In August 1992 the Essen quartet that had spent seven years at full gallop crossed to Tampa, walked into Morrisound Studios, the room run by Jim and Tom Morris that had become the forge of death metal, and took a cutting torch to Ventor's double bass pedals, coming out in September with nine songs, a drawer full of drum pad noises and the record Noise International released on 26 October 1992 as Renewal. Nobody had asked for it. That was the point.
Kreator had earned the stop. Coma of Souls had landed on 6 November 1990 as the fifth album in five years, and Mille Petrozza described the treadmill without decoration to Dead Rhetoric on 10 November 2013: "Every year an album, every year a tour." The band told the label it wanted a year off to experiment. It took two, short by eleven days. The line-up was the one from Coma of Souls, Petrozza on vocals and guitar, Frank Gosdzik, late of Sodom, on guitar, founding bassist Rob Fioretti on what became his last Kreator album, and Jürgen "Ventor" Reil, credited on the back cover with drums and programming. In America, where Epic had issued the previous record, this one went out on Futurist.
Then the cage went down. Formed in Essen in 1982, in the coal and steel belt of the Ruhr, the band that had made its name on velocity now lowered itself into the pit, slowing the tempo to a miner's tread, stripping the riffs down to the plain load bearing kind and letting the machines in. Petrozza explained where the clang came from to the fanzine Disposable Underground, in an interview printed in its seventh issue in 1993 and posted online on 24 October 2022: "where we live there's a lot of industry, and it's a very industrial area here." The samples were never a manifesto. They started, he said in the same interview, with Ventor trying out drum pads loaded with "weird sounds" and the rest of the band shrugging yes.
"Winter Martyrium" drags you down the shaft without a lamp: a grinding opener of almost six minutes, Ventor's kit striking like a pneumatic pick on a coal face, the guitars sitting further back in the mix than a Kreator fan of 1990 was used to hearing them. "Renewal" follows and reads out the new law. It is the song the band chose to film, and it carries the programme of the whole record in four and a half minutes: tempo down, weight up, and Petrozza's voice dropped lower and pushed forward into a flat, direct bark with the old shriek gone from it. Weight over speed. On purpose.
The middle of the album is where the descent pays. "Reflection", the longest song here at 6:15, holds a mid pace and builds itself the way Petrozza said the whole album was meant to work, basic riffs stacked into structures that keep changing shape. "Karmic Wheel" goes deeper still, its slow central passage hanging in the dark like a lift cage stalled between two galleries, the cable creaking, nobody inside sure which way it will move next, and Petrozza called that part, played live, "pretty experimental and trippy" in the same 1993 interview. Experimental is the right word. It is the bravest six minutes on the record.
"Europe After the Rain" is where the anger returns. Written, Petrozza told Disposable Underground, "against racism and against this new neo-Nazi movement that's going on in Germany at the moment," it is the moment the band climbs back to the surface with a pickaxe still in hand and swings it straight through the window of the beer hall where the new hatred was being poured, the old fury of the 1980s aimed at a target in that year's German news. The interlude "Realitätskontrolle" is another matter: 1:22 of interlude that I would trade, without a second thought, for one more riff of that calibre. Then "Depression Unrest" closes the record leaning on the machines as hard as the opener does, and it is the better for it, the samples finally welded into the riffs instead of bolted onto them.
This is a thrash band going underground on purpose, and coming back up with coal dust in its lungs. The trouble is what the dust did to the sound. The mix puts the snare and the electronics where the guitars used to stand, and on the long songs the riffs lose their edge against it, a rock face blurred by the drill. Petrozza saw it himself, twenty one years on.
This is a thrash band going underground on purpose, and coming back up with coal dust in its lungs.
One thing I can admit is that I'm not really happy with the production of Renewal. It could have sounded better. The sound is strange. That was also because of us because we told the guy who mixed it, to mix it like that. We wanted a unique, unusual sound.
Mille Petrozza, Dead Rhetoric, 10 November 2013
They got the unusual sound. They paid for it in punch. The songs are better than the room they were recorded in, and the record is better in its first half and its last song than across all thirty nine minutes. None of that sinks it. Renewal is the hinge on which Kreator swung out of the 1980s, a German thrash institution volunteering for the dark at the exact moment its audience wanted another Coma of Souls, and the slow, cold, mechanical weight it found down there still sounds like a choice made by adults rather than a trend chased by tourists. Go to it for "Karmic Wheel" and "Europe After the Rain", stay for the nerve, and forgive the mix, because the man who signed off on it has already owned up.