Plague Divine was formed under the name sacrifice bitch in early autumn 98. The thought was to start playing death metal with influences such as swedish Entombed as well as typical USA/Florida Death Metal like Cannibal Corpse. As the black metal bands of Stockholm/Sweden had been taking over most of the scene, there were really no new acts around and most of the old had quit or changed style. The original line-up back then was:

Nico Åsbrink, Guitar.
Patrick Muhr, Guitar.
Jacob Anderson, Bass
Tomas Daun, Drums
Johan Thornberg, Vocals


With this line-up the band played together for about half a year. Then the band splitted up for the first time. Due to among other domestic problems, Johan Thornberg and Patrick Muhr left to start Insision. Tomas Daun also joined insision but still remained in Sacrifice Bitch, playing in both bands for about a month before he also left due to lack of time to be commited to two bands.


This left Jacob and Nico in the posisition to try to fill the line-up again. At this point of time however, this wasn't an easy task. Good, unoccupied musicians in Stockholm, who were into death metal were not kind easy to find. Never the less a month or so later, Juan "Brujo" Araya joined on drums; bringing with him Christos Chatsikonstandinos, the guitarrist of his second band Ruins Of Time. Juan´s entrance to the band brought a new dimension of longer and faster blastbeats mixed with a quite unique playing style; (he is a half right-; half left-handed drummer, this means he mixes both styles to become one) . From this point, the band developed more and more towards Grind Core, still keeping it´s roots in the influence of early swedish death metal, as well as the USA/Florida influences.


The band continued rehearsing under the name of Disaster. During about one and a half year from the split up not much happened, the band kept trying to find a good vocalist and the creative progress was pretty much haltred. In late spring of 99, a recording of the song Fragments Of The Ground, was made as the graduation project of Jacobs sound engineer education (To this point the most extreme music ever played within the walls of SAE-sweden), on this recording Juan handled the vocals, wrotte the lyrics and recored the drums as well.
After the trial of quite a few singers, Peter Emanuelsson was finally found. Peter also sang in the quite established underground act Spazmosity and fitted fine for the task. The band continued rehearsing throughout the year of 99 trying to find clubs or venues who would let them play. Their first break came in early 2000 when the new line-up got their first gig which later followed by yet another one at a local metal-club in Stockholm. The response was singlehandedly positive.


Not much else came in their way as the band continued rehearsing in varied intensity throughout the year of 2000. In spring 2001 Christos annonced that he was going to leave the band as he didn't feel as a respected part of the group. A short while later Juan also left as a result of a demanding day/night-job.


So again the band found it self without enough members to continue. Nico kept writing new songs as they now tried to find a new drummer. They tried Martin XXXX of another stockholm-death metal band (called Scurvy); for a while. As the drumparts were pretty demanding and Martins studying and comittment to Scurvy were allready time exhausting, neither of that worked out. That was it for the year of 2001 and the larger part of 2002. It started to feel pretty much hopeless to ever get the band to work out, songs had been written and dumped but no real progress ever seemed to come, as the band continued to split up every time it was ready to record to start playing live. What seemed to be happening were just one long rehearsal session to learn new musicians old songs. But one pretty alchohole influenced night in late spring 2002, Jacob and Juan had a talk and Juan decided to join the band once again. That summer of 2002 they waited for a rehearsalroom, when rehearsing once started in autumn, nothing seemed to have been lost and they started off where they had stopped over one year earlier.

Soon ex-Thy Primordial guitarrist Markus XXXX joined as leadguitarrist. They rehearsed untill late spring 2003 when a member once again would leave the band. This time it was Markus who had to leave, for the swedish town of malmö, with his girlfriend (her decission). During his time in the band they had managed to get another gig and the reaction was still, only possitive. The summer of 2003 Plague Divines first demo was finally recorded, containing tracks made from the very start, as Bestial lust, or the latest, and fastest song ever made: Conceived To Perish.

To be continued....





www.plaguedivine.ch.vu