BLASPHEMANIAC interview

Hail! BLASPHEMANIAC have been around for more than ten years, but this is only your second full-length, with the first one appearing back in 2021 and a lot of splits and singles in between. Was BLASPHEMANIAC always meant to be a slow-burning project rather than a band that constantly needs to produce albums, or did the smaller releases simply become the natural way of keeping the beast alive?

Violador Profano: First of all, thank you very much for the opportunity, and especially for the care you put into these questions. This is definitely the best questionnaire we've ever received.

I'd never really stopped to think about it, but I can say that, yes, Blasphemaniac developed very slowly and naturally. But that's down to the whole context surrounding the band. Everything we've done has always been a fucking struggle. In fact, NOTHING HAS EVER BEEN EASY!

Around 2015, we used to rehearse in a basement we'd turned into a studio, Lady Reagan Records, where we rehearsed and produced the first material for several projects: Blasphemaniac, Cristo em Chamas, Vingança Satânica, among others. This was in Atibaia, São Paulo, a city that was a prominent place in the underground, with its own scene and several bands.

During our first six years of activity, we were deeply involved in the most closed-off and obscure Black Metal circles in the countryside of São Paulo and elsewhere in Brazil. We recorded demos that were passed from hand to hand DIY-style, and we only played at restricted, radical events. We had no social media presence and no contact whatsoever with promoters, record labels, or the bands belonging to Brazil's more conventional scene.

Some people who knew us back then even said we'd died, but the truth is that we'd never been more productive. We'd always maintained a closed-off attitude, keeping ourselves detached from the mainstream underground scene. Only those living in the Necrounderground knew we existed.

In 2021, a Russian metal maniac, Baltazar from Primitive Devil Worship Records, came across some leaked videos that had been posted on Facebook, got in touch with us, and we started talking. He really liked our 2018 demo, The Call of the Black Goat, and asked to release it.

This happened at a time when our side projects were coming to an end, and I ended up focusing on Blasphemaniac, since I'd been creating its concept, logos, and artwork since 2013.

Back in 2020, when the lineup of Bestial Occult Ceremony was consolidated, I knew we had to change our focus and stop being just a project. We wanted to turn it into something genuinely serious because we wanted to create something relevant, both conceptually and sonically.

At the same time, we came to understand that the poison has to be spread and the Devil's name glorified, following the maxim: "For the Devil, ALWAYS THE BEST."

It no longer made sense to keep everything restricted, so we started spreading Blasphemaniac openly, with the most primitive sound possible, in an explicit and pornographic manner, and, of course, with the same satanic radicalism and fanaticism as always.

I've always been into splits, singles, EPs, and shorter releases because I believe they can convey powerful messages on their own. They're also a great way to continue our purpose of poisoning souls and forging new alliances.

But there's also the lack of money, members living very far away from each other, others who stole from the band, a lack of commitment, and members dealing with psychological and family problems. I'm a loyal friend to almost everyone who's ever been in the band, but... Nothing has ever been easy.

Still, almost everyone has always put a lot of effort into overcoming these obstacles and making things happen, and they did happen, almost always the way we expected them to.

We even have an inside joke that Blasphemaniac is cursed, because the amount of shit that happens at crucial moments is unbelievable.

I believe we're at our best right now. Our biggest difficulty these days is maintaining a regular rehearsal schedule because we live so far apart from one another.

The title Ataque Diabólico a Sacralidade Brasileira is pretty direct, but it also points toward something much more specific than generic Satanism. What exactly is the “Brazilian sacredness” you are attacking here? Christianity itself, the way it was imposed and absorbed, the mixture of Catholicism with local beliefs, or the whole historical machinery behind it?

Violador Profano: I'd say your analysis is very good because it's really a mixture of all those things.

Here in Brazil, we live under a very peculiar condition because we're experiencing an undeclared spiritual war. There are few places where christianity was imposed as radically as it was here, and nowadays christians are absolutely dominant in every sphere of society.

But ancestral resistance cults still exist throughout the country. They coexist with christianity and often stand in opposition to it.

