In our interview with Tenma, he noted how the Saami Aadum (god’s dance) had many similarities with a moshpit. There is something quite similar in religious rituals and concerts. And this has been well noted and documented in explorations in history, anthropology, and mass psychology.
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On Saturday, January 10, Polish black metal band Batushka (the one which won the court case), played their debut Indian show at Fandom, Bengaluru, as part of The Uprising Edition 3, organized by Artist Connect.in and The Indian Artists Collective.
Sacred Blasphemy
Black metal bands are notorious for conflict with religion. Black metal which had its notorious second wave in the Nordic countries, ironically regions with some of the highest human development indices, became the birth ground for church burnings.
Batushka’s approach is different. Their blasphemy is rooted in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, using inspired hymns and masses delivered almost exclusively in Church Slavonic, the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church. Fun fact: Bulgarian and Macedonian are generally considered the closest modern languages to Church Slavonic.
There is also a crucial inversion. Where traditional liturgy addresses “You” (God), Batushka’s lyrics shift to “I” placing the self in the divine role. This recontextualization in a black metal setting “blackens” the liturgy, hinting at blasphemy without resorting to simple Satanic slogans. Albums like Panihida draw from funerary rites while Litourgiya from orthodox services.
Schism Reflected
Even the crowd mirrored the genre’s internal tensions. At one point, an audience member howled “Fuck Patriarkh!”. Mirroring the history of its subject matter, the church of Batushka, has had its own schism.
The dueling versions offer distinct readings of the same Orthodox vocabulary. Krysiuk’s Patriarkh favors a djenty, glossy production with patriarch-style headgear and frontman-focused staging. Drabikowski’s Batushka, the version performing in Bangalore, embraces murkier, doom-inflected black metal where guitars, choirs, and church-hall reverb coalesce into a suffocating liturgical fog.
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The Bangalore Ritual
The staging set the tone. Between the two album covers for Litourgiya (2015) and Panihida (2019), a coffin topped with a skull served as a grim altar in front of the stage, anchoring the death-and-mourning aesthetic. I was transfixed by the dark atmospheric sound, which was delivered as a great wall of sound mix. The performance perfectly married the dark gothic choral hymns with crushing black metal riffs that sat firmly on the heavier side.
A memorable moment was the participatory ritual. Candles were distributed among the audience like a profane eucharist, turning the crowd into willing