“We are God’s excrement… it’s a badge of honour”: How Behemoth are continuing to turn blasphemy into empowerment

In most decently aged Christian places – churches, cathedrals, graveyards – you’ll come across the Christogram. Usually comprising the letters IHS over the cross, it can be seen on the papal coat of arms, and as far back as the 1600s was adopted as the marker of The Order Of Jesuits. It’s a fairly weighty calling card.

As for what it represents, some read it as an acronym for I Have Suffered, Jesus Hominum Salvator, or In Hoc Signo (respectively, Jesus, Saviour Of Mankind and By This Sign in Latin). Actually, it’s the start of Jesus’ name in ancient Greek. What Nergal noticed about it, though, was the meaning when you turn it upside-down.

“It says ‘shit’!” he crows proudly. “Shit! Right there, on this holy symbol! Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s completely ruined.”

The Behemoth frontman is definitely not the only one to have spotted this unfortunate oversight by The Lord’s graphic designers. But he may be the first to use it as the basis for an album title, that of the Polish blasphemers’ 13th offering, The Shit Ov God, and to turn it into the artwork and onstage flag symbols for his band.

If a simple swear-word and some giggling schoolboy toilet humour seems a little base for an entry into Behemoth’s Big Book Of Blasphemy, that’s the best bit. And anyway, he’s done enough grand titles in Latin, and was disappointed how few fans bothered looking up the translation of 2022’s Opvs Contra Natvram (Work Against Nature). So, this time, he went on the nose.

“It’s like me at the age of 15, when I turned the cross upside-down,” he explains. “It’s the simplest, most fucking atavistic reaction of disagreement, of rebellion. It’s primitive, it's primal, it's vulgar. You invert the cross, so I used the same semantic tool here. I took this acronym that is probably the most sacred for all the Christians, but I just turned it upside-down.

“And there’s some existential philosophy there, too. If there is a God, then we are the excrement. But being the lesser being is not a reason to mourn or to be depressed. We're gonna wear it as a badge of honour.”

Such things should come as no surprise from Nergal. A lifelong Satanist, who sports a tattoo of infamous British occultist and ‘Wickedest Man In The World’ Aleister Crowley on his left forearm, he was first called up to court in his Polish homeland under draconian blasphemy laws for tearing up a Bible onstage. His latest wrangle, a charge of ‘offending religious feelings’ after posting a picture of a crucifix made of cocks on Instagram in 2019, was finally chucked out of court this March.

Anyway, as an artist, Nergal feels the title's a snappy one.

“Some people said it's too simple. But then we did The Satanist, everyone said that was as well. They said it was not creative. Well, it came over 30 years into extreme metal history, and nobody had used it yet.”

He laughs. “I think that’s pretty brilliant of me, actually.”

On the day we catch up with him in London, Nergal is in a fine mood. Not least because Behemoth’s Unholy Trinity Tour triple-whammy with rejuvenated Norwegian legends Satyricon and Greek underground heroes Rotting Christ has seen them playing to the biggest rooms of their 34-year career, selling out the O2 Academy Brixton. In the midst of all this, he’s become a father for the first time.

“Life is fucking good, man,” he beams. “Things could not be fucking better, in any respect.”

If he looks even healthier than normal, it’s because he hasn’t had a drink for ages. They used to be “fucking ragers”, but now all but one of the band have sworn off the booze.

“We loved our cocaine and we loved our whiskey and wines and shit like that. Great times. But for me, for no reason, one day I went, ‘Okay, that's it, I'm gonna challenge myself.’ And I don't miss it. I benefit from being sober. I'm better onstage than I've ever been. I'm more active, more energetic.”

This refreshed energy has made it into The Shit Ov God. Though never a band lacking in fire, it’s an album that boils particularly hard with vitality and life.

“It's empowering and it's vital, it’s strong,” Nergal states enthusiastically. “We don't bring things down and fucking bury them. We open up, we bloom, we conquer. It’s pure protein, high-energy stuff, man.”

Nergal isn’t conducting many interviews for The Shit Ov God. Kerrang! is one of only a handful of people to whom he's speaking. With the announcement of the album, he asserted that he sees less and less cause to explain himself or his art.

“What you see onstage, what you see on the record, what you see in the videos, that's me, and that's who I am now,” he says. “And, yes, I am a talker. But there’s so-called journalists out there who just ask those dumb questions, and I get irritated. Trust me, it’s not arrogance. I'm just fed up. It's too much. Do I want to talk to another 100 people, from which I know five or 10, and who I don’t have much faith in?

