Venom frontman Conrad "Cronos" Lant, who helped invent black metal, dies at 63

Conrad "Cronos" Lant, the bassist, singer and last founding member of the British band Venom, whose 1981 debut album helped give rise to the term "black metal" and shaped the sound of thrash, death and extreme metal that followed, has died at 63. The band announced his death in a statement posted to its social media channels on October 1, giving no cause of death.

The news was confirmed by multiple music publications, including a tribute published by Decibel magazine and a report from Louder, the online home of Metal Hammer and Classic Rock. Lant was the sole remaining member of Venom's original lineup still performing under the band's name, and had led the group, in one form or another, for most of the 48 years since it formed in Newcastle upon Tyne.

The numbers

Lant was born in London in 1963 and moved to Newcastle at age eight. He joined Venom in 1978, two years before the band's first recording session, and remained its frontman for all but an eight-year stretch in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Over that span he sang and played bass on 12 Venom studio albums, the last of which, Into Oblivion, was released on May 1 this year through BMG's Noise Records imprint, meaning Lant was still an active, recording musician within months of his death. Venom's catalog and touring history remain listed on the band's own long-running site, venomslegions.com, and on streaming platforms including Lant's official Apple Music artist page.

How Venom reshaped metal

Venom's path to influence ran through a small independent label rather than a major studio system. Lant was working at Neat Records, a Newcastle studio, when he persuaded its owner, David Wood, to record a single by his new band. The 1981 single "In League With Satan" became an underground hit, and the full-length that followed, Welcome to Hell, was later inducted into Decibel's Hall of Fame, with the British weekly Sounds calling it, at the time, "possibly the heaviest record ever allowed in the shops for public consumption." A second album, Black Metal, followed in November 1982; its title track gave an entire genre its name, one later taken up by Scandinavian bands such as Mayhem, Emperor and Darkthrone.

Lant has said the sound was a deliberate collision of influences. "I loved Motorhead, they were a huge inspiration, but I wanted to have the Black Sabbath satanic thing too, and Alice Cooper's theatricality, and punk's aggression," he said in a 2019 interview cited by Louder. "I wanted us to be evil." Beyond the theatrics, critics and peers have pointed to something more structural: Venom, DIY in its recording and brash in its marketing, helped break the hold that larger studios held over what heavy music could sound like, opening space for the independent scenes that produced thrash and extreme metal through the rest of the decade.

Who is affected

Lant's death closes out the active career of the last classic-era member still touring as Venom; his former bandmates, guitarist Jeff "Mantas" Dunn and drummer Tony "Abaddon" Bray, left to found the separately branded Venom Inc. in 2015 and had been estranged from Lant for years. It also lands squarely within a genre whose first generation of stars — Lant was 63, the same age bracket as several other NWOBHM-era figures — is now reaching the end of long touring careers. Fans and musicians who grew up on Venom's early albums, from Metallica's James Hetfield to Celtic Frost's Tom Gabriel Fischer, have cited the band's records as formative listening, a lineage Decibel's obituary traced directly from Newcastle's Neat Records cassettes to the second wave of Norwegian black metal more than a decade later.

Reaction

The clearest public statement came from Lant's son, Nathan, who wrote on the band's social media on its members' behalf.

"I want to thank all of the Legions for all of the support you have given my dad over the years. I know he really appreciated you all. He has laid down his soul, and his music will live on. The legend of Cronos will never die."

Tributes followed from across the metal world. Slayer and Exodus guitarist Gary Holt, whose band toured with Venom during the "Bonded" era, wrote on Instagram that he was "devastated by this news," adding that the tours the two bands shared "have and will always go down as the greatest tours we've ever done," and that Lant "helped shape Exodus into what we became." Even the old rift within Venom's own ranks surfaced in recollections published this week: Dunn, in an earlier interview Decibel republished alongside its obituary, had called the estrangement between himself and Lant "very sad," adding, "there isn't bitterness as much as disappointment. Conrad and I used to be very close."

What happens next

Venom's statement did not address whether the band will continue to tour or record without Lant, who had steered it through a 1999 internal attempt to remove him as frontman before leading its most recent lineup, with guitarist Stuart "Rage" Dixon and drummer Danny "Dante" Needham, through Into Oblivion this year. No funeral or memorial details had been made public as of this writing. The reissue and touring circuit that has kept Venom's early catalog in print — including recent vinyl pressings of Welcome to Hell and Black Metal — is expected to continue regardless, given the albums' status as foundational texts for extreme metal rather than as live-dependent releases.