The Polish quartet from Olsztyn had one studio album and one live record behind it when it entered Studio Modern Sound in Gdynia in May 1995, and what came out of those sessions was the record that separated the band from every other act working in the country at the time: nine songs, thirty four minutes, no interludes, no ballad, no concession of any kind to the European death metal that was already beginning to slow down and tidy itself up. Croon Records issued it in Poland on 5 July 1995 on cassette and compact disc. It reached number three on the Polish chart and reportedly moved some seventeen thousand units there inside a fortnight, figures that meant very little in Hamburg or Tampa and everything in a market that had only had a functioning record industry for six years.
Vader at that point was Piotr Wiwczarek on vocals and guitars, Jarosław Łabieniec on guitars and Krzysztof Raczkowski on drums, with Leszek Rakowski credited on bass. Wiwczarek produced with Adam Toczko, Tomasz Bonarowski engineered, Grzegorz Piwkowski mastered. Those names matter because the record's most argued-about quality is a production decision rather than a compositional one, and because the same names recur across the Polish catalogue of the period for anyone who wants to trace how the scene actually got recorded.
| Territory | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Poland | Croon Records | 1995 |
| Europe | System Shock / SPV | 1996 |
| United States | Conquest Music | 1996 |
| United States, reissue | Pavement Music | 1998 |
| Japan | Avalon Marquee | 2000 |
| Poland, reissue with a Depeche Mode cover appended | Metal Mind Productions | 2003 |
Five years and four territories to distribute one thirty four minute album is the whole story of what it cost to be a Polish band in the nineties, and it explains why the record's reputation abroad was built by tape traders rather than by a label campaign.
The debut, The Ultimate Incantation, had been thrash architecture accelerated to the edge of collapse. This is a different construction entirely. The riffs are shorter and more percussive, built to be hit rather than played, and the vocal drops into the lower, flatter register that would define the band for the next three decades. Reviewers who came to the album late, and there were many, consistently identify this as the point at which the Morbid Angel inheritance stops being audible as imitation and starts functioning as grammar.
"Silent Empire" opens and is the track everybody names, and it states the album's method inside its first minute: no build, no atmosphere, the riff already moving. "Sothis" is the one the specialists pick, and it shares its title with an EP the band issued around the same period, which has been confusing catalogues ever since. "Blood of Kingu" is where Raczkowski's playing is most exposed and most impressive. "Reborn in Flames" closes and is the only track here that could be called an anthem, which is presumably why it survived in the live set for twenty years.
The drum sound is thin, dry and slightly cheap, and it is also the reason every note of that drumming is audible.
Which brings the argument to its usual place. The snare on this record has been described by reviewers for thirty years in terms of buckets and tin, and the criticism is not unfair: this is a budget recording and it sounds like one. The counter-case is stronger. A fuller, more expensive drum sound of the sort the band would obtain three albums later flattens exactly the detail that makes Raczkowski worth hearing, and the comparison is available to anyone who owns both records. Where Litany is cleaner, tighter and more mechanical, this one is drier and more urgent, and the question of which is the better album has divided the band's audience since 2000 without moving an inch in either direction. Chronicles of Chaos gave De Profundis full marks. Others have never rated it above the album that followed it. Both positions are defensible and neither is going to win.
Raczkowski left Vader in March 2005 and died on 20 August of the same year, in Olsztyn. The drumming preserved here is the clearest surviving argument for what he could do, which is a poor consolation and an accurate one.
What the record established is larger than any of its individual songs. Before it, Polish extreme metal was a rumour circulating on dubbed cassettes; after it, there was a documented case that the country produced death metal as good as anywhere. Everything Behemoth, Decapitated and Hate did afterwards was done in a market this album had already proved existed. Thirty four minutes, and not one of them spent explaining itself.