Blood Fire Death

Blood Fire Death is the fourth album by the Swedish band Bathory. It continued the band’s transition towards more epic songwriting, and includes some of the first viking metal recordings.

The lyrics to The Golden Walls of Heaven and Dies Irae are acrostics: the first letters of each line form phrases, namely “SATAN” (repeated 8 times) and “CHRIST THE BASTARD SON OF HEAVEN,” respectively. The lyrics to For All Those Who Died were taken from a poem by Erica Jong, first published in her book Witches (1981).

The 1999 and 2004 re-issue of the album In the Nightside Eclipse by Emperor contains a cover of A Fine Day to Die, recorded during the Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk sessions. Later, Ihsahn, Emperor’s frontman, covered “For All Those Who Died” with his wife Ihriel in their joint project Peccatum on The Moribund People.

The front cover comes from a painting by Peter Nicolai Arbo : Åsgårdsreien (1872)
He also made the painting that DoomSword used as front cover for the album Let Battle Commence