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This new Behemoth album has cemented my opinion that Behemoth is creatively cooked, or at least has diverted all of their energy into being edgy and kind of forgot to write music that pushes them as artists and is interesting to listen to. Legendary Polish blackened death metal band Behemoth is back with their 13^th overall record called The Shit ov God, and I think this might be where I personally get off the Behemoth Express.

Behemoth put out a string of good to great, even at times, classic records between 1995 and 2014 but have failed to do anything interesting or new since then. I Loved You at Your Darkest in 2018 as well as Opvs Contra Natvram in 2022 were bland records that had plenty of cringe moments that would be edgy as hell if you were a 14-year-old atheist trying to piss off your Catholic school teachers. I mean, really, I think we all knew the downfall of Behemoth was imminent when they announced their 2018 single “God = Dog.”

And it’s not just me that’s saying The Shit ov God is nothing more than shock value. For the sake of shock value, Behemoth mastermind Nergal recently spoke to Knotfest about the album’s title and its concepts, saying, “I am very tired. Partly, this title is an answer to that. We are in a position where it is harder and harder to inspire people, trigger people, and to move them in any way, because the market and the culture is so oversaturated, hardly anything gets through. And that’s because the world is stripped of the nuances. It is very polarized, black or white.

“I remember when I came out with The Satanist, it was the same story. Half of the crowd thought the title was amazing. Half sarcastically went, ‘Wow, so creative.’ They were very cynical about that, and it took a few years for it to sink in. Give those haters a few years, and they’ll realize at this point in our careers, when we’ve come out with all these metaphysics and Bible quotes in Latin that people don’t know shit about, a lot of fans can’t remember the title Opvs Contra Natvram, or even I Loved You at Your Darkest, which is a simple English sentence. This time around, after exploring all the astral worlds and those different dimensions, we’re gonna take you down into the gutter now.”

And sorry for the extremely long quote there. But I think it really does kind of put this record into perspective. I also think that it misses the entire point while being pretty conceited. So basically, The Shit ov God exists to shock people, because nothing is shocking or triggering anymore or catches people’s attention anymore because of short attention spans or whatever the case is, but also the people who don’t like it, or think that it might be silly or kind of cringy, will come around in a few years to see that it’s actually genius, and they’re all wrong. Got it?

And I think the complete and total opposite is true here. Unfortunately, I think you will remember the name of this record, but you probably won’t remember much, if any, of its music. The Shit ov God opens with “The Shadow Elite”, which sets the tone for the record in that there’s a whole lot of smoke and very little fire. “The Shadow Elite” rages with blistering blast beats and tremolo-picked leads and scrape-heavy down-picked chugs at a big stadium-sized “We are the shadow elite” chorus, which is all well and good, but “The Shadow Elite” just feels like a lesser version of something that would have been on Evangelion.

The same can be said about the second track, “Sowing Salt”, and therein lies one of my main gripes about this record: it’s just more of the same. It feels like a commitment to the label and to fans, rather than an expression of something deeply artistic that Behemoth had to say, because we’re already two tracks into this record, and it just feels like Behemoth is going through the motions.

It’s almost as if this record was created more to show Behemoth‘s enemies in the Polish government and Christians around the world that they’re still here and they’re still very much against them—not because Behemoth had anything urgent to say artistically.

Then there’s the title track, “The Shit ov God“, which is different in a bad way. The whole song has this very like, “If you’re good, then I’m evil” scheme with the lyrics and uses lines like, “If you are the sun, I am Vantablack” and “You brighten the North, I rage down South.” Then the chorus spells out Jesus’s name in Greek alongside a christogram and does this whole “Gimme an S” sort of thing.

Some of the chorus’s lyrics, just to kind of give you an example, are: “J for joyless, H to humiliate, S for thy son, unloved.” You get the idea. At least musically, it took a chance on some slower tempo riffing and grooves, which are pretty cool.

Then Behemoth gets back into quicker tempos with the next track, “Lvciferaeon”, whose run time comes complete with more blasphemous lyrics. The whole choral chant of “If I am God, everyone is. If I am God, and if I am not, none exists.” is a decent halftime break from the rest of the song, and some of these swaying guitar melodies in the song are pretty decent. But again, “Lvciferaeon” just feels like more boilerplate Behemoth, rather than a pushing of the sound or anything that you’re really going to latch onto on this record.

“To Drown the Svn in Wine” cranks up the tempo big time before Behemoth launches into the slower, moodier “Nomen Barbarvm”. That track slowly gains momentum up to a pretty cool riff break prior to its solo, and changes things up with some decent rhythmic variety, instead of just blasting its way through its own run time.

