Once Upon The Cross - Remastered
Deicide
Once Upon the Cross — Remastered is a 30th anniversary reissue of Deicide's third studio album, originally released on April 18, 1995 via Roadrunner Records. The remaster was first issued as a Record Store Day 2025 exclusive on limited-edition metallic white "autobots" vinyl (pressed to just 2,500 copies), with subsequent colored vinyl pressings following for wider release, all remastered for vinyl by Mike Milchner at Sonic Vision Mastering. The reissue marks the album's first proper American vinyl debut, as the original 1995 release did not receive a widespread domestic vinyl pressing, and it comes packaged with a printed inner sleeve featuring the album's lyrics. The original album was recorded at Morrisound Recording in Tampa, Florida and mastered at Sterling Sound in New York, with production handled by Deicide and engineer Scott Burns — the latter one of the defining figures of the early-1990s Florida death metal sound.
The underlying album is Deicide's most streamlined and focused effort from their classic Hoffman brothers era. Coming three years after the band's brutal and relentless sophomore record Legion, Once Upon the Cross pulled back to a slightly more controlled mid-tempo groove without sacrificing any of the band's characteristic aggression or anti-Christian provocation. The nine tracks clock in at just over 28 minutes — a consciously compact runtime that drummer Steve Asheim has since acknowledged felt "very slow" to the band given how much faster they played the material live, the result of recording at a more measured pace after the originally-tracked drum performances ran to only 22 minutes. Highlights like "When Satan Rules His World," "Christ Denied," and "Kill the Christian" showcase the Hoffman brothers' guitar pyrotechnics and their knack for riff-driven song structures with discernible verse-chorus forms — an approach Apple Music noted as reaffirming "the death metal quintet's songwriting chops" after Legion's more fragmented feel. Samples lifted from Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ open both the title track and "Trick or Betrayed," adding a cinematic layer of blasphemous theatrics to the proceedings.
Once Upon The Cross - Remastered
Deicide
Once Upon the Cross — Remastered is a 30th anniversary reissue of Deicide's third studio album, originally released on April 18, 1995 via Roadrunner Records. The remaster was first issued as a Record Store Day 2025 exclusive on limited-edition metallic white "autobots" vinyl (pressed to just 2,500 copies), with subsequent colored vinyl pressings following for wider release, all remastered for vinyl by Mike Milchner at Sonic Vision Mastering. The reissue marks the album's first proper American vinyl debut, as the original 1995 release did not receive a widespread domestic vinyl pressing, and it comes packaged with a printed inner sleeve featuring the album's lyrics. The original album was recorded at Morrisound Recording in Tampa, Florida and mastered at Sterling Sound in New York, with production handled by Deicide and engineer Scott Burns — the latter one of the defining figures of the early-1990s Florida death metal sound.
The underlying album is Deicide's most streamlined and focused effort from their classic Hoffman brothers era. Coming three years after the band's brutal and relentless sophomore record Legion, Once Upon the Cross pulled back to a slightly more controlled mid-tempo groove without sacrificing any of the band's characteristic aggression or anti-Christian provocation. The nine tracks clock in at just over 28 minutes — a consciously compact runtime that drummer Steve Asheim has since acknowledged felt "very slow" to the band given how much faster they played the material live, the result of recording at a more measured pace after the originally-tracked drum performances ran to only 22 minutes. Highlights like "When Satan Rules His World," "Christ Denied," and "Kill the Christian" showcase the Hoffman brothers' guitar pyrotechnics and their knack for riff-driven song structures with discernible verse-chorus forms — an approach Apple Music noted as reaffirming "the death metal quintet's songwriting chops" after Legion's more fragmented feel. Samples lifted from Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ open both the title track and "Trick or Betrayed," adding a cinematic layer of blasphemous theatrics to the proceedings.