Baal Ravenlock — Behemoth's founding drummer — was in the band from its formation in 1991 in Gdańsk. He recorded the first two albums, Sventevith (Storming Near the Baltic) (1995) and Grom (1996), in a context hard to imagine today: a Poland just emerged from communist rule, with no studio, label or distribution infrastructure for extreme metal, and an underground circuit that communicated by letters and cassette tapes. His drumming belongs to the vocabulary of second-wave black metal — raw blast beats, harsh production, without the technical refinement the band would develop later. It is another Behemoth: subject matter tied to Slavic paganism, short structures, precarious recording. The synthesis with death metal, the monumental production and the international reach would come only years later. With Nergal, he is one of the two names present at the founding of what would become the biggest band in Polish extreme metal.
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