Moonspell mark 30 years of their album Irreligious

Metal Injection marked 30 years since Moonspell released their metal album Irreligious in a retrospective piece published August 7. The outlet argued the Portuguese band's 1996 record still sounds as gloomy and monolithic as it did on release.

Irreligious was a sharp turn from the band's previous album, Wolfheart: where that record was raw and rooted in black and gothic metal, Irreligious was polished, layered and structurally more ambitious, down to interludes like "Subversion," which Metal Injection said lands closer to industrial and techno than to the gothic rock around it.

The album also marked a lyrical shift for singer Fernando Ribeiro, who was growing tired of stock satanic imagery. "My spleen and boredom with the Satanic world and the copy-paste of Eliphas Levi and second-hand vampire stories was starting to show," he said, and he turned instead to writers like Patrick Suskind and Jean Genet. "Opium" sets its imagery against a quote from the poet Fernando Pessoa, and "Awake!" is built around a recording of occultist Aleister Crowley reading his own poem. It was also the first Moonspell album to feature guitarist Ricardo Amorim, who has remained the band's primary co-writer on every record since.

Metal Injection said the closing song "Full Moon Madness" has ended nearly every Moonspell show since 1996, with Ribeiro making a circular hand gesture above the crowd before it begins. The album also broke the band in Germany, where it charted and built the European audience that carried them through the decades since, at a point when the band members were young and "living with our parents," as Ribeiro put it. "Irreligious changed that," he said.

The piece's author, Joel Barrios, framed the album through his own introduction to it: growing up in Cuba in the 1990s with no internet access, he first heard Moonspell's "Opium" on a Century Media sampler traded on the black market, with no other context for the band. Irreligious arrives in a busy week for metal anniversary retrospectives, following pieces marking the Cro-Mags' 40-year-old Age of Quarrel and Pig Destroyer's 25-year-old grindcore debut.