Hate Forest

Hate Forest is a Ukrainian black metal band formed by Roman Saenko, the leading member of Drudkh, Dark Ages, and Blood of Kingu. Thurios joined the band in 1998 after the recording of Scythia. The music is mostly very fast, but occasionally slow, with low, distorted vocals, raw low fidelity quality production, sometimes with programmed drums (drummer is a live player during concerts), and dark ambient elements (some releases have consisted entirely of dark ambient tracks). Musical influences are mostly from Scandinavian black metal to traditional death metal, especially Bolt Thrower (they covered their song "Cenotaph"). According to the band, its lyrics are about mythology, mainly Slavic, and inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's stories and Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. The band never gave interviews, never released photos, and held its distance from the black metal scene. After Hate Forest disbanded, Saenko focused on Drudkh, and other side projects such as Blood of Kingu, Windswept and Precambrian which are of different inspirations. After a 16 year hiatus Saenko released a new album in 2020 under the Hate Forest name titled "Hour of the Centaur" and has steadily released more albums and EPs from that point.