Tom G. Warrior's first band, Hellhammer, have a small yet highly influential discography that takes less than a half hour to binge in its entirety. The vocalist-guitarist's next project, Celtic Frost, is an entirely different beast.
Picking up where Hellhammer left off, the Swiss extremists laid the groundwork for death and black metal on their unfuckwithable first three releases — Morbid Tales, To Mega Therion and Into the Pandemonium — but then made a disastrous pivot to campy hair metal on 1988's much-maligned Cold Lake.
They issued an overlooked course correction with 1990's Vanity/Nemesis, and then disappeared for 16 years before returning with the cataclysmic Monotheist in 2006, which threw torrents of doom and industrial metal into their scorching OG formula, resulting in what might be their heaviest (and maybe even greatest) full-length.
Altogether, their discography is incredibly wide-ranging, so where the hell should someone who's never heard Celtic Frost begin their journey? Below, Warrior himself picks the perfect point of entry.
"A Dying God Coming Into Human Flesh"
I think "A Dying God Coming Into Human Flesh" would make a good starting point for somebody keen to discover Celtic Frost's very wide scope of work.
This song combines the band's typical heaviness with our equally typical penchant for incorporating widely varying styles of music into our own sound. As such, it is as typical as it can get for Celtic Frost.
