Jason Crews is the owner and editor of INFRARED MAGAZINE and a Dallas–Fort Worth-based music journalist and concert photographer. Through INFRARED MAGAZINE and JASON CREWS PHOTOGRAPHY, he covers rock, metal, country, and live music with a focus on album reviews, artist features, concert coverage, and photography. His work is driven by a genuine passion for music and helping artists connect with new audiences through honest writing, strong visuals, and meaningful storytelling.
BEHEMOTH ‘I, Scvlptor’
Rating: 9.5 / 10 Stars
BEHEMOTH is: Adam “Nergal” Darski — vocals, guitars; Zbigniew “Inferno” Promiński — drums, percussion; Tomasz “Orion” Wróblewski — bass, backing vocals; with long-running guitarist Patryk “Seth” Sztyber — guitars, backing vocals.
Paid links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
REVIEW – The most interesting thing about I, Scvlptor is that BEHEMOTH refuse to pretend it is something it is not.
Arriving September 4, I, Scvlptor is not the conventional studio-album successor to 2025’s The Shit Ov God. Nergal has described it more accurately as an autonomous body of work — even “more of a compilation” than a regular studio record — built to connect the band’s foundational past with its present creative identity. Across eight previously unreleased recordings, seven from the studio and one captured live, BEHEMOTH move between new compositions, radically updated pieces from their earliest years, a displaced The Shit Ov God session track, tributes to Venom and Bathory, and an alternate studio treatment that deliberately strips one of the new songs back down again.
That sounds like the recipe for a rarities dump.
Instead, the architecture gives I, Scvlptor a reason to exist.
This is BEHEMOTH examining how a band becomes itself.
The title track places the modern version of the group at the front of that examination. “I, Scvlptor” works in the monumental, deliberate tradition of pieces such as “O Father O Satan O Sun!,” “Lucifer,” and “Nieboga Czarny Xiądz.” The tempo does not need to sprint. The power comes from accumulation — dense guitars, an oppressive rhythmic stomp, Inferno’s punishing control, and Nergal delivering the words with the authority of someone presiding over a ritual rather than merely fronting a metal song.
The sculptor metaphor gives the track more philosophical weight than another exercise in theatrical blasphemy.
Nergal frames existence as continual self-creation: humanity shaping itself against limitation while already knowing that mortality ultimately wins. The point, then, is not final conquest. It is the act of shaping.
That idea quietly becomes the governing principle of the entire release.
BEHEMOTH are sculpting themselves here, too.
“Lord ov the Horizons” immediately complicates the expected modern formula.
The opening emphasizes atmosphere and restraint, including unusual quasi-sung or clean-vocal textures before the arrangement begins tightening around the listener. The transformation into the second half is the point: controlled dread turns militant, the rhythm accelerates, and the theatrical preparation gives way to the kind of blackened death-metal force associated with contemporary BEHEMOTH.
The contrast is important because it demonstrates how much the band now understands space.
Early BEHEMOTH frequently used rawness as atmosphere because rawness was simply part of the available language.
Modern BEHEMOTH can manufacture dread deliberately.
They can withhold impact.
They can stage the explosion.
And that makes what comes next especially revealing.
“Rise of the Blackstorm of Evil” reaches all the way back to 1992 and The Return of the Northern Moon.
In its original environment, the song belonged to a primitive young black-metal band drawing heavily from Samael, Celtic Frost, Hellhammer and the extreme underground surrounding them. Decades later, BEHEMOTH revisit the same framework with completely different equipment, ability and musical perspective.
The result is not restoration.
It is reconstruction.
The lo-fi fog that once surrounded the song is replaced by enormous drum definition, distinct guitar layers and the kind of physical production weight impossible to associate with a primitive early-’90s demo.
There is inevitably a tradeoff.
The original’s obscurity was part of its atmosphere. Modern clarity removes some of that accidental mystery.
But the reward is being able to hear the architecture underneath it.
