The title of Mütiilation's first album isn't really a Mütiilation phrase. "Black imperial blood" is a line the whole scene around them was reciting in 1993, coined by Vlad Tepes: "We are Black Legions of Satan, we are the immortal warriors of Black imperial blood." Mütiilation just put it on a record sleeve first.
The scene was Les Légions Noires, a handful of teenagers around Brest, in Brittany, who decided in the summer of 1993 that Norwegian black metal had already compromised itself with death metal's sense of professionalism. William Roussel, who records as Meyhna'ch, and Vordb Báthor Ecsed formed what they called an occult musical alliance and set about making records so limited, and so deliberately ugly, that almost nobody outside their own circle could hear them. Mütiilation, Roussel's main outlet, became the first band to carry the Black Legions name, alongside Wlad and Vorlok Drakksteim's Vlad Tepes and, later, Belkètre.
Vampires of Black Imperial Blood came out in 1995 on Drakkar Productions, the label's first full-length CD, pressed to a thousand copies. It was recorded at Black Legions Studio with Mørdrëd on drums — the first Mütiilation record to use a live drummer alongside the drum machine Roussel would rely on entirely for everything that came after. The eight tracks stretch out: "Magical Shadows of a Tragic Past" runs ten minutes, "Tears of a Melancholic Vampire" past eight, titles that read like romantic poetry laid over guitars so distorted that some reviewers have joked it makes Darkthrone sound polished by comparison.
That's the record's real trick. It isn't fast or aggressive so much as bleak — melancholic, riff-driven, closer to a funeral dirge than a black mass — and it's usually credited as one of the founding documents of what became known as depressive black metal, a strand that runs through bands like Xasthur and Shining a decade later. Where the Norwegian second wave built vampirism out of winter and violence, and Cradle of Filth built it out of orchestration, Vampires of Black Imperial Blood built it out of despair: vampirism less as predation than as a kind of endless, joyless mourning.
None of this was aimed at an audience. The Black Legions pressed their records in the low hundreds on purpose and dealt almost entirely in tape trades and hand-numbered copies, an aesthetic of scarcity that made the music feel less like product and more like something you weren't supposed to have found. Vampires of Black Imperial Blood was reissued in 1999 as a double LP by End All Life Productions in a run of a hundred numbered copies, with a Bathory cover tacked on, and it remains one of the scarcest and strangest artefacts of a scene that never wanted to be found in the first place.
