Behemoth mastermind Adam “Nergal” Darski will revisit the dark origins of his legacy by performing the band’s seminal 1995 debut album, Sventevith (Storming Near the Baltic), in its entirety for a series of exclusive European festival appearances in 2026.
The performances, which mark the 30th anniversary of the album’s release, will be the first time Sventevith has been presented live as a “full conceptual work.”
The first confirmed date for this special event is the 2026 edition of the Beyond the Gates festival in Bergen, Norway.
For this extraordinary series, Nergal will be joined on stage by the Icelandic black metal visionaries Misþyrming. The collaboration is being billed as a “rare convergence of heritage and renewal,” intended to “summon the primal spirit” of the 1995 release, which “laid the foundation for Behemoth’s evolution from underground obscurity to global extremity.”
The Beyond the Gates festival, which is celebrating its 14th edition, is set to take place from July 29 to August 1, 2026, across multiple venues in Bergen, including the legendary Grieghallen and USF Verftet.
This look back at Behemoth‘s earliest material stands in stark contrast to their current output. The band released their 13th full-length album, The Shit Ov God, in May 2025 via Nuclear Blast Records, a record described as their “most inflammatory and extreme record to date.”
“It’s like me at the age of 15, when I turned the cross upside-down,” Nergal told Kerrang! earlier this year. “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.”
Nergal said on the album title: “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. I think that’s pretty brilliant of me, actually.”
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