The Young Gods

THE YOUNG GODS

If Switzerland’s The Young Gods never got the full reverence they deserve, that’s largely because their incendiary, paganistic vision proved so revolutionary that no one ever found the means to wield their tools to equaal effect. Using just drums, a sampler and the sky-razing vocals of frontman Franz Treichler, TYG displaced metal riffs and classical strings onto an unstable template of loops and temporal shifts that mined their sources for exponential amounts of wild energy while sounding as though it was raising up a landscape through sheer force of will. Devin Townsend, Sepultura and Mike Patton have cited them as an inspiration. Three decades on, their debut still sounds just as startling, like a manifesto for a bold and violent new world.