Music ❤ Letters

I think most of the band references I used to write during the nineties came from Deicide, Pantera, and Entombed. These bands were the cornerstones of what I considered to be “real” metal. This is covered in more detail in our book, HellRaisers Crew, Graffiti from Espoo, Finland.

I think I first stumbled upon Deicide around 1990-1991, when my crew mate Rosk got a couple of copied cassettes from a schoolmate. One was an older Slayer release, the other was Deicide’s debut album (released a year earlier). Slayer I was already familiar with, but Deicide really took me by surprise. This band defined for me what Satan and satanic metal were all about. I’ve been following them ever since.

My favorite Deicide album is still their second studio release, Legion: eight tracks of technical death metal with a single-minded message of being against anything christian beliefs and teachings. All songs are perfect, no fillers included.

Briefly about Glen Benton’s vocals… they are some of the lowest growls I’ve ever heard, yet at least on the studio albums you can still more or less understand what he’s “singing.” Only a few other vocalists have impressed me as much — mainly Jörgen Sandström from Grave & The Project Hate MCMXCIX, David Vincent from Morbid Angel, and Tomi Koivusaari from Amorphis.

So yeah, a lot of our pieces from the ’90s were filled with Deicide quotes — we even created a mock crew, DBD, based on Deicide’s “Dead By Dawn.”

Enjoy the sketches and the graffiti. The second one from the top was actually drawn on an iPad using Procreate — one of the few I’ve ever done on that platform.