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 occupied more column inches over the following six months 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 failed as a provocation, and the evidence is in the reviews themselves: Distorted Sound gave the album eight out of ten and called the name terrible in the same paragraph, Metal Forces gave it seven and called it daft, Kerrang praised the record while conceding the title read as a shark being jumped. Four separate outlets found it necessary to separate the music from the wrapper before they could discuss the music. That is a cost, and it was paid before a note was heard.
What is on the tape is not in dispute. Every outlet consulted, including the ones that disliked the album, agrees the record is superbly performed and heavily produced, the guitar tone thick and corroded, Promiński's drumming beyond reproach. Dom Lawson at Blabbermouth gave it nine out of ten and singled out the drumming on "To Drown the Svn in Wine" as devastating. "Nomen Barbarvm" is the track that leans hardest into straight death metal and it is the one that two independent reviewers picked as the strongest. "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. Angry Metal Guy considers its spoken passage one of the stronger moments on the album. Distorted Sound calls the same song the most embarrassing thing here. Both reviewers are describing an identical arrangement, and the difference between them is entirely whether they accept the register the band has chosen. This publication comes down with the second camp: the chant that opens it 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.
The larger question the reviews split 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. Wonderbox and Distorted Sound hear the former, and both reach for Demigod as the comparison. Sputnikmusic, which scored the album 2.3 out of 5, hears nothing the band has not already done, and v13 arrived at the same conclusion in more elaborate language. The evidence supports both readings, which usually indicates 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.