Adam "Nergal" Darski has taken BEHEMOTH's debut album back to the stage in a form it has never had. For 2026 the frontman has joined forces with Icelandic black metal band MISÞYRMING for an exclusive live project: performing 1995's "Sventevith (Storming Near The Baltic)" in its entirety, as a single conceptual work, for the first time — marking the record's 30th anniversary.
The collaboration reached the Hellsinki Metal Festival in Helsinki, Finland on August 8, and fan-filmed video of the set has since surfaced.
"Sventevith" is where the story starts. BEHEMOTH were formed in Poland in 1991 by Darski, and the debut is a raw, unambiguously black metal record — pagan-tinged, thin-sounding by design, and a long way from the machine the band became. The death metal influence that would define their later work had not yet arrived, which is precisely what makes a full performance of it interesting three decades on: it is the one BEHEMOTH album that sounds like nothing else in their catalogue.
MISÞYRMING are a fitting partner for it. The Reykjavík band have spent the last decade as one of the most respected names in Icelandic black metal, and their sound sits far closer to the atmosphere of early BEHEMOTH than anything Darski's own band currently plays live.
BEHEMOTH went on to build international standing with "Demigod" (2004), "The Apostasy" (2007) and "Evangelion" (2009), before 2014's "The Satanist" pushed the band's artistic and conceptual reach considerably further. Their most recent album, "The Shit Ov God", arrived in May 2025 via Nuclear Blast Records, produced by Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios — a man whose CV also runs through EMPEROR, ENSLAVED, KREATOR and ROTTING CHRIST. Cover art came from long-time collaborator Bartek Rogalewicz and Dark Sigil Workshop.
Nergal has been characteristically unapologetic about that title. "It's like me at the age of 15, when I turned the cross upside-down," he told Kerrang!. "It's the simplest, most fucking atavistic reaction of disagreement, of rebellion. It's primitive, it's primal, it's vulgar. You invert the cross, so I used the same semantic tool here. And there's some existential philosophy there, too. If there is a God, then we are the excrement. But being the lesser being is not a reason to mourn or to be depressed. We're gonna wear it as a badge of honor."
He was equally dismissive of complaints that the name was too blunt: "Some people said it's too simple. But then we did 'The Satanist', everyone said that was as well. They said it was not creative. Well, it came over 30 years into extreme metal history, and nobody had used it yet."
Source: blabbermouth.net