Vim Fuego Ho, ho, fuck...

Yep, it’s Christmas time, so the world’s most (only?) Christmassy death metal band Coffin Fuck have made their annual trip to the studio somewhere near their home base of Hopatcong, New Jersey. COVID played the Grinch in 2020, the first time in a decade a Coffin Fuck Christmas single didn’t eventuate, so the three lads in their silly sweaters are making up for lost time this year.

But something has changed.

Yes, it’s the usual three self-professed dorks mangling a Christmas song in a so-bad-it’s-good completely unproduced metal manner. Yes, the lyrics are mostly inappropriate and silly. And yes, the artwork to this year’s offering “Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree” looks to have been hand drawn using Microsoft Paint.

But therein lies a clue: there’s a rough hand-rendered version of the most famous image in black metal history. No, not Dead’s splattery “excuse the mess” farewell. No, no! Not Count Grishnakh posing with the over-sized butter knife. The OTHER most famous image from black metal. You know, Abbath and Demonaz in full battle dress and badger make-up ready to shovel snow with their guitars from the cover of “Battles in the North”.

Yep, Coffin Fuck have passed over to the dark side. This year’s Christmas single is... black metal!

And actually, it’s not half bad. Well OK, it is pretty bad, but that’s the point. It’s standard-ish black metal with fast, reedy sounding guitars, and blasts and snare drum flurries like you’d expect, but it’s the funny little foibles which make Coffin Fuck such fun. The tuneless vocal tuning at the start of the song. The clunky solo mid-song. The stupid lyrics – “You will get a detrimental feeling when you hear/heathens screaming, worship Santa” and “Have a Misanthropic day/Everyone glaring evilly/In the most trve nekro way”.

Yep, it’s dumb as fuck, but that’s why it’s fun. Merry Antichrist-mas!