Satanic Planet: Dead Deities

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Genre:

Metal

Label:

Relapse

Release Date:

2026

You know who’s having a moment? Satan. Between the theatrical re-release of Ken Russell’s The Devils, the demi-controversy surrounding Satanic doo-wop group Twin Temple being dropped from Charley Crockett’s tour, and Lucifer’s son visiting New Orleans in the new American Horror Story, Ol’ Scratch is everywhere these days. But what happens when the season shifts, when the cloying good cheer of—groan—the holiday season comes with its candy stripes and jingle bells and partridges in pear trees? How do you keep the message of the Dark Lord relevant when half of the world is celebrating his nemesis? This is the goal of evangelical satanist band Satanic Planet.

I mean that descriptor literally. The metal supergroup’s singer Lucien Greaves isn’t just magnificently named, he’s also the co-founder of and spokesperson for the Satanic Temple, the at-times-controversial organization that promotes a non-religious satanism built around a philosophy of self-determination and social welfare programs. In the same way that the Temple presents itself as a serious-minded secular project, Dead Deities, the group’s second album, isn’t some Rob Zombie retread. It’s a legitimate—and legitimately interesting—artistic expression, one that employs the hip-hop production skills of Planet B’s Luke Henshaw, the anything-goes splatter of the Locust’s Justin Pearson, and the extraordinary versatility of Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo to round out Greaves’ poisoned-pen jeremiads.

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Unsurprisingly given Greaves’ role as a provocateur, Dead Deities is a political project as much as an artistic one. The press materials quote from the mission of the Satanic Temple: The album endeavors to “encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority,” and “undertake noble pursuits,” among other lofty goals. Greaves’ vocals are heavily processed throughout—in “Church Burning,” he sounds like he’s singing through a bubbling mouthful of magma—but the message occasionally cuts through. “Church Burning” was prompted by the attempted bombing of the Satanic Temple’s headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts, an odd reversal of the torchings of stave churches by black metal bands in Norway in the early 1990s. B-movie organs moan across the track, their potential campiness turned serious by Greaves’ shrieks and the slashes of noise and texture scattered around Lombardo’s clattering drums. “You, me, and your god make two,” Greaves intones, implying either the non-existence of the deity or simply an aversion to anything even remotely trinitarian.

In the slasher fantasy of single “Sam Alito’s Mom,” Greaves imagines knifing the Supreme Court Justice and raising the “black burning flag” of anarchism. “Sic semper tyrannis,” he shrieks, Latin for “Thus always to tyrants,” before declaring victory over what he calls “a culture war bomb dropped from the cunt of Sam Alito’s mom.” It’s incendiary, obviously, and arguably misogynistic; it’s certainly unfortunate (and, one assumes, not a coincidence) that his anti-authoritarian phrase was also shouted by John Wilkes Booth when he shot Abraham Lincoln.

Despite the rhetoric and anger, Satanic Planet don’t come off as preachy or pedantic. You could stroke your expertly manicured goatee and see this as a product of the certainty they have in their moral rightness, but it has more to do with the level of attention they’ve paid to these songs. With its stomping, stalking rhythms and careful arrangement of ugly synth basses, high church organs, and anonymous buzzing and creaking, it’s obvious they’ve spent a lot of time listening to heavy experimental music. You might hear Portrayal of Guilt’s high-concept Devil Music in the rich hum of the strings, or some of composer Aaron Dilloway’s constantly morphing visions of darkness in the clever arrangement of extramusical sound. Lombardo largely dials back the mile-a-minute thrash of Slayer in favor of the kind of looping, lyrical drum lines that he laid down with Fantômas, which in turn gives the rest of the band a little breathing room. You can hear it in the relatively restrained “Ouroboros,” where drones and “Red Right Hand” chimes reverberate over hand drums and a simple pattern played on a kit. “Break the bread, drink the wine, burn the scripture, burn the shrine,” Greaves croaks, and when the song explodes into infernal organ noise and a plague of cymbal crashes, it hits harder than just about anything else here. There are scraps of industrial, cybergrind, metalcore, and death metal in this stew, as well as a healthy garnish of Godflesh’s machinelike relentlessness, all of it well balanced.

This maximalist approach gives Dead Deities an air of inevitability and momentum. When stabs of Bernard Herrmann violins and Antichrist Superstar synth bumps clash in the relatively pared-back title track, it can feel as if the entirety of the 20th century is in support of Greaves wearing “your skin on All Saint’s Day,” as he claims to be willing to do. At any given moment, an armada of noise appears to be on the approach, with machine scrapes grinding in the foreground as a kind of advance guard.

The album’s experimental bent is also what keeps the music from slipping into parody or, even worse, po-faced sincerity. In “Antichrist,” bells toll and Dracula organs herald the darkness, but it’s kept steady by the precise choppiness of the production, the way the aquatic vocal effects make Greaves’ screams sound like he’s being either drowned or forcibly baptized, and the overall air of knowingness. Part of the pleasure is hearing Satanic Planet expertly chart the narrow path between Satan Is Real-style camp and the self-seriousness of decades of supposedly satanic black metal.

Is this religious music? It depends on how you define “religious.” The Satanic Temple insists they reject theism of any kind, and far more of the album is spent rending garments and turning over tables than advocating for the righteousness of their cause; Satan himself barely gets a mention, much less a moment of adoration. I’m not sure that this matters—that the protestant ethos at work here is saying anything about organized religion that hasn’t been said by generations of Reddit atheists, nor does the occasional edgelord sloganeering feel freshly toxic. Satanic Planet are not likely to inspire teenagers to paint pentagrams on their attic floors. They’ll have to settle for having made a pretty good record.

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