So you can walk down any street in a major Brazilian city and find a Catholic church, a Protestant church, and a shop selling all kinds of witchcraft and sorcery supplies on the very same street.

Obviously, there's prejudice and persecution against the people who practice these traditions. I've experienced it myself. I was fired from a job after people found out I belonged to Quimbanda, following a campaign of harassment against me on social media.

Temples are burned down, shops are vandalized, and the political power of the Neo-Pentecostals keeps growing, allied with Zionism. There are attempts to infiltrate Indigenous lands in order to convert people to christianity, not to mention the narco-christian gangs and all the other kinds of shit these bastards are involved in.

Given this context, I've always felt the absence of a direct attack on our historical, symbolic, and artistic reality within Metal.

I always feel disgusted by the monumentalism that forces us to feel small before a false god, and by christian iconographic art and all those symbols shoved down our throats at every turn in this country.

The Brazilian "saints," the architecture, Protestant stereotypes, their prayers and cacophonies, and especially the narratives they've created about things like the "christian martyrs" who supposedly died at the hands of Brazil's Indigenous peoples while those peoples were resisting the imposition of christianity. These are the more visceral aspects we're attacking.

I don't think any of this makes the album less meaningful to people who aren't from here, because the same shit keeps happening all over the world.

I see many Black Metal bands referring to their own cultures on their albums, yet unfortunately I also see Brazilians talking about European cultures. That's not something that concerns us. We're committed to our own raw reality.

I see this album as a definitive attack on christianity in Brazil, in a way that, until now, has been unprecedented.

You make a very clear distinction between your “devils” and the biblical Devil, and the press text talks about ancestors, sacrificial blood and syncretic traditions. How important was it for you to look at Brazilian history and popular religious culture rather than simply borrowing the usual European Satanic vocabulary from old black metal?

Violador Profano: In Brazil, we have the privilege of having three "hells" and an infinite number of Devils. The hell of the Indigenous peoples, the hell of the Europeans, and the hell of the enslaved Africans, with all their Black Magic and their demons. They have all converged here for over 1,500 years.

And that's without even taking the other South American countries into account.

We have obscure cults and sacrificial, anthropophagic, and war rituals, necrolatry, necromancy, sorceresses, witches, dark goddesses, and vampire archetypes that predate any European records.

This has always been something that bands around here rarely talk about. Only a few have gained prominence, and most of those who deal with these subjects do so in a rather ridiculous way.

Believe it or not, there's also a certain amount of internal prejudice surrounding this.

Bands like Ocultan were targeted for talking about Quimbanda in a pioneering way.

I find it incredible that this new band formed by Blasphemer from Mayhem, called Ruïm, which has even won a Grammy, has never mentioned Brazil in its interviews as a reference for its themes, considering that he talks about Umbanda. And don't get me wrong, I'm not here to defend Umbanda, which is tied to syncretism with christianity.

Guys from Dissection and Watain, Jinx from Coven, among others, have all visited Quimbanda temples in Brazil and are familiar with it.

So our Devils have already been roaming the underworld for quite some time.

Brazilian metal already has an enormous mythology around bands like Sarcófago and Vulcano, but those bands weren't trying to sound “Brazilian” in the way that term is often used today. They were simply making fucking extreme metal in Brazil. Do you think BLASPHEMANIAC has a specifically Brazilian identity that can be heard in the music, or does that identity mainly come from the subject matter and language?

Violador Profano: I absolutely agree with you. I've heard and read a lot of bullshit about this, including from very important figures in the global scene, going on about the mythology of Brazilian Metal and how it supposedly "got lost because of globalism," blah, blah, blah... Pure nonsense, and something people around here talk about a lot, too.

Much of the rudimentary nature of Brazilian Metal comes from the conditions we had at the time, especially the technical and social circumstances. That sound reflects its time. That's where the mythology comes from.

The equipment available here was really shitty, and getting your hands on good gear was impossible for most kids, who were usually sixteen or seventeen years old.

