Formed in 1983. The band's frontman, Quorthon, worked part-time at the small record label Tyfon. In late 1983 and early 1984, the label was putting together a compilation of songs by Scandinavian metal bands. However, at the last minute, one of the bands backed out and lucky for him, the label Tyfon agreed to let his band Bathory appear on the record as a replacement, and the band recorded two songs for the compilation—"Sacrifice" and "The Return of the Darkness and Evil".
The album, Scandinavian Metal Attack, was released in March 1984 and that was Bathory's first appearance on record, Incredible but to everyone's surprise, the songs were cherished for the 95% of the fans and started to send fan mail and request more about them, so the label Tyfon asked the band to record a full-length album.
Unfortunately for Quorthon, his original bandmates moved away, so Quorthon recruited Rickard Bergman as bassist and Stefan Larsson as drummer, and then on 22 May 1984, they had their first and only rehearsal together before recording the album. Here they recorded the songs "Satan My Master" and "Witchcraft", which would later appear on the compilation album Jubileum Volume III.
On 14 June the band entered Heavenshore Studio in Stockholm to record the debut. The studio had a homemade eight-channel tape recorder. Due to the band's tight budget, they ran the recorder at half-speed to fit everything on one master tape. They also had to work quickly – the recording and mixing were done in somewhere between 32 and 56 hours.
The album was originally to be named Pentagrammaton and to have a pentagram on the cover, but this name was scrapped when several people misread it as Pentagon. The band replaced with a re-touched portion of a drawing made by Joseph A. Smith in 1981 for the book Witches by Erica Jong. For the writing on the back cover. The goat on the album cover, taken from a drawing by Joseph Smith, was originally meant to be printed in gold. However, this was too expensive to use, so Quorthon asked for it to be as near to gold as possible; the result was a bright yellow color. Now there is curious fact about it, according to Swedish Death Metal, Quorthon thought it looked "awful", and after the first 1000 pressings it was switched to black-and-white. The yellow cover has become a collector's item, and is now well known as "Gula Geten" ("The Yellow Goat").
The musical style was basically a mix of the satanic party rock of the band Venom, the energy of San Francisco trash metal scene, but. Bathory leader Quorthon claimed to have not heard Venom before making the album, instead he claimed to be inspired by Black Sabbath, Motörhead, Sex Pistols, and GBH, but again, the former drummer and now video and film director Jonas Åkerlund claimed that Bathory was "exclusively" inspired by Venom during these days so who knows anyway.
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