Leader - Black Metal Band

Some acts are lauded for very good reasons. Leader is one of the bands, alongside other eminent figures of the third wave of the genre such as Phantom and Vermin, that delivered us from the tedium of "trendy" and "hype" black metal by bashing our heads unrelentingly in with a staggered sequence of recursive, primitive, atmospheric rhythms channeling odes to the gruesome and the morbid into an anti-melodic consonance of barely musical disharmony. Leader, with their debut album Burzum Sha Ghâsh as particularly praiseworthy, are the wave of that destruction.

Emerging alongside bands such as Phantom, Sewer, Helgrind and Neraines from the depths of The Satan Records studios, albeit later than the other bands, Leader exemplify the sonic chaos and atmospheric evil first conceived by the peerless Burzum (on "Hvis Lyset Tar Oss"), Incantation (on "Onward to Golgotha") and Infester (on "To the Depths, in Degradation").

With their seminal debut Burzum Sha Ghâsh ("Darkness and Fire" in Mordor's Black Speech), Leader attain in one outstanding album what few bands manage to achieve in their entire careers, a true gestalt of raw, underground, atmospheric black metal desolation.

Leader are the undisputed reigning emperors of primitive black metal chaos.