Besides that, we only had cassette tapes, bootleg Brazilian editions, and plenty of teenage savagery. Everything came down to feeling because access to information was limited, too, which made everything even more primitive.

The truth is that those bands wanted to sound like Sodom, Destruction, and Possessed, but with more hatred, radicalism, and the inherent primitivism of that moment.

I'm not trying to take anything away from that "golden age." I'm extremely proud of our history, but that's a fact.

They were insane young guys living through the embryonic period of what would eventually become "Extreme Metal." They wore batteries as bullet belts because that's what they had, but they did it with soul and passion.

Over time, that created an identity of its own because so many bands followed that sonic approach.

During the second wave, Brazilian Black Metal was getting almost completely drunk on the Greek Black Metal sound. This happened with different styles all over the world. Who would've thought India would become home to so many prominent extreme bands nowadays?

As for Blasphemaniac's Brazilian identity, I'd say we play Metal with that same old-school primitivism, within the appropriate proportions, of course, because that's our main sonic influence.

We worship those tones and the blast beats of the classic Brazilian bands, and we despise that modern, click-tracked, homogenized sound.

Personally, I also draw a lot of inspiration from Angel's vocals in Vulcano.

Alongside all that, I've always hated the fact that Sepultura's Roots is considered "the greatest epic in the history of Brazilian Metal."

That New Metal shit is fucking garbage. It takes a bunch of influences from Brazilian pop artists and throws them all into a salad designed to make the Brazilian popular music establishment recognize them. And that's exactly what happened.

By contrast, we have Quorthon making epic, monumental albums about his own culture. Later on, Desaster developed their own incredible sound with themes rooted in their own cultural background.

Sabbat made one of my favorite albums of all time, Karisma, which immerses you in Japan's darker culture through both its sound and lyrics. It's supreme old-school Black Metal.

So, when we started taking things more seriously and recording our first album, Bestial Occult Ceremony, I already wanted to incorporate influences from outside Brazil in a way that reflected our own identity. At the end of "The God's Mother Rape," I included a blasphemous chant from Quimbanda rituals that insults Christ's whore of a mother, bringing that Brazilian element into the music.

On our following EP, Night of the Necromancer, I also used more Quimbanda references, which is basically a Brazilian left-hand-path cult, both on the cover and in the title track.

By that time, we already had incredible themes lined up for at least the next seven albums, themes that nobody had ever explored before.

This has gradually become more established in our lyrical concepts, while the sonic side is something we'll develop further in the future.

In fact, I'm dedicating a lot of time to researching the subject for our next album, because I want to bring it to life in a genuinely deep and provocative way. It's going to challenge another one of those sacred pedestals in Black Metal's thematic universe.

The influence list is basically an invitation to start a bar fight: Vulcano, Sarcófago, Sodom, Kreator, Venom, Hellhammer, Bathory :) Which of these bands actually taught BLASPHEMANIAC something important, rather than simply giving you riffs you wanted to steal?

Violador Profano: This might be the hardest question of all. Well, I've got all of them tattooed on me, hahaha! They're all incredibly important bands to me.

It's really difficult to say which one actually taught me something because I basically shaped my character around all of them.

In fact, when Blasphemaniac first started, the idea was to sound like early Bathory and Hellhammer.

I'd say Vulcano and Sarcófago's demos, especially the ones with Portuguese lyrics, were particularly important because they carry all that characteristic fury and insane rawness.

Bathory, with Under the Sign of the Black Mark and Blood Fire Death, brought that epic sonic devastation that helped us develop a different perspective on what we wanted to do.

But it would be unfair to leave out Hellhammer and Sodom, which were the bands that introduced me to Black Metal and poisoned my soul forever.

Anyway, this is a difficult one. All of them helped shape my character.

And where does the tropical side come into this? “The savagery of the tropics” sounds good in a press release, but Brazil isn't just a backdrop for European-style black/death/thrash metal. Is there something about the climate, landscape, cities, violence, religion or everyday life around you that genuinely affects how BLASPHEMANIAC sounds?

