Antestor

black metal

Antestor is one of Norway's earliest unblack metal groups. In early years they played a raw form of death metal with the stylistic touches of Black Metal and Christian lyrics. Now Antestor plays melodic black metal with philosophical lyrics about faith and death. They started their career during the start of Norway's second wave of Black Metal, which led to them receiving much criticism from these bands, Mayhem in particular. Antestor is the only Christian band to have an album released by Cacophonous Records, which also released records by bands such as Dimmu Borgir, Sigh and Blood Storm, and was actually dropped from Cacophonous Records after the label discovered that Antestor held Christian beliefs. Antestor (Latin for call to witness or testify) formed in 1990 in Norway under the name Crush Evil. They released two demos early in their career, and in 1994 they recorded their debut album, Martyrium, although not released until 2000. They dubbed the style of their early work as sorrow metal rather than misapply the tag black metal. The band is vocally Christian and over the course of their career have received serious death threats because of this. Euronymous, the guitarist of the seminal black metal band Mayhem, once said, The Militants of Norwegian black metal will force this band to split up. That never happened: Antestor was never forced to split apart and in an almost ironic twist of fate, the reputive Norwegian extreme metal drummer Jan Axel Blomberg (better known as...