Album cover, Mayhem - De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas

Thomas Alkärr
Here, we really talk about design as a strong identity marker… 

Narrator
Few Norwegian record covers have as obvious a place in music history as the black metal band Mayhem's LP "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas" from 1994. Cultural journalist Thomas Alkärr, who has made a TV documentary and exhibition about Norwegian black metal, tells us more: 

Thomas Alkärr
Black metal is an underground movement with a clear culture of sharing and a "do it yourself" mentality, a bit like that of punk. That's one side of the story here. The other side is that the album cover tells Mayhem's extreme history. 

It was Mayhem's guitarist and chief ideologist Øystein Aarseth who had the idea of how it should look. He also helped design the Mayhem logo in the 80s in collaboration with a guy called Terje Nilssen from Rjukan – 200km west of Oslo. 

The title "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas" was created by the band's Swedish singer Pelle Ohlin immediately before he tragically took his own life in the spring of 1991. 

The church on the album cover may seem scary and threatening, but it can also be seen as a potential target for the small circle of black metallers who at this time were actually burning down churches around Norway. 

It was Aarseth's friend and source of inspiration, the guitarist Snorre Ruch, who obtained a photo of Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, and then he made a drawing based on that photo. 

Mayhem recorded the album in the Grieghallen in Bergen from 1992 to 1993, but before the cover is finished, Aarseth is murdered by the band's then-bassist Kristian "Varg" Vikernes, who ends up in prison. 

Suddenly there's only one member left in Mayhem: the drummer Jan Axel Blomberg. He continues to work to get the album out and enlists the help of Robin Malmberg in the band Mysticum. Malmberg had a good PC with image editing software – something that is not so common in 1993. Malmberg pulls out the church a little so that it becomes wider and changes shape. He then colors it and puts the parts together for this classic album cover, which symbolizes both quality and identity for black metal fans around the world.