Eighteen songs, three acts, ninety-two minutes, and not one throat in front of the stage. Filmed in Poland in October 2021, screened three times on Halloween night on Japanese, Greenwich and Pacific evening clocks, taken off the platform a week later and held back three years before Nuclear Blast pressed it onto three CDs with a Blu-ray and onto three LPs on 25 October 2024, the Gdańsk quartet hangs up its thirtieth birthday as a hinged altarpiece of three painted panels, one per era, opened for the cameras alone. Behemoth built a triptych. Then it bolted the doors.
The first panel is painted with the oldest pigment the band owns. The act the sleeve calls The Scorched Forest drags "Cursed Angel of Doom" out of Endless Damnation, a cassette demo from 1992, and tears the tape hiss off it in barely three minutes, then hauls "Chant of the Eastern Lands", the opening track of the 1995 debut Sventevith, and "Lasy Pomorza" from Grom out of the pagan years and sets them among the stumps of a forest shot in black and white. Bands of this tonnage rarely dig that deep into their own barrow. Most seal it.
That opening act is the reason the record exists, and the oldest song is the reason the opening act works. Written before three of the four men on this film were in the band, "Cursed Angel of Doom" is handed here to the line-up of 2021, Nergal on voice and guitar, Inferno at the drums, Orion on bass and Seth on the second guitar, who play it with the discipline of a garrison, and in their hands it stands up as a statement of origin rather than a curiosity. The film puts the four of them alone in the clearing, Nergal hooded and painted, the trees standing in for an audience. Trees do not applaud. On a black metal record that is almost a virtue.
The second panel, The Path ov Via Dolorosa on the sleeve, walks the years when the pagan band turned occult and then turned into a battering ram. "The Thousand Plagues I Witness" comes from Pandemonic Incantations in 1998, "Decade of Θεριον" and "Chant for Εσχατον 2000" from Satanica in 1999, "Christians to the Lions" from Thelema.6 in 2000, and "Heru Ra Ha: Let There Be Might" is lifted from the end of Zos Kia Cultus in 2002. The set for this act is a field of sand planted with wooden crosses, fires burning between them, which is about as subtle as the catechism of these songs ever was. "44 (The Youth Manifesto)" is the act's best joke, and it is printed on the tracklist rather than spoken.
The third panel, The Desecrated Temple, holds the international decades: "Demigod" from 2004, "At the Left Hand ov God" from The Apostasy, "Alas, Lord Is Upon Me" from Evangelion, "Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer" and "O Father O Satan O Sun!" from The Satanist, and "Rom 5:8" from I Loved You at Your Darkest, the 2018 album that was still the newest the band had when the cameras rolled. "O Father O Satan O Sun!" closes the whole rite past the ten-minute mark, a hymnbook fed page by page to the brazier, and it is the right last word. Nothing on these three discs was written after 2018. That is the point and the problem at once.
The engineering is beyond reproach. The live audio was captured by Arkadiusz Malczewski, the band produced it, and Jaime Gomez Arellano mixed and mastered it at Orgone Studios, and the result is finished to a professional gloss, with the playing precise and fierce from the first song to the last. The film was directed and edited by Dariusz Szermanowicz of Grupa 13, from a script he wrote with Nergal. Every frame is lit. Every note is in its place.
And that is where the paint on the triptych starts to flake. A live album sells one thing a studio album cannot: a room that answers back, the roar after the last chord, the crowd that turns a song into an event. Here the room is a forest, a sandpit and a ruin, and whatever sits between the songs was decided in an editing suite. The running order is fixed by the calendar, not by the stage, so the set climbs through thirty years like a museum corridor instead of building like a concert. In a video the band posted to mark the stream, transcribed by Blabbermouth on 30 October 2021, Nergal said: "Three decades, it just went that fast." The record takes ninety-two minutes to prove him right, and it takes every one of them.
Here the room is a forest, a sandpit and a ruin, and whatever sits between the songs was decided in an editing suite.
Take it for the first act, for "Cursed Angel of Doom" and "Lasy Pomorza" played by a band that had every commercial reason to leave them buried, and for the Blu-ray, because the film is half of this object and the better half. Played on the discs alone, without the pictures, it is an expensive, immaculate retrospective of a career that still had The Shit ov God in front of it: a souvenir of one night in 2021 that waited three years for a shelf, impossible to fault on craft and impossible to love the way a real night in a real hall gets loved.