Violador Profano: When I talk about that, I'm not referring only to Brazil, but also to the many devastating bands from all over South America that influence us: Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru...

I won't even start naming them because there are so many, and I'd inevitably be unfair to some of them.

But as I mentioned earlier, nothing comes easy around here, and life is fucking hard, which makes everything more difficult and visceral.

Another factor is that opposing religious beliefs are very present in our everyday lives, so those who live in opposition and resistance end up cultivating a lot of everyday hatred.

I think this is reflected in the fact that the Metal made here tends to carry more genuine hatred.

Wherever you go, in shops, schools, the government, the currency, people's tattoos... wherever you look, there's always some christian bullshit shoved in your face.

Nowadays, the candidate for president here who's connected to the Neo-Pentecostals and Zionists is receiving massive support from many prominent Brazilian Black Metal figures. Can you fucking believe that?

Obviously, there's no "Satanic candidate," but seeing that kind of attitude out in the open stinks worse than fresh shit to me.

And many of those so-called "legends of the past," the guys behind those glorified cover bands that have been celebrated all over the world, are christians.

Blasphemaniac is a response to all of that, in one way or another. It's the by-product of our hatred for all that shit.

Besides that, I know people who are much crazier than me, people who do far more transgressive and criminal things, and some of those stories have become the basis for our lyrics.

And let's not forget that these are hostile lands, despite what people try to sell you.

Over the past few years, our scene has suffered several losses due to murders and suicides.

All of this pushes us to seek out the most hateful, aggressive expression possible. There's no way we could be any less insane, because this is our reality!

The album supposedly wants to resurrect the “radical, blasphemous and pornographic primitivism” of the 1990s while taking its sound from the 1980s. That's an interesting combination. Why look toward the 90s for the attitude and the 80s for the musical foundation?

Violador Profano: Because these things have been lost.

You see these fucking cute little guys, delicate little hipsters dancing around, co-opting the entire sonic and visual aesthetic of 1990s Black Metal without any attitude whatsoever. Everything is light, fresh, and harmless.

They have the same wickedness as a bag of jelly beans and the same fury as a Care Bear, always full of pathetic speeches that have NOTHING TO DO WITH BLACK METAL, along with reheated, introspective, or "Hollywood-style" themes.

The sound has also become increasingly polished, or even worse, completely digital.

We've always been obsessed with the old tones of classics like Onslaught, Hellows Eve, Violent Force, Mutilator, and Vectom. That muffled sound, the sound of tape, the genuine hiss.

All of that has been replaced by records that are increasingly clean, crystal-clear, and completely soulless.

So we're trying to bring that back, remaining true to our profane actions and recording everything analog.

We're keeping the blasphemous laws of Infernal Steel alive.

There is also a difference between sounding primitive and deliberately making a record sound primitive. You talk about analog recording, physicality, danger and filth. How far are you willing to go with that? If an ugly recording makes the riffs hit harder, fine - but if the production starts hiding what the musicians are actually playing, is that still authentic to BLASPHEMANIAC?

Violador Profano: I think that nowadays, with the democratization of access to music production, any kid can create practically any sound imaginable with the endless resources available through plugins.

The logic of social media and streaming has made everything more plastic.

Since opposition is at the core of everything we do, we seek out that dead sound.

We use old equipment to record the way things were recorded during the "golden age."

We have an alliance with Túnel Records (@tunel_records), where we record our material. It's a studio entirely dedicated to Metal and to recovering that lost essence, without commercial or marketing interests.

We're very lucky to have maniacs like Daniel "Death," who dedicates his life to valve circuits.

Everything is done analog, recovering that sound and capturing performances for real, with passion.

Our obsession with sounding like the old Masters is what drives us to pursue this approach.

A lot of people who think in the opposite way tell us our sound is "demo quality."

That only confirms to me that we're on the right path.

The track titles are certainly not interested in subtlety. “Cavando com a Cruz um poço de Sangue no Anus do Nazareno bastardo” doesn't exactly leave much room for a polite interpretation :) Is provocation itself important to the band, or is the offensive language simply the most honest way of dealing with subjects you genuinely consider obscene or oppressive?

