Rotting Christ’s ‘Genesis’ (2002): the album where the Greek band went back to raw black metal

Genesis, the seventh full-length album by the Greek extreme metal band Rotting Christ, came out in 2002 on Century Media. It is not a new record: a new digital edition was listed in August 2026, 24 years after the original release. What the album documents is a band turning back toward the sound it started with.

Back to the black metal beginnings

Rotting Christ was founded in Athens in 1987 as a grindcore act and moved toward black metal under the influence of bands such as Celtic Frost and Venom, becoming one of the genre’s early names. The 1989 demo Satanas Tedeum mixed black metal and grindcore, and the 1991 EP Passage to Arcturo was the band’s breakthrough. The group signed to Century Media in 1996 and stayed with the label for ten years before moving to Season of Mist.

The early years left their own marks. In 1993 the band played the “Fuck Christ Tour” alongside Immortal and Blasphemy. Before Rotting Christ signed to the Athens label Unisound Records, Mayhem’s Øystein Aarseth had shown interest in releasing the band on his Deathlike Silence Productions, a plan that ended with his murder that same year.

By the time of Genesis, the band had spent several records exploring slower, gothic and doom-inflected material. Genesis reversed part of that course. It returned to the more aggressive approach of the band’s early days as a black metal act, with fast, percussive tempos and raw vocals, while keeping some of the gothic and doom elements of the records in between.

How the record was made

The album was produced by Andy Classen at the Stage-One-Studio in Germany, a studio also used by Krisiun and Belphegor. All ten songs were written by Sakis Tolis, who played guitar and sang, with Kostas Vassilakopoulos on guitar, Andreas Lagios on bass, Georgios Tolias on keyboards and Themis Tolis on drums.

The track list runs from “Daemons” to “Under the Name of the Legion”, through songs such as “Lex Talionis”, “In Domine Sathana” and “The Call of the Aethyrs”. One of them reached an audience far outside the black metal scene: “Ad Noctis” was included on the soundtrack of the metal-themed video game Brütal Legend.

What came after

The orchestral and ritual sound that many listeners now associate with Rotting Christ belongs to later records. Aealo, the band’s tenth studio album, came out in 2010. The band has toured widely outside Greece, including a slot at Wacken Open Air in 2003, and its name has drawn protests and cancelled concerts over the years. As of 2026, Rotting Christ has been active for 39 years, one of the longest runs in black metal. The band marked its first two decades with Non Serviam: A 20 Year Apocryphal Story, a two-DVD and two-CD set filmed in Athens on 8 December 2007 and released in February 2009.

The full album can be heard on Rotting Christ TV, the band’s official YouTube channel.

Correction: an earlier version of this article described Genesis as the album on which Rotting Christ turned toward orchestral arrangements, Middle Eastern scales and choral writing. Those elements came on later records; Genesis marked a return to the raw black metal of the band’s early years.

Tags: black metal, metal, Genesis, melodic black metal, Rotting Christ