Interview with death black metal band KADAVEREICH.
Answered Daemorph and Kist, thank you!
Recenze/review - KADAVEREICH - Perversa Mysteria (2026):
Ave KADAVEREICH! I'm listening to your new album "Perversa Mysteria" right now, and I have this nagging feeling that I'm at an evil black mass. You play black death metal, and this is your first full-length album. Can you tell us how the new record came about and what direction you wanted to take after your excellent previous EP "Radiance of Doom"? Did you want to be even faster, darker, more devilish?
Hello, and thank you very much for your interest. It’s great that you’re feeling this way. It means our message has gotten through. All the material was ready by 2022, and at the beginning of the year we were already planning to go into the studio and considering our options. The start of the war stunned us all, and my family and I decided to leave Russia. At first, things got a little strained between me and the guys, but later I realized that we didn’t actually disagree on how to view the events. So after some time, the idea of finishing the album, on which so much time and effort had been spent, resurfaced. Actually, at the very beginning, I envisioned KADAVEREICH as a more primitive and straightforward war-bestial metal. I tried to write riffs that were as primitive as possible, deliberately simplifying them. But during the writing process—and to a large extent during the recording process as well—I gave up on self-imposed limitations and constantly worrying about how well the music fit the style, and just started creating however I felt. If I wanted to slow things down right there and use a doom riff, I just went for it. Same goes for the keyboard samples. Usually that’s not really encouraged in this genre, but I figured, “What the hell.” When I wrote “Tauroctony,” I initially wanted to offer it to GROND—the band where I was the bassist at the time. It seemed to me that it was too slow for KADAVEREICH and kind of stood out from the rest of the material. But GROND already had a full set of songs for their upcoming album at the time, and besides, I thought this track would serve as a sort of “epilogue” to the album, much like “Perversion Of The Mysteries” is a semi-intro.
You know what immediately hit me in the face? The sound on the new record. It's organic, raw, the album has a black spark to it. In today's world of over-compressed formats, it's literally refreshing. In my opinion, this is what true hell sounds like! Please tell me where and how you recorded it? How did you achieve such a sound?
Overall, we’re very happy with the result. Sasha Borovykh from TsunTsun Productions handled the mixing and sound design. He’s simply an excellent sound engineer and professional; we didn’t have any misunderstandings at all—he immediately grasped the vision for how our album should sound. We wanted the sound to be as natural and “raw” as possible—in a good way. We barely straightened out the drums on the grid, as is common practice these days, so you can hear some imperfections and rough edges. Although I have to admit that during the mixing process, when the sound engineer sent me the mixed tracks as MP3s, I was totally fine with that raw and dirty sound. But when I got the master files in WAV format, the sound seemed too clean to me, haha. So there’s still room to go in terms of that “dirty” sound.
I'm exactly the kind of old-school fan who approaches music in such a way that if he likes an album, he buys both the CD and the T-shirt. I must say that the cover art for this year's album is really well done. This is how I imagine real hell. Can you tell us how you chose the motif and how it relates to the music? Daemorph did a great job as always, but I feel like the motif is a little unusual for him, different.
Yes, it was a difficult task for me; designing my own album is, for some reason, much harder than it is for anyone else. Probably because I lack that sense of distance and an outside perspective. I made six or seven “drafts,” but none of them satisfied me; I kept wondering if that was really what should be on the cover. Finally, on the eighth try, I came up with what you see on the cover. The main idea was to convey a sense of madness and a dark ritual. Later, I used some elements from the failed cover designs as parts of the digipak and booklet artwork. In general, the theme of madness has always fascinated me in my work; you can see this in some of my covers, where it’s unclear exactly what’s happening and how one thing flows into another. Unfortunately, since the advent of AI, I can’t compete with it in this area. I can only say that I was trying to do this long before it became AI technology.
It is written about KADAVEREICH that Daemorph was behind the band's inception and that the band was originally Ukrainian, but due to Russia's invasion of the country, it moved to Germany, Turkey? Can you please tell us more about the history of your band? I follow the war in Ukraine regularly and for me, as a Czech, it is something terrible that affects me personally. How has the war influenced your work? I can't help but feel a strange darkness in your new album.
