Legendary Black Metal Pioneer Venom Bassist Cronos Dead At The Age Of 63

The man who named the abyss is gone. Conrad “Cronos” Lant, founding bassist, vocalist and permanent centre of gravity for Venom, died on 1 October 2026 at the age of 63. The band confirmed it with the blunt finality the Legions have always expected from them: profound sadness, broken hearts, no cause given. His son Nathan added the only line that matters — “He has laid down his soul, and his music will live on. The legend of Cronos will never die.”loadedradio.com

Venom did not invent Satanic heavy metal. Black Sabbath got there first with the riffs and the crosses. What three Geordies did in a Newcastle church hall in 1979 was worse and more useful. They took Sabbath’s occult pose, Motörhead’s velocity, Judas Priest’s leather and Kiss’s pyrotechnic ambition, then stripped the polish until the tape itself sounded possessed.

Cronos had joined a band called Guillotine on guitar, met Jeff “Mantas” Dunn, and switched to bass a week before a church-hall gig when the original bassist walked. They renamed themselves Venom on a roadie’s suggestion, adopted demon aliases, and started rehearsing on the altar. The vicar locked the door and left. Neighbours called the fire brigade when Abaddon’s practice charges filled the street with red smoke. Cronos later admitted they nicked the candles and crucifixes.

Welcome to Hell arrived in 1981 on Neat Records, recorded in stolen studio time while Cronos worked as an assistant engineer. It was barely competent, deliberately so, and already too much for the NWOBHM gatekeepers. A year later came Black Metal. Cronos wrote the title track as a statement of separation: not power metal, not thrash, black metal. The album cover he drew with pens and Tipp-Ex, the spiked logo, the song that literally names the genre — none of it was subtle. Scandinavian kids who would later burn churches and invent second-wave black metal bought the record because it permitted them.

Bathory, Hellhammer, Mayhem, the early thrash bands in the Bay Area: all of them heard three Newcastle lads who refused to play in time and decided that was the point. Mantas put the recipe plainly years later: more leather than Priest, more pyro than Kiss, dirtier and faster than Motörhead, more Satanic than Sabbath. Stir it, and you get Venom.

The stage shows were the proof they meant it. They refused British dates until a venue could take the full load of flash pots, smoke and inverted crosses. Their first major London headline, Hammersmith Odeon on 1 June 1984, put Abaddon on a riser so high his head nearly touched the ceiling and succeeded mainly in setting the back curtains on fire. Promoters cancelled them for years after seeing the specs. The legend of a million effects per song was partly Chinese whispers; the early videos show mostly smoke and a theatrical bang at either end. It still felt like the floor was about to give way, because the band played as if it should.

That brings us to Studio 54. On 3 April 1985, during the Combat Tour with Slayer and Exodus, Venom walked into the former disco cathedral where Diana Ross and Andy Warhol had once hoovered cocaine off the Moon Man and treated it as enemy territory. The bill was billed, accurately, as the ultimate revenge on the disco era. Venom arrived with pyro and without Mantas. When the video crew filming The Ultimate Revenge refused to pay upfront, Cronos and company took the axe from beside the fire extinguisher and cut their cables. All the footage captured of Venom that night was the interview and the explosion.

Gary Holt of Exodus still calls the pyro and the ball-breaking one of the great nights. Disco’s floor did not literally collapse under them, the structural stories that circulate tend to confuse this gig with a 2004 Newcastle rehearsal-room ceiling that gave way under Cronos’s bass frequencies, but the symbolism stuck. Three extreme metal bands had occupied the room and left it smelling of cordite.

Cronos left in 1987, returned in the mid-90s, and remained the only constant through lineup wars, a climbing accident that silenced him for nearly two years, guest spots with Probot and HammerFall, and sixteen studio albums. The latest, Into Oblivion, came out in May. The final shows were still happening in July. The lawsuits over logos and merch continued right up to the end; he never stopped treating the sigil and the goat’s head as his work.

None of the later records erased the first two. Black metal as a living genre moved on to colder production and genuine misanthropy, but it kept the name, the pseudonyms, the refusal to sound professional, and the inverted cross Cronos had redrawn so it belonged to them. The Legions who bought the shirts and stood in the smoke already know the rest. The voice that opened Welcome to Hell has stopped. The record has not.