert itself once more. The band reconvened, reenergised and eager to make up for lost time, returning to live performances in 2010 before finally unleashing the mighty “Legion Helvete” (2011), a typically uncompromising comeback interspersed with pronounced Motörhead influences on punkish hyper-blasters such as ‘Slakt’.

It would be another four years before Tsjuder issued the merciless “Antiliv” (2015), a snarling lycanthropic howl of a record, heavy-loaded with vindictive black’n’roll swagger and lashings of buzzsaw guitar.  

Tsjuder quickly set about creating the follow-up to “Antiliv”, but musical differences and protracted disputes led to a parting of the ways, with Anti-Christian bowing out after an impressive 20-year tenure with the group. Undaunted, Nag and Draughluin enlisted doyen tub-thumper Jon Rice to provide the requisite drum artillery and continued to work on new recordings – fine-tuning guitar tones and sharpening mixes.

Then COVID-19 struck, the pandemic further stymieing the album’s release as the world tumbled from its fragile axis. But humanity is now benignly settling into its most chronic phase of perpetual abnormality and Tsjuder are steeled again to hoist their inverted cross above the barricades of conciliation. Their latest opus, “Helvegr”, is a devastatingly savage offering, one which fully adheres to the band’s eternal credo of “NO FUCKING COMPROMISE”.