Danzig III: How The Gods Kill
Danzig
Danzig III: How the Gods Kill is the third studio album by Danzig, released on July 14, 1992 on Def American Recordings and once again produced by Rick Rubin. It arrived at a peculiar moment of vindication for the band: the mainstream rock world was finally catching up to the blues-metal blueprint that Danzig and Rubin had been developing since 1988, with Metallica's Black Album borrowing heavily from their template and younger disciples like Alice in Chains and White Zombie breaking through to radio. Danzig responded with a less claustrophobic and more expansive record than its predecessors, peaking at number 24 on the Billboard 200 — their highest chart position at the time — and finally breaking through MTV's reservations about the band's imagery with the lead single "Dirty Black Summer." Bassist Eerie Von has called it the band's finest album, noting that by this point the group could record most basic tracks within a couple of takes, working from a position of hard-won confidence and total command of their craft.
Musically, How the Gods Kill retains the blues-metal foundation of Lucifuge while leaning harder into heavy metal and introducing a new breadth of reference. The brooding opener "Godless" sets the tone, "Bodies" is built on a riff drawn from Led Zeppelin's "How Many More Times" — itself derived from Howlin' Wolf — and "Dirty Black Summer" opens with a nod to the doom-laden intro of AC/DC's "Hell's Bells." Black Sabbath looms large over "Heart of the Devil," which Willie Dixon had agreed to guest on before his death prevented the session, and "Do You Wear the Mark?" The atmospheric ballads "Anything" and the sprawling title track deliver on the darker-than-dark moods that had become fashionable in early-1990s metal, while the baroque orchestral nightmare "Sistinas" — a croony gothic ballad that Spin compared favorably to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark — remains one of Glenn Danzig's most polarizing and singular creative gestures. AllMusic called it "arguably the definitive Danzig album," and Rolling Stone declared Danzig "the genuine article" among rock visionaries, while Pitchfork described it as "the album that lived up to the mighty image he'd built."
Danzig III: How The Gods Kill
Danzig
Danzig III: How the Gods Kill is the third studio album by Danzig, released on July 14, 1992 on Def American Recordings and once again produced by Rick Rubin. It arrived at a peculiar moment of vindication for the band: the mainstream rock world was finally catching up to the blues-metal blueprint that Danzig and Rubin had been developing since 1988, with Metallica's Black Album borrowing heavily from their template and younger disciples like Alice in Chains and White Zombie breaking through to radio. Danzig responded with a less claustrophobic and more expansive record than its predecessors, peaking at number 24 on the Billboard 200 — their highest chart position at the time — and finally breaking through MTV's reservations about the band's imagery with the lead single "Dirty Black Summer." Bassist Eerie Von has called it the band's finest album, noting that by this point the group could record most basic tracks within a couple of takes, working from a position of hard-won confidence and total command of their craft.
Musically, How the Gods Kill retains the blues-metal foundation of Lucifuge while leaning harder into heavy metal and introducing a new breadth of reference. The brooding opener "Godless" sets the tone, "Bodies" is built on a riff drawn from Led Zeppelin's "How Many More Times" — itself derived from Howlin' Wolf — and "Dirty Black Summer" opens with a nod to the doom-laden intro of AC/DC's "Hell's Bells." Black Sabbath looms large over "Heart of the Devil," which Willie Dixon had agreed to guest on before his death prevented the session, and "Do You Wear the Mark?" The atmospheric ballads "Anything" and the sprawling title track deliver on the darker-than-dark moods that had become fashionable in early-1990s metal, while the baroque orchestral nightmare "Sistinas" — a croony gothic ballad that Spin compared favorably to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark — remains one of Glenn Danzig's most polarizing and singular creative gestures. AllMusic called it "arguably the definitive Danzig album," and Rolling Stone declared Danzig "the genuine article" among rock visionaries, while Pitchfork described it as "the album that lived up to the mighty image he'd built."