There’s no doubt we’re going through difficult times right now. I’m Ukrainian; I was born in Kharkiv. After graduating from Kharkiv University, I married a Russian woman and moved to Moscow, though I still visited Kharkiv several times a year. So you could say I’ve spent half my life in Russia with a Ukrainian passport. I never “became Russian” and always felt Ukrainian. In 2012, I joined the old-school death metal band GROND as a bassist. Around 2018, the band began to experience a period of stagnation, creative stagnation, and lineup changes. Due to various internal reasons, I was unable to realize my creative potential within the band, so that’s when the idea arose to form my own band, but with a more aggressive and extreme direction. I found the guitarist Panzer through an ad, and we were very lucky with him; he turned out to be an excellent musician, although it took him some time to get into the style. The hardest part was finding a drummer. After a long and unsuccessful search, I asked Kist—the former vocalist and drummer from GROND who had since become just a vocalist—to help out on drums, at least for the recording. When he agreed, we recorded the Radiation Of Doom demo, which was released as an EP on Godz Ov War in 2021. At the time, we saw ourselves as a full-fledged band with the potential to perform live. That’s why the lineup included two guitarists and a vocalist. On the day Russia bombed my hometown of Kharkiv, my family and I decided to leave Russia. That same day, we bought tickets for an evening flight to Kazakhstan—at the time, it was the only available flight. We had only two suitcases of belongings with us. We were in Kazakhstan for just a week, but we didn’t know how the Kazakh government would act in a war situation, since they were part of the CSTO—a military alliance with Russia. So we left Kazakhstan for Turkey and lived there for over a year—fourteen months. There I worked drawing cover art—my only remaining source of income. It became a salvation for me, even if only psychologically; I threw myself into my work and escaped the terrible reality for a while. My wife, an employee and curator at the Tretyakov Gallery, naturally quit her previous job and was looking for opportunities to further her career. After some time, she received an offer from a museum in Berlin, and so we have been living in Germany since May 2023. While I was still living in Turkey, the idea resurfaced to finally finish the album we’d put so much effort into. We scaled the lineup down to the bare minimum. The drums were recorded sometime in mid-2022. Kist recorded them on his own; I couldn’t be there for the session to oversee anything. But since the material was already more or less polished, everything went well. The guitars were recorded about a year later; I participated online for that, and we consulted and made minor changes as we went along. Later, we recorded the vocals, and in the fall of 2024, I recorded the bass. We spent the rest of 2024 mixing the album. In early 2025, I asked Greg from Godz Ov War to release our album, and he immediately agreed. However, the label already had plans for the next six months, so the release was scheduled for the fall. But in the fall, we had to change plans again due to some issues with the label and postpone it to February 2026. It’s been a long and difficult journey.
When I look at your lineup, you are a band made up of experienced musicians. How do you actually create new music? How does the process of creating new material work? Do you have any problems agreeing on things? After all, experience can sometimes be an obstacle. You know how it is, egos and all that.
I usually write riffs on the bass, often at the same time as the drum part, and sometimes with ideas for what the guitar might play. When the composition feels more or less ready to me, I send it to the guitarist, and he records the guitar track over it. I listen to the result and make adjustments to the structure or the riffs themselves, because there’s a difference between how a riff sounds on bass and how it sounds on guitar. Then I send it back to the guitarist with the changes. And so on until the composition is finished. So you could say Panzer is a full-fledged co-author. He often suggests interesting arrangement ideas, as was the case, for example, with the composition “Radiation Of Doom.” But if the ideas conflict with the main concept of the composition, then I either reject them or we rework them.
I'm curious about what it's like in Ukraine in terms of music. How did you get into music and who was your role model? What about your scene, clubs, fans?
Before the war, the music scene in Ukraine was much the same as in any other European country, with a few minor differences. For example, in Germany, as a musician, you need to own absolutely all your own equipment—an amplifier, a cabinet, a drum kit if you’re a drummer—and rehearsal spaces are rented on a long-term basis like housing, whereas in Ukraine the system is a bit different. All you need is an instrument and some pedals, and rehearsal rooms are rented by the hour with all the necessary equipment. In every other respect, the music scene is the same. Since the war began and the borders closed, Ukrainian bands have had a hard time going on European tours—I mean those who’ve kept their bands going. Otherwise, the whole music routine is exactly the same. That’s exactly why it was easy for me to fit into Berlin’s music scene. I started my musical career a long time ago, back when I was a student, as a vocalist. It was the early nineties, the golden age of extreme metal. We played some kind of death-doom. Later, when I moved to Moscow and continued my musical career, we couldn’t find a suitable bassist, and it just so happened that I had to pick up the bass. My favorite bassists are Steve DiGiorgio and Timmy Hansen (Mercyful Fate/King Diamond); I also really like the bass parts on the early albums by Rainbow and Ozzy Osbourne.
Your lyrics are also very dark. Of course, that's part of death metal and black metal, and I like it, but I'd be interested in the origin and creation of the lyrics. How did the lyrics for the new album come about? What are they about?
Our overall conceptual theme is sort of a post-nuclear Roman Empire. I forwarded your question to Kist, our singer and drummer who writes the lyrics, and here’s what he wrote: "During the work on the album, I became fascinated with literature about Mithraism — a mystical religious cult that was widespread in the Roman army during the 1st to 4th centuries AD. This influenced the lyrics to a significant extent, some of which contain direct references to the cult of Mithras (for example, "Perversion of the Mysteries," "Sun-Horned God," and "Tauroctony"). Some of the songs are dark, perverted fantasies on the theme of antiquity. For instance, "Panzercletian" tells the story of how, after his death, Emperor Diocletian ends up in a kind of hell, where, for his lifelong "achievements," he is transformed into a tank-like, perfect killing machine. "Arrows of Ahriman" deals with Angra Mainyu — the deity and embodiment of evil in Mazdaism and later Zoroastrianism. In general, the essence of KADAVEREICH's lyrics is dark tales that we pulled from the abyss of the past using the hooks of fantasy and pain."