Violador Profano: I've always found it kind of absurd how much hype was created around that Batushka bullshit, which supposedly desecrates Orthodox christianity while using its hymns of praise to God UNALTERED.

It's such pathetic shit. It's like listening to a Pope's mass with guitars and guttural vocals. Total garbage!

We've always tried to go for the worst, most insane, and most offensive thing possible.

We all have some good stories about vandalizing churches. In fact, the photos for the new album were taken inside a church. The cross you see is the one that used to hang from the ceiling, which we brought down, and the destroyed Bible is the one that was on the altar.

We also have plenty of stories about leading believers down the "wrong path."

We've even dug open graves and disturbed the eternal rest of dozens of christians around here.

So mocking the idea that Jesus will return, only to be greeted by another cross, with the promise that we'll do something much worse with it this time, seems entirely appropriate to me.

We're called BLASPHEMANIAC, so that's the absolute minimum anyone should expect from us.

We play mercilessly blasphemous Metal. That's what we do!

This is also reflected in the cover of our album, which played a fundamental role in that regard.

You've also chosen to mix Portuguese and English instead of keeping everything in one language. Does Portuguese give you access to things that English simply can't express in these lyrics, especially when you're dealing with Brazilian religious history and local forms of blasphemy?

Violador Profano: After a few conversations with my friend Johannes from Destruktion Records, in which we talked specifically about how we always express ourselves better in our native languages, the idea kept echoing in my mind for a long time.

That made me realize how much I love so many excellent bands that write lyrics in their own languages, such as Kulto Maldito, Parabellum, Anal Vomit, Nebirus, Bestial Holocaust, SexMag, Tumba, Pralaya, and the Portuguese-language tracks by Vulcano and Sarcófago, among many others.

Initially, the album was going to be in English and called Tyrants of Brazilian Blasphemies.

After reflecting on it and discussing it together, we realized that we really had to write the lyrics in Portuguese to deal with this concept properly. It would also sound different to most people.

During the process, we had a brainstorming session among ourselves, and Veles came up with the album title in Portuguese. Nothing else made more sense than that.

“Hail Satanás” is almost ridiculously simple as a title, sitting there among much more elaborate Portuguese phrases. Was that deliberate? Sometimes the most primitive statement on a record is the one that works best.

Violador Profano: It's very perceptive of you to notice that detail. You're really paying attention.

Despite its simplicity, this is one of the most deeply sinister tracks on the album.

It's credited to Raw Necro (Intelectual Moment, Shaitandearth). He was a great friend who, unfortunately, decided to take his own life. He did so in a final ritual, wearing a Blasphemaniac shirt underneath his tunic.

He gave me those lyrics back in 2018, and I've wanted to use them ever since.

Maniac Aggressor sent me this short, brutal test demo, and I knew the lyrics would fit perfectly.

It's a tribute to my brother, who, through conviction, transcended the physical plane and passed into the spiritual plane, where he now vibrates as a powerful dead one.

The lyrics deal with black magic, occultism and necromancy, but the press text insists that this comes from a “profoundly South American perspective”. What does that perspective actually change? If you removed the Brazilian and South American context from the lyrics, would the occult ideas still mean the same thing?

Violador Profano: Since everything we talk about in Blasphemaniac is rooted in our reality, our lyrics describe events we've experienced ourselves or stories told to us by people who are references in the practice of magic in Brazil.

For example, "Black Moon Rites" is based on a sexual ritual that a renowned Brazilian sorcerer told me he had performed.

Likewise, "Night of the Necromancer" was based on accounts from a sorcerer who was active in Brazil's prison-based Satanic Sect during the 1990s.

We approach occultism through Quimbanda and its entire system of sorcery, which originated here.

I personally understand Quimbanda as a system of sorcery and spiritual connection that can exist and be understood anywhere on the globe, because wherever you go, someone has already died.