Riffs that once arrived through tape hiss and underground necessity are now exposed as components in a musical language BEHEMOTH never entirely abandoned.
That makes the re-recording more interesting than an exercise in making an old song “sound better.”
It asks whether an embryonic composition can survive after the musicians who wrote it have spent more than three decades evolving beyond it.
Here, it can.
“In Thy Pandemaeternum” makes the historical argument even stronger.
Originally appearing on 1998’s Pandemonic Incantations, the song comes from a transitional moment when BEHEMOTH were already moving away from straightforward black-metal construction toward the blackened death-metal identity that would increasingly define them.
The 2026 re-recording allows that mutation to become much easier to hear.
Inferno becomes central.
His blast beats and double-kick work can operate with contemporary definition, while the bass and guitars gain separation inside an arrangement that was far more complex than the older production necessarily revealed.
Nergal himself has said he believed strong, mature riffs were buried beneath the chaotic original sound and mix. The new recording gives them another life.
More importantly, “In Thy Pandemaeternum” functions as the hinge of I, Scvlptor.
If “Rise of the Blackstorm of Evil” represents the underground beginning and the title track represents modern BEHEMOTH, this is the mutation occurring between them.
It is the missing evolutionary frame.
Then “Begotten” disrupts that lineage.
Written during the The Shit Ov God sessions but omitted because it did not fit that album’s flow, the song occupies the wild-card position in this collection. The source commentary around it emphasizes dissonance, abrasion and claustrophobic weight, but Nergal’s own description is particularly revealing: he considers it unusually catchy, carrying a strong new-wave feel with moments moving toward post-gothic territory.
That contrast helps explain why it belongs here.
I, Scvlptor is constructed around material that does not belong somewhere else.
“Begotten” is not merely a discarded song rescued from a hard drive. It represents a path BEHEMOTH explored that did not serve the architecture of The Shit Ov God.
Here, being the outsider is its purpose.
Orion’s low-end contribution also matters when BEHEMOTH move into these denser spaces. The band’s modern sound can become so enormous that bass risks disappearing behind the guitars and Inferno’s drums, but the physical depth underneath these arrangements is essential to keeping the music from becoming pure high-frequency violence.
That becomes especially important because the next two tracks shift from self-examination toward lineage.
“In League With Satan” is Venom by way of modern BEHEMOTH, with Shagrath of Dimmu Borgir joining Nergal on vocals.
The important thing is that they do not over-intellectualize it.
Venom’s original power came from primitive satanic rock-and-roll swagger, and the appeal of the remake is hearing that skeletal anthem inflated by BEHEMOTH‘s contemporary guitar mass.
Seven-string weight changes the physical scale without destroying the chant-ready simplicity.
Shagrath’s presence makes the historical connection tangible.
This is not simply a veteran metal band covering another veteran metal band.
Venom sit near the beginning of the genealogy from which black metal emerged. Dimmu Borgir and BEHEMOTH became two of the most internationally visible European descendants of that evolution.
Put those elements together and “In League With Satan” becomes something closer to a bloodline reunion.
It should also be enormous live.
“The Return of Darkness and Evil” makes the lineage even more explicit.
Bathory’s influence on black metal is foundational, and BEHEMOTH choose not to present their interpretation as a pristine studio object. Instead, the release uses the first live performance from Athens, with Sakis Tolis of Rotting Christ sharing vocals.
That decision matters.
The surrounding studio material demonstrates exactly how polished and overwhelming BEHEMOTH can sound in 2026.
The Bathory tribute is allowed to breathe differently.
Live roughness remains intact. The performance has urgency rather than surgical correction. Sakis brings another piece of European extreme-metal history directly into the recording.
The track reminds the listener that black metal’s mythology was not created in perfect studios.
It came from immediacy.
From imperfection.
From musicians trying to make something dangerous before anyone understood what the final vocabulary would become.
That context makes the inclusion of both Venom and Bathory smarter than ordinary bonus-track behavior.
BEHEMOTH are showing their ancestors immediately after showing their own youth.
