Review: Behemoth – The Shit ov God

March 27, 2025

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You know what’s sad? Falling out of love with a band, though it’s something that just happens with time. Sometimes you just lose interest, or aren’t connecting with a band anymore. Although something that particularly sucks is seeing both a decline in quality and an ascending level of social media-fueled cringe. Behold Behemoth! I don’t think any other band has managed to make me wrestle with my enjoyment of their music more than Nergal and his merry men. I’ll willingly admit that they’re one of the bands that got me into extreme metal proper, and for the longest time they were one of my favorite extreme metal bands, and even to this day I can still spin albums like The Satanist, Demigod and Zos Kia Cultus (Here and Beyond) and enjoy them. But the last decade since the band released the aforementioned The Satanist record has been a facepalming nadir of frustration and embarrassment, culminating in this new record, dumbfoundingly titled The Shit ov God.

The moment this record was fully unveiled and announced was the last straw for me personally, and suffice to say, this review will probably read like the obituary to my enthusiasm for Behemoth; if anything, my goal here is to just say my piece about Behemoth and move on to better and far more interesting bands. Though one thing I will also add to this review is a brief historical overview about the band for context.

For those unaware, when Behemoth first started, they were actually one of the pioneering bands of the Polish black metal scene when it first started developing, and in their early years and for their demos and first 2 LP’s they played pagan black metal that was in line with Norwegian black metal at the time. Then, by the turn of the century they switched to blackened death metal heavily inspired by Nile and Morbid Angel, and middle eastern music with a lyrical and aesthetic change from Slavic paganism to Thelemic occultism—thanks to the lyrical contributions of poet and occultist Krzysztof Azarewicz. His collaboration with Nergal would shape the band throughout the 2000’s to great success, and his diminishing presence, and later absence would start the band’s decline, among other reasons.

In 2014, the band released their magnum opus The Satanist, a record that to this day gets a lot of accolades, and marked yet another shift in the band’s sound towards purely Satanic and blasphemous black metal with orchestral flourishes; however, because of all the attention the band got for this record, and the various antics and misadventures of front-man Nergal, including surviving cancer and being a judge at The Voice of Poland, of all things, the band got seriously overexposed, and since they also were fresh off an insanely acclaimed record and a big breakthrough, the signs that their decline was imminent have become blatantly obvious in hindsight.

One of Behemoth’s brands of coffee.

God=Dogfood hawked by Nergal

The first display of this decay was 2018’s I Loved You at Your Darkest, an album that continues to be the band’s most polarizing. It’s an album that I myself have come back and forth between enjoying and disliking, but one thing I will say about it is that it had ideas, weird and kinda undercooked ideas at times, but ideas nonetheless, which is something I cannot say about their 2022 album Opvs Contra Natvram, an album that merely exists. At best it’s competent, at worst it’s astoundingly inoffensive, which is a cardinal sin in black metal, even if the final product was at least somewhat consistent.

And after all of that, here we are with The Shit ov God, and no amount of purple prose or posturing by Nergal or his media team will make this title sound any less cringy than it is. While we’re at it, some of the lyrics on this record are just as bad as the title. If you think the cheerleader chanting on the title track was bad, prepare to hear Nergal’s already tired growling vocals drop lines like “oh captain, my captain,” or sophomoric attempts at being poetic like “Blackening holy land/We are ruin, we are locusts/Fatum ov the universe/We are the shadow elite!/Succumb ne’er to fear” or be baffled by random and out of nowhere historical references like “Napoleon’s sword.” But beyond these facepalming moments, the songs have become too formulaic: simple verse, chorus, verse, with occasional breakdowns, solos and codas. The choruses are really where the band falters the most; they’re too repetitive and the attempts at making them these chant-worthy crowd pleasers come off too self-indulgent, instead of genuinely good and catchy lines that hype you up, and because a good chunk of the lyrics are self-parody, there’s virtually nothing engaging to sing along to.

Paradoxically, despite the music being way too formulaic, dull and one-note, the actual performances are as good as ever, hell, because Nergal has overexposed himself so much, it’s only natural that his bandmates pick up the slack and carry the music. Inferno is still hailed as a masterclass percussionist and the band’s most talented member, an assertion I still agree with, and this is now the band’s third album where he consistently over-delivers and succeeds with his aggressive and dynamic drumming. The same can be said about bassist Orion, whose low-end and grooves shine even with Nergal’s autopilot songwriting.

I do want to make something abundantly clear, I don’t think Nergal is talentless; the man has 7 albums that still hold up in my opinion, and even now, while the actual execution is not up to par, it isn’t incompetent. The guitar playing and solos are solid (shoutout to guitarist Seth, who also carries the weight of this band despite not being a core member, for some reason given he’s been around for 20 years by now), and while he keeps retreading the sound and style of The Satanist there are glimmers of that album’s brilliance still, even if they’re few and far-between. And this really is the problem at the heart of this album and Behemoth as a whole for a decade by now; the band claims to be constantly striving to evolve, to avoid being stagnant, to push boundaries, etc. but you listen to any of their records since 2014, and what you get is The Satanist but worse, for the third time in a row: that album’s sound, atmosphere, production, presentation and aesthetics. Hell, a lot of the riffs in this record sound nearly identical as the ones from The Satanist and even ILYAYD except it sounds nowhere near as fresh or even weird as those records, just a complete rehashing and recycling of better ideas, and even the worst aspects of those records. No one seems willing to say ‘no’ to Nergal. The most blaring example is the track “O Venvs, Come!” which sounds like a complete rehash of the songs “Ben Sahar” and “O Father O Satan O Sun!” from The Satanist, complete and utter self-pillaging and a blatant display of this band being completely out of ideas.

Even when looking back to the rest of the band’s discography, and their eras, each album was an actual progression or at least consistent in quality, with each record building on what the previous did. When they’ve changed styles, they’ve explored that sound to a natural conclusion, and then they released The Satanist. After being showered with acclaim and awards, it’s just been the same album with diminishing results and sounding more and more tired. I know I’m hammering this point too much, but this record honestly gives me nothing else to talk about.

I’m sure there are people out there who will think I’m being too harsh, or that I’m one of those dumb elitists wearing aviator sunglasses, who brag about owning a first press vinyl of Sventevith (Storming Near the Baltic), but I’m not. I honestly held on to Behemoth for longer than I probably should have, but I also don’t hate them. Nergal being Nergal notwithstanding, I’m simply no longer interested, nor can I take them seriously anymore. And depending on who you ask, that’s worse than just flat out hating a band, because if you’re hating them, at least they’re still eliciting a reaction and you’re still engaged with their music, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons. Not so much for me though.