The band started in 1997 with Atax (guitar/voice), Mrok (drums) and Scum (bass/guitar), to create dark music for dark souls, but mainly for ourselves. Right from the beginning we tried to find our own style and to sound as original as possible. Of course you can hear that we are influenced by the Nordic Black Metal of the early ‘90s, but Pest is really not just a copy of the old legends, which has been confirmed by a lot of people.

With this line-up we recorded in April 1998 our first demo “Schwarze Visionen” ,which contains 6 songs with a running-time of 27 minutes. In summer 1999, while we were recording our debut album “Ära”, Mr. Blasphemy joined the band as additional vocalist. The Ära-CD was produced by ourselves, contains 11 tracks with a running-time of 55 minutes and was released in May 2000. In 2002 the album was re-released on MC by the German label “Ketzer Records”, and in 2003 as CD with different booklet and three bonus-tracks by the USA label “Fullmoon Prod.”. Between October 2001 and February 2002 we recorded our 2nd album “Ad Se Ipsum” (11 tracks/54 minutes) , which was released in November 2002 by the German label “Fog of the Apocalypse”. In summer 2003, after a creative break of more than a year, we started writing new songs for our third album “Vado Mori”, which was recorded between December 2003 and August 2004. It is going to be released by “Ketzer Records” in winter 2004/2005.

Because the sound is also very important for the originality of a band, all our albums were recorded and mixed in our rehearsal-room, which gives us a very unique sound. But to be honest, we are not really satisfied with the sound of our first two albums. We were not experienced enough to do it better. With “Vado Mori” we made a big step forward.

We have only played a few live gigs by now and because we don't have so much time to rehearse, the recording of albums is much more important for us. But if we get an interesting offer to play live, we won't say no.

For those who care, our band-name is a tribut to the plague of the 14th century, which killed about a third of the European population. Our lyrics are about death, darkness, despair, sorrow, anger and our hate against religion and mankind. But we are not interested in spreading any kind of message. The lyrics are very personal, consisting of very individual thoughts. At last we have to say, that everybody who likes raw, grim, gloomy, atmospheric and original Black Metal, should check out our music.

Source : http://www.ketzer-records.de/pest/biography.html