DIMMU BORGIR released "Death Cult Armageddon" on September 9th, 2003, through Nuclear Blast, and symphonic black metal has never been the same. The Norwegian band recorded the orchestral parts with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra — a budget almost unheard of in extreme metal at the time — and the result is less a black metal album with strings than a full collision between the two forms. Nicholas Barker's drumming, Galder and Silenoz's riffing and Shagrath's rasp sit inside arrangements of genuine orchestral weight, and "Progenies of the Great Apocalypse" became the band's signature song and one of the few extreme metal videos to reach heavy rotation. Purists dismissed it as bombast; it sold in numbers no Norwegian black metal record had managed before, and defined the genre's mainstream face.