Which brings me to another complaint that I have about The Shit ov God, and it’s that these song structures hardly differ from one another. The Shit ov God is devoid of surprises and pretty much goes down the exact paths that you think it’s going to go down. Predictability isn’t necessarily a bad thing in some cases for some artists, but for a band that has historically written some very good to excellent metal that has covered a lot of compositional ground, The Shit ov God really sticks to a pretty basic and, again, predictable formula throughout.

Just to close out my thoughts on every track: the record ends with “Avgvr (The Dread Vvltvre)”, which does nothing to persuade any of my criticisms I’ve already talked about here. It’s hard to pull out any real shining moments from this record, as it all just kind of blends together, but there are a few. “Nomen Barbarvm” has a wonky groove to it, with the guitars and drums providing this push-and-pull counterpoint to one another. “To Drown the Svn in Wine” has a cool build-up to a very frantic and woe-driven ending. And the operatic vocals and overall urgent feel of “Avgvr (The Dread Vvltvre)” is a nice touch, but dropping flecks of gold into a pool doesn’t make the pool gold. It just means you’ve got some shiny flecks floating around in a pool.

Here’s my problem with this record—and really the last two records outside this one—Behemoth markets themselves as this extreme entity. They are vocally anti-Christian. They’ll fight the Polish government on religious issues, and they’re just generally pretty edgy online, in both what they say and what they sell. But outside the edgy merchandise and statements and performances, both live and online, Behemoth isn’t very, quote unquote, dangerous in their music anymore.

Behemoth isn’t pushing the bounds of their music anymore so much as they seem to be using it as a marketing vehicle for Behemoth, the brand. Nothing’s really changed with the lyrics over time. Nothing is too surprising about the music. It’s just Behemoth on the plateau that they’ve been sitting on.

And listen, I understand bands are brands. Bands are a business. They have to bring in money because this is people’s jobs. This is people’s livelihood. I totally understand that. But it doesn’t have to come at the cost of the quality of the music.

And I know that all sounds harsh, but come on. This is the band that put out Demigod, The Apostasy, Evangelion, and The Satanist back to back to back to back. This is a band that has quite a few good-to-great-to-classic albums to their name and that still sounds very good live and could still play the hell out of all their instruments. And all they could come up with is a third, all right, rehash of their old sound. It’s disappointing.

What I think is especially egregious is that Nergal even talks about how Behemoth doesn’t repeat themselves in the press material around the record. In the promo, Nergal stated: “It’s not about skill. It’s about soul. It’s about making a statement by who you are. It’s thinking, how can I expand these death metal/black metal spectrums? And if we can’t go any further or faster, we’ll go sideways. That’s what Behemoth has done for the last few records. And to make a statement like that about an album that does little to nothing to further the Behemoth sound is, again, just kind of ridiculous.”

Maybe this sounds crazy, but I’d rather Behemoth attempt something like Morbid Angel‘s Illud Divinum Insanus and just go off on some wild musical tangent. Maybe it would be great. Maybe it would suck. I cannot see into the parallel universes where that happened. But I would rather listen to a new Behemoth record for the first time and think, “Holy crap, that’s Behemoth in 2025—whoa.” I’d have to sit there and actually try to digest what I’m hearing instead of going through this and thinking, “Oh, but I’ve heard this before.”

I’ve talked about it before, but I do not like Behemoth’s I Loved You at Your Darkest pretty much at all, though at least Behemoth was trying something out on that record. And there’s something to say about it. There’s something to pick apart there. But The Shit ov God is largely unremarkable. Behemoth introduced the record with the only song that’s something actually different, and the rest is just a dirty mirror held up to the band’s past with a new frame around it.

The Shit ov God is, unfortunately, a four out of 10 for me. There’s nothing really memorable about it, and I don’t feel any great urge to listen to it over a lot of any of the great Behemoth records that they’ve put out in the past. Which, again, sucks, because Behemoth are a solid bunch of musicians, as is evidenced by all the performances throughout this record, and I’m just let down because I do think that if Nergal could put aside his urge to be edgy, he could do something impactful and good. The guy can write a song. The guy is smart about music, and this is just, again, Behemoth kind of going through the motions. And I really do think that Nergal could do a whole hell of a lot better than that.

We got a record that is the equivalent of a pentagram drawn on a locker in a Catholic high school. I know what the intention was, but it’s just not as offensive or shocking as you’d think or as you’d want it to be.