On 29 January 2025 the band released a single and, with it, the title of the album it came from, and the reaction to those four words shaped the following six months more thoroughly than any musical decision on the record. That is worth stating at the outset, because a review that pretends otherwise is describing a listening experience nobody actually had.
Behemoth issued The Shit ov God through Nuclear Blast on 9 May 2025, eight songs and thirty seven minutes, the thirteenth studio album and the first since Opvs Contra Natvram in 2022. Adam Darski sings and plays guitar, Zbigniew Promiński drums, Tomasz Wróblewski plays bass, Asenath Siewierski plays the second guitar. It entered the Polish chart at number one, the German at nineteen, and the British rock and metal chart at seven. Two further singles preceded and accompanied it, "The Shadow Elite" in March and "Sowing Salt" on the day of release.
The title inverts the Christogram, the three letters that stand for the name of Christ in Latin liturgy, and turns them into an English obscenity. Darski has been explaining this since January and was still explaining it in December.
It's not a stupid title. Just get the record, read the lyrics. It's more philosophical than you think it is.
Adam Darski, Blabbermouth, 18 December 2025
He is right about the lyrics and wrong about the arithmetic. A provocation that requires seven months of clarification has already failed as a provocation, and the proof is the shape of every conversation this album has had since January: the music cannot be reached without first climbing over the name. Praise for the record now arrives with an apology for the wrapper stapled to it, and that is not a thing that happens to a title which works. The cost was paid before a note was heard.
What is on the tape is not in dispute. The Gdańsk band plays at a standard almost nobody left in the genre can match, the record superbly performed and heavily produced, the guitar tone thick and corroded, Promiński's drumming beyond reproach, and nothing in the argument around this album has ever turned on whether these four musicians can execute. "To Drown the Svn in Wine" carries the most devastating drumming here, a kit worked like a machine press until the song has nowhere left to stand. "Nomen Barbarvm" leans hardest into straight death metal and is the strongest thing on the record for pure force. "O Venvs, Come!" is the album's best composition by a clear margin, six minutes that build through choral writing into a closing march, and it is the only piece here that could not have appeared on either of the two previous records.
A band this practised can execute anything it decides to execute. The question is what it decided.
The title track is the fault line, and it is instructive. Its spoken passage is either one of the stronger moments on the album or the most embarrassing thing on it, and the arrangement is identical in both hearings: the entire difference sits in whether the register the band has chosen is accepted or refused. The register does not hold. The chant that opens the song is the one place on the record where a band with thirty years of practice sounds like it is performing blasphemy rather than committing it, and a band whose frontman has stood in a Polish courtroom for the genuine article should not sound like it is reciting.
The larger question the album splits on is whether this is a partial return to the faster, less theatrical mode of the 2004 period or simply more of the post-The Satanist manner. Demigod is audible in the tempos and in the refusal to let three of these songs breathe, and it is genuinely there rather than imagined. It is equally possible to play the record twice and find nothing the band has not already done, and done harder, since 2014. Both readings survive contact with the album, which is the usual sign of a record positioned between two modes rather than committed to either.
Thirty seven minutes is short by the standards of this band's recent work and that discipline is the album's best decision. What is missing is not craft, ambition or money. It is the sense, present on the 2014 album and on parts of Demigod before it, that the group needed to make this particular record. Very good, then, and a long way from essential, and the one thing history will remember it for is a joke in Latin.