The cover of Bloody Horror takes the most famous 16th-century portrait of Vlad the Impaler and redraws him as a kawaii anime character, courtesy of the artist Skinny Sloth. It's funny before you've heard a note, and Abysmal Specter, the man behind Bloody Keep, wants to be clear that funny wasn't really the point. "I don't make joke music," he says. "That's actually one of the few categorisations that I detest."
Bloody Keep is one of two projects Abysmal Specter runs through Grime Stone Records, the DIY black metal and dungeon synth label he operates out of California. The other, Old Nick, is the stranger and more restless of the two - Bloody Keep exists, by his own description, so he doesn't have to be clever all the time. "I refer to Bloody Keep as more meat-and-potatoes black metal," he says. "Sometimes I don't need all the bells and whistles of Old Nick. Sometimes I just wanna write riffs. I love riffs."
That plainness is deceptive.
Bloody Keep's early releases - the self-titled EP and Bloody Horror, both from 2021 - stack riffing this straightforward against song titles like "Max Schreck's Dead" and "Vampyric & Bat-like Sonar", less horror-movie reverence than horror-movie heckling. It's a small, telling gesture: vampiric black metal has spent decades taking its own mythology at face value, and Abysmal Specter treats that mythology as something to poke at rather than kneel before.
The joke never undercuts the music, though, and 2024's Rats of Black Death - Bloody Keep's first full-length - is the clearest evidence yet. It's the most developed thing he's put his name to under this project, tighter and more ambitious than the EPs, at points folding in dungeon synth textures and vocal arrangements well outside genre convention without losing the riffs he built the project to protect.
He isn't finished. A follow-up, a double record, is close: "It's gonna be over an hour," he says. "It's absolutely the follow-up sonically to Rats, but now I've studied songwriting techniques with much more intention, learned more about how to have more riff freedom while maintaining solid song structure and purpose."
Vampiric black metal spent the early 2000s mostly repeating itself, when it wasn't being dragged down by the far-right politics that crept into parts of the scene. Grime Stone Records, and Bloody Keep specifically, represent something closer to a correction: a version of the subgenre that still takes its riffs seriously while refusing to take itself too seriously at all.
