Nergal performed Behemoth‘s 1995 debut Sventevith (Storming Near The Baltic) in full at Hellsinki Metal Festival, backed by Icelandic band Misþyrming.
Adam “Nergal” Darski brought Sventevith (Storming Near The Baltic) to a Finnish stage on August 8. The band behind him was not Behemoth.
The Behemoth founder played the full album at Hellsinki Metal Festival in Helsinki, backed by Icelandic black metal group Misþyrming. Fan-filmed footage of the performance has since appeared online and can be watched down below.
This is the arrangement for the entire anniversary run. Nergal is touring his own band’s 1995 debut without his own band, using Misþyrming as the live unit rather than a support act. The record has never been performed in full as a complete work before.
The project was announced last November and covers a short series of European festival appearances. Beyond The Gates in Bergen, Norway hosted one at the end of July, with Brutal Assault also on the list. Organisers have described the shows as marking three decades since the album’s release.
Sventevith (Storming Near The Baltic) came out in 1995 through Pagan Records, when Darski was still in his teens. It is a raw black metal record with none of the orchestral scale or death metal weight the band would later be known for, and it remains the starting point for everything that followed.
Behemoth formed in 1991 in Gdańsk, Poland, and moved steadily away from that early sound across the following decades. Demigod in 2004, The Apostasy in 2007 and Evangelion in 2009 built their international audience, and 2014’s The Satanist is widely treated as their high-water mark.
Misþyrming come from Reykjavík and have spent the past decade at the centre of Iceland’s black metal scene, which makes them a closer stylistic match for 1995-era Behemoth than the current Behemoth lineup would be.
Behemoth‘s most recent album, The S**t Ov God, arrived in May 2025 through Nuclear Blast Records. Nergal explained the title to Kerrang! by comparing it to the first act of rebellion he ever committed.
“It’s like me at the age of 15, when I turned the cross upside-down. It’s the simplest, most f**king 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 honor.”
He was unbothered by criticism that the title lacked imagination.
“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.”
The S**t Ov God was produced by Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios, whose previous credits include Emperor, Enslaved, Kreator and Rotting Christ. The cover art came from longtime collaborator Bartek Rogalewicz and inverts the IHS Christogram in line with the title.
Nergal returns to full Behemoth duties in October, when the band co-headline the “In League With Satan” tour across Europe with Dimmu Borgir, supported by Dark Funeral.