And besides, all that European Black Magic circulates through Quimbanda, so it's not as far removed from our reality as some people might think.

The track "Ritos de Necrolatria e Defuntaria" is written in the meter of the profane chants used in Quimbanda rituals, which serve to remind us who our enemies are.

And that's without even mentioning Brazil's ancestral deities, such as Anhangá, Andirá, and Catxuréu, as well as the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca gods...

So we're not dealing with traditional occultism, but rather with the ancestral and syncretic spirituality that exists all around us.

One thing I find interesting about old Brazilian extreme metal is that the music could be incredibly primitive without ever feeling timid. Sarcófago didn't need a huge production or technical playing to sound dangerous. Do you think modern extreme metal has become too obsessed with making everything sound enormous, when sometimes a nasty little guitar sound is much more threatening?

Violador Profano: I totally agree.

We're all absolutely addicted to Heavy Metal — the "Speed" in our sound comes from that — and to the entire sonic aesthetic of that era, including other styles.

We always pursue that sound, which, by today's general standards, tends to be considered weak.

Those were times when everything was done with guts, without plugins, autotune, or any of that shit.

We've never even used a metronome during rehearsals, let alone while recording.

That reflects in our sound because we try as hard as possible to reproduce the sonic magic of those days.

Modern production is something that doesn't even cross our minds. We'd never create something with that approach in mind.

It's common to see bands start out with a rawer sound and then move toward a modern production style to give themselves an air of "evolution."

We don't care about that.

In our case, I think evolution is measured by how we've refined our concepts.

Because, yes, we believe very strongly in feeling, in looking each other in the eye.

I'm lucky to have such great chemistry with the other guys because we're all veterans.

You have the phrase “No scene” in the manifesto around this album, alongside “No trends” and “No algorithm whores”. I understand the sentiment, but every underground band still exists inside some kind of scene, even if it hates the word. Do you genuinely think BLASPHEMANIAC can exist outside the scene, or is “no scene” really about refusing to obey its rules?

Violador Profano: Actually, as I mentioned earlier, we're outsiders in the Brazilian Metal scene.

First of all, because of our geographical location. We're from the countryside of São Paulo, which already puts us at a disadvantage, since our costs are a little higher for promoters in the capital. Believe it or not, many of them prefer to book the same bands that always play there for precisely that reason.

Besides, the Brazilian scene has several extremely poser bands that follow trends, changing their sound according to whatever happens to be fashionable at the time.

Not to mention the bands with christian members.

There are plenty of people in this scene who pretend not to know that many christians enjoy dressing in black and are opportunists looking to make money by organizing shows and doing similar shit.

And there's a whole lot of other bullshit I won't waste my time mentioning.

In this context, I usually say that we create our own scene!

Access to everything is more difficult here than in the capital, so people tend to put more fury into what they do.

We prefer doing things with maniacs from the countryside like ourselves. We have great friends involved in all kinds of activities, such as zines, record labels, photography, and filmmaking. Of course, we also have some good friends in the capital.

This isn't about regionalism or being provincial. It's about rejecting a self-perpetuating system.

We've existed for more than ten years without depending on the conventional scene, and that's the scene we're talking about.

And what is the thing in today's underground that makes you most want to say “fuck this” and disappear back into your own world? Is it the algorithmic side of promotion, the obsession with trends, the endless nostalgia for old records, or something else?

Violador Profano: I'd say the absolute shittiest thing nowadays, without a doubt, is the use of AI in practically EVERYTHING.

From simple texts to album covers and logos, lyrics, and promotional material.

I can recognize that shit from a mile away, and I fucking hate it. I think it completely destroys the soul of a piece of work.

I won't listen to anything of that kind under any circumstances. If I see AI involved, it's deleted immediately.

I think many record labels are really losing their judgment by releasing records with AI-generated covers.

Alongside that, there's something I call "the logic of the algorithm," which has completely taken over the underground.

We're seeing likes, views, and engagement numbers become more important than concepts, ideology, and conduct.

So many fucking poser bands are packed with those numbers...

