«Pleasure to Kill» is Kreator’s second album and it came out in November 1986 on Noise Records. The band from Essen was a three-piece at the time and recorded at Musiclab Studios in Berlin with Harris Johns producing, leaving the debut «Endless Pain» behind with a far more savage sound.
“`Country: Germany
Style: Thrash Metal
For fans of: Sodom, Destruction, Tankard
Here Kreator play faster and more violently than anything before. Mille Petrozza on guitar and vocals, Rob Fioretti on bass and Ventor on drums build a suffocating wall, with tempo changes and riffs that early on touched the hardest sound death metal would produce later. The lyrics stay in the same dark, macabre mood as the first record.
The title track «Pleasure to Kill» stands out with its catchy central riff, «Riot of Violence», where Ventor takes over the microphone, and the long «The Pestilence», which shows how tightly they could hold a song together. «Carrion» and «Under the Guillotine» stand beside them.
The recording took about two weeks and Johns asked the group to play the songs over many takes, so that the album would sound cleaner without losing its dirt. As a three-piece, Kreator shared the vocals: Petrozza sings on most tracks, Ventor takes on three.
The album is considered a landmark of European thrash, in the company of the records that laid the foundations of the genre, and it put Kreator beside Destruction and Sodom in the German triptych of the style. Its influence shows in many acts that came later, in death as well as in black metal. It entered the German charts for the first time in 2017, with the reissue of the record, reaching number 99.
See also: KREATOR – Krushers Of The World and Witchburner – Black Raging Flames | Metal Territory.