In the history of metal, there have been many instances of bands being banned because they shocked people or had opinions that differed from those of the majority. Have you ever had any problems? In today's internet age, it's very easy to immediately condemn someone, spread rumors, and destroy them. How is extreme metal perceived by the Ukrainian public, media, etc.?
The metal scene has always operated in the realm of provocation and rebellion against conventional norms. And current trends—especially those coming from the younger generation—to make “metal safe,” acceptable for social media, and subject to self-censorship—all of this is, of course, disgusting and worthy of contempt. They can find a reason to accuse you of being a “fascist” and start canceling you. For example, I was never a big fan of BURZUM; Varg isn’t the brightest guy, and I remember when his ridiculous texts were published in the late ’90s and early 2000s—they elicited nothing but a condescending, ironic smile. But what they’ve made of him now—almost a “second Hitler,” with even the name itself being censored—is just idiocy. I don’t like “antifa” because they use aggressive methods against anyone they don’t like for whatever reason. Back in Russia, there were (or are there still?) “Antifa” groups that “fought the Nazis.” And now Russia has a totalitarian fascist regime that is waging war not only against Ukraine, but already against the rest of Europe (it’s just that the “hot” phase hasn’t started yet). And where are all these clowns, the “Russian Antifa”? Generally speaking, I don’t like either the far right or the far left. History shows us that both sides ultimately end up with concentration camps and mass executions. By the way, there’s much more freedom of speech in Ukraine than there is in Europe right now. At least that was the case before the war. I don’t like that suddenly your gender has become the most important thing, and genitals have become the dominant, defining theme of the new reality. It feels like humanity is rapidly getting dumber. It’s a good thing I’m already old enough, and it won’t be me reaping the fruits of this “brave new world.”
How are KADAVEREICH doing with concerts? Do you perform live at all? Wouldn't you like to tour Europe? I could imagine you alongside bands like POSSESSED or DEICIDE, who come to us quite often.
There are no plans for concerts yet, simply because the band members are scattered across the country. I don't know if I'll be able to get the band together in Germany, but if I do, then we can start talking about live concerts.
Daemorph, I have to ask you about your work as an illustrator and graphic designer. Do you have any favorite techniques? Where do you get inspiration for your paintings? How did you get into painting? Please walk us through your career and tell us where we can find your paintings. If I wanted a motif for a new album cover, where would I contact you? Do you choose bands based on your taste?
I graduated from university with a degree in architecture, so technically, according to my diploma, I’m an architect. But I’ve always hated architecture—I don’t even have that “engineering and design” mindset. The main benefit of the program was that it included painting and drawing classes. So even while I was still in college, I knew I wouldn’t work as an architect—I’d be an illustrator. At first, I worked in web design, then went freelance as an artist. Mostly, I did storyboards for commercials and feature films. I especially liked the latter since I’m a cinephile. Drawing album covers was more of an extra “cherry on top.” As for comics, my success there was fairly limited. I once dreamed of becoming a professional comic artist, but all my attempts to break into the comic industry were unsuccessful, and over time I simply lost interest in that career path. After the war began and I left Russia, I naturally lost my job as a storyboard artist, and right now my only source of income is metal album covers. I create only digital illustrations, but lately my interest in classical painting has been reawakened—we’ll see what comes of it. You can contact me any way you like—via email, Instagram Messenger, or Facebook.
What does death metal and black metal mean to you? How would you define it and how do you perceive these styles as an experienced musician? I don't want you to describe the playing technique, I'm more interested in your perspective, feelings, the energy you convey, and so on. Try to be a philosopher for a moment.
I discovered metal in my early youth because I became interested in Satanism and all things occult. So black and death metal (as well as dark ambient) have always served as a gateway to another, otherworldly reality for me. At first, I even went out of my way to shield myself from information about the musicians themselves, so that the music would remain as abstract as possible and not tied to earthly affairs. That’s why I still don’t really like social themes, let alone political ones. And by the way, I don’t like gore themes in music either, even though I practically specialize in them as a metal illustrator. And although I haven’t considered myself a Satanist for a long time—I’ve come a long way spiritually since then, and we all change with age—I still have a soft spot for this aesthetic.
What does KADAVEREICH have planned for the coming months? If you have something on your mind that you would like to say to fans, labels, promoters, here's your chance..
It's hard to say anything for sure at this point. I have a few riffs, but no finished songs. And it's unclear whether the project will continue—with the same lineup or a different one. Only time will tell. For now, we're just happy that the album is finally out.
Thank you very much for the interview. I really appreciate you taking the time for our website. I wish your whole band a lot of hellish inspiration, sold albums, and enthusiastic fans. May you also be successful in your personal lives. I hope to see you live sometime.
Thanks for the interview! We're all looking forward to future live shows! Stay brutal!
Recenze/review - KADAVEREICH - Perversa Mysteria (2026):
Recenze/review - KADAVEREICH - Radiance of Doom (2021):
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