The Monolith Deathcult
is a Dutch Death Metal band founded in 2002. Their songs are largely about horrible events both real and fictitious. Out of a belief that the Death Metal genre has reached a ceiling in terms of speed, they have decided instead to innovate by broadening the genre, including previously "not done" elements into the style to add to the brutality and speed. While their image is mostly serious, it sometimes incorporates elements of irony and Black Comedy, but the band is almost always about bad taste and a morbid fascination with everything wrong.
Current lineup:
- Michiel Dekker - Guitars, Programming, Samples, Vocals (additional) (2002-present), Percussion (2017)
- Carsten Altena - Keyboards, Samples (2002-2008, 2012-present), Organ, Orchestrations, Vocals (choirs) (2007), Guitars (lead) (2015-present), Percussion (2017-present)
- Robin Kok - Vocals, Bass (2002-present), Samples (2017)
Former members:
- Sjoerd Visch - Drums (2002-2015)
- Martijn Moes - Guitars (2002-2011)
- Ivo Hilgenkamp - Guitars (2011-2015)
Discography:
- The Apotheosis - Full-length album (2003)
- The White Crematorium - Full-length album (2005)
- III - Trivmvirate - Full-length album (2008)
- The White Crematorium 2.0 (The Revenge of the Failed) - Full-length album (2010)
- Tetragrammaton - Full-length album (2013)
- "Obliteration of the Despised & Decade of Depression" - Compilation (2014)
- "The Disaster Tapes 2006-2012" - Compilation (2014)
- "Bloodcvlts" - EP (2015)
- V1 - Versus: It Will Burn Us Without Leaving Ash - Full-length album (2017)
- "Fist of Stalin" - Single (2018)
- "Dawn of the Planet of the Ashes" - Single (2018)
- V2 - Vergelding: Dawn of the Planet of the Ashes - Album (2018)
- "Connect the Goddamn Dots" - Single (2019)
- "Feet of Jeremiah" - Single (2020)
The Monolith Deathcult and their songs provide examples of:
- Final Solution: Multiple songs of theirs involve The Holocaust, and there are others about other genocides, like "Wrath of the Ba'ath" (about the Anfal genocide) and "Drugs, Thugs, and Machetes" (about the Rwandan genocide).
- Genre-Busting: They incorporate elements from electronic music in their later material
- Ghostapo: "The Furious Gods (Gabriel's Song)" is about Heinrich Himmler, with a heavy focus on his fascination with the occult.
- Historical Villain Upgrade:
- Say what you will about Vlad the Impaler, he wasn't a vampire overlord who rose from the dead to lead his satanic army to eradicate Islam.
- Attila the Hun probably didn't really eat the flesh of his defeated enemies.
- While Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini was a Nazi collaborator who played a small role in the Holocaust, he never directly oversaw any deportations nor engaged in cruelties which horrified even the Nazis. The band appear to have conflated his Balkan-based Muslim SS troops with the Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia, who also had Slavic Muslim troops and participated in such atrocities.
- Horrible History Metal: They're a band that does this almost exclusively, with a particular focus on wars and genocides. Examples include "Drugs, Thugs, and Machetes", about the Rwandan genocide, "Kindertodeslied", about the Hitler Youth, and "Master of the Bryansk Forests", about a particularly brutal battalion of Nazi Einsatsgruppen during World War II.