Then the release circles back to “Lord ov the Horizons.”
The alternate version is an inspired way to close.
Earlier, the finished song demonstrates the theatrical control of modern BEHEMOTH — tension, atmosphere, production weight and carefully staged escalation.
The finale removes some of that protective polish.
Rather than ending with another historical artifact or an even larger climax, I, Scvlptor allows the listener to see behind the construction.
The sculpture is turned around.
Tool marks remain visible.
The rougher presentation emphasizes instrumental friction and exposes more of the song’s underlying mechanics.
That symmetry gives an otherwise unusual collection a genuine ending.
And it reinforces the title concept in a way the release never needs to state explicitly.
Creation is process.
The finished object is only one version of the work.
That is why I, Scvlptor makes more sense as an autonomous BEHEMOTH project than it would as a conventional album.
A standard album would invite questions about consistency, narrative progression and where it stands alongside The Satanist, I Loved You at Your Darkest, Opvs Contra Natvram or The Shit Ov God.
This release is asking something else.
What remains constant when BEHEMOTH move from 1992 to 2026?
What happens when primitive black-metal material is rebuilt by musicians capable of operating on some of the largest stages available to extreme metal?
Does production erase danger?
Does experience sterilize instinct?
And how much of modern BEHEMOTH was already hiding inside those earliest songs?
The answers are more complicated than simple nostalgia.
Modern production unquestionably changes the atmosphere of the archival compositions.
The young band’s limitations were once inseparable from the music.
Those limitations are gone.
Inferno can now make old material physically devastating in ways early recordings could never capture.
Orion adds low-end mass that pushes the songs away from thin traditional black-metal sonics.
Seth’s layered guitar work and Nergal’s decades of development give the modern material architectural precision.
And Nergal’s vocals themselves become a timeline.
The commanding low-end force of current BEHEMOTH can sit beside harsher, more primitive vocal instincts when the early compositions demand them.
That flexibility is possible because this working configuration has spent roughly two decades developing a shared vocabulary.
They are not historians attempting a historically accurate recreation.
They are the current BEHEMOTH interpreting earlier BEHEMOTH.
That distinction is everything.
There is also an interesting contradiction in the band’s current stature.
BEHEMOTH have become capable of enormous festival productions, elaborate visual staging and internationally recognizable spectacle without making music that feels designed to comfort a broad audience.
The scale has grown.
The hostility remains.
That tension is one reason I, Scvlptor is worth examining now.
A band this established could easily turn its early catalog into museum material.
Instead, BEHEMOTH drag those songs into the present and force them to compete with everything the band has learned since.
Some grime inevitably disappears.
But something else appears in its place.
Perspective.
The physical presentation reinforces that philosophy. Bartek Rogalewicz / LODGE.BLACK handles the cover art and design, continuing a long visual association with BEHEMOTH and giving the release an appropriately ancient, severe physical identity. Nuclear Blast’s announcement also confirms Grupa 13 produced the “I, Scvlptor” video.
In the end, I, Scvlptor is most compelling when viewed as a self-portrait built from different ages of the same organism.
The new songs show where BEHEMOTH stand.
The re-recordings show where they began.
“In Thy Pandemaeternum” reveals the evolutionary fault line.
“Begotten” shows a contemporary path that did not fit the previous album.
Venom and Bathory identify the ancestors.
Shagrath and Sakis Tolis connect that ancestry to the European scene that developed around it.
And the final rough mix reminds us that every imposing finished structure began as unfinished material.
That makes the title unusually appropriate.
BEHEMOTH are not simply presenting the sculpture.
They are showing the stone, the hammer, the fractures, the earlier attempts and the hands that helped shape the tradition around them.
For more information on BEHEMOTH, visit:
www.Behemoth.pl
www.Facebook.com/Behemoth
www.Twitter.com/BehemothBand
www.Instagram.com/BehemothOfficial
www.YouTube.com/@BehemothOfficial
www.Spotify.com/Behemoth