“We're so indifferent to whatever people are saying, because what matters at the end of the day is what happens tonight. I’ll go out there, I’ll see the crowd, I’ll see how they respond, and that’s what’s worth it.”

Part of this is ongoing self-improvement and making sure he’s not wasting his energy. He can get dissatisfied when he casts his eye around the world, but it’s a dissatisfaction in others not using their brains and potential, preferring to criticise instead of do their own thing, better.

“I was disappointed that people said they didn’t understand the last album title, or that I Loved You At Your Darkest was too long and complicated,” he says. “I don't get that, as a metal fan. Where's the intellectual work? Where's the disturbance, where's the itching?

“That’s how [people] are developing, or how we are regressing,” he continues. “I'll say the world is getting more stripped down from any nuances. The world is just black and white, especially with cancel culture, it’s either this or that. I would love to be somewhere in between, balancing it out.”

On The Shit Ov God, part of what’s driving Nergal is a rebellion against playing it safe. That Behemoth have attained the status that they have is impressive in itself, even more so, coming from a country without an established launchpad. And especially when you consider that they’ve got ambition in abundance, but never kneeled to fulfil it.

He's also often found himself up against it. As well as locking horns with the Church, he's found criticism within the metal world as well. There's been accusations of racism (strenuously denied many times in the pages of Kerrang! and elsewhere), of selling-out for daring to dream and push his band to bigger arenas. Which, when you look at how they work, even as big as they are and touring with artists like Slipknot, is ridiculous. Behemoth are extreme and blasphemous. You can’t say their new album’s title on the radio or do a massive billboard in Leicester Square. Spotify algorithms won’t like it, either. But that’s why Nergal did it. Safe, he says, is boring.

“Everyone is feeling the backlash of the cancel culture thing: ‘You can’t do this. You can’t do that. That's threatening. That's blasphemy.’ There's no fun in that! Rock’n’roll is supposed to be all that stuff. If you want to fucking cut that out, then it's not rock’n’roll. That is not extreme metal, there's not black metal.

“That's why I came up with the album title. I'm just so fucking fed up with all that. This is my middle finger. This is me. This is little punk rocker Nergal saying, ‘No. Fuck you. Deal with it.’”

It hasn’t hurt the numbers, however – something Nergal pays a lot of attention to. One might link this nihilistic approach on to his assertion with the album announcement that, “If this is our last record, I can die a happy man,” but, he says, that’s simply living like there’s no tomorrow, rather than a coded signal of the end.

“I say that with every record. But then again, it’s the 13th album, and 13 sounds magical, like the end of the cycle. It crossed my mind to call it that, 13, not a bad album title. But then, Black Sabbath did that…”

Behemoth are, though, in uncharted waters. They are arguably the biggest extreme metal band in the world. There’s no map. Things could go down, could continue. It’s diving into the unknown of it that turns Nergal on after so many years at the evil coalface.

“I met my managers and said, ‘Guys, I'm realistic. This has never happened before. This is probably the top.’ But I'm not sad about it. We got to that point, checked happy, and we can die happy now. If we retire tomorrow, this is amazing. Embrace it. Squeeze the shit out of the success. Who knows what’s next?”

Nergal himself seems energised by it all. The man talking to us today is someone fully locked-in. The look in his eye is even more up for grabbing life by the nards than usual. And even if, behind he amusing name, some might see The Shit Ov God’s blasphemy as being the umpteenth round in a now-familiar fight, that they are so enthusiastically still having it is worth saluting on its own.

At 47 years old, a dad, and a man who’s won bigger prizes than any other extreme metal artist in history (except, as he says, possibly Slayer), Nergal is at least trying to make his art difficult for himself.

“Metallica are huge, but in terms of extreme bands, only Slayer did anything like this. We have the Behemoth flag on top of a mountain that no-one has climbed before, and that is the adventure.

“I can’t tell you what’s tomorrow, except that what I’m doing, it will be a 1,000 per cent, and I will be fully focused on that single day,” he says with a determined smile. “That’s fucking exciting.”

The Shit Ov God is out now via Nuclear Blast

Read this next:

• The People Vs Nergal: The Behemoth Frontman Faces Your Questions
• 10 Bands Who Have Been Banned By The Church
• Behemoth: Nergal’s track-by-track guide to new album Opvs Contra Natvram