On top of that, our new album was rejected by that SHITTY RIP-OFF LABEL, Godz ov War Productions, because they supposedly would have difficulty promoting the artwork on social media.

Can you fucking believe that?

I mean, what the fuck has Extreme Metal become?

We have extreme artwork created by a Brazilian artist who's internationally prominent and has worked for D&D, Magic, and fucking Marvel. He asked not to be credited because it could potentially hurt his career.

At first, that son of a bitch from the label agreed to release the album in exactly the format we wanted, before he'd even seen the cover.

Then, after seeing it, he backed out because it wouldn't be easy to post on social media due to their "Community Standards."

After the release had been announced, he kept us waiting for months without replying, delaying the whole thing.

Whenever I stop and think about it, I feel like beating the shit out of that guy for all the time he made us waste and for disrupting our entire release schedule.

We created something really good, and we were treated like that. It's much better than most of the hipster crap he's been releasing.

I'd especially like to thank Adirondack Black Mass for their worldwide support in making the CD and LP happen.

I'd also like to thank Black Hearts Records, Gospel Below Records, and Esturro Records for supporting us in Brazil and putting together an exclusive LP edition for the Brazilian market.

A lot of things have changed nowadays. Making shitty videos is considered "supporting the scene," and we try to escape that logic as much as possible.

It might sound romantic or like some kind of pretentious nostalgia, but we've been victims of that logic ourselves, and that's why we fight against it.

The album is described as having “no cheap nostalgia”, despite being openly built from the language of 80s and 90s extreme metal. Where exactly do you draw that line? At what point does paying respect to the old underground become simply making another retro record?

Violador Profano: When I talk about "cheap nostalgia," I'm referring to all those Black/Thrash bands that don't take their cues from Master's Hammer, Mercyful Fate, Root, Zemial, Mortuary Drape, Absu, Tormentor, Vampyr, and so on.

Instead, they take their cues from newer bands like Nocturnal, Cruel Force, and Hellripper.

In other words, they want to do it more because it's fashionable than because they genuinely worship the roots of that sound.

I've seen this shit everywhere. We even used to say that if you kicked a tree in the street, three bands copying Cruel Force would fall out of it.

Pathetic and completely soulless.

You have been doing this for more than a decade, so you've had plenty of time to watch extreme metal turn old-school worship into an industry of its own. Do you think there is still such a thing as genuinely dangerous underground metal, or has the internet made almost everything safe by making everything immediately visible?

Violador Profano: We're living proof that the internet doesn't make everything so easy to see. Otherwise, our album could have been posted without any major problems.

I do think Extreme Metal has largely lost its wickedness.

That's why I avoid using "Hollywood-style" themes in our lyrics as much as possible.

The idea is for the band to be a genuinely hateful manifesto.

I still believe that a band's real wickedness lies in its concepts, its ideology, and the truth it conveys.

I'm a full-blown necromaniac. All the bones we use are real, taken from graves by my own hands.

I've sacrificed dozens of animals to the Devil.

I've eaten the ashes of dozens of dead people. Real, old-school necromantic Black Magic, involving corpses, human fat, and all that shit.

None of this is fantasy to me.

I only expose these things through the lyrics I write, while living them in my everyday practice of worshipping the Powerful Dead.

So I don't think we fit in with most bands in this style.

Our wickedness is genuinely real, and that's what sets us apart.

And finally, BLASPHEMANIAC seems determined to make an album that feels physically hostile rather than merely “extreme”. When Ataque Diabólico a Sacralidade Brasileira is finished and the last song stops, what do you want left behind: a handful of riffs stuck in someone's head, disgust, curiosity about the history behind the lyrics, or simply the feeling that they have just spent 40 minutes somewhere they probably shouldn't have been?

Violador Profano: Our main purposes are to spread and perpetuate the Devil's name, poison and corrupt souls, and awaken Satanic revolt in as many souls condemned to this existence as possible, using the purest form of Metal as our language.

I hope it will always be the gasoline that burns away whatever remnants of christianity remain encrusted in each and every one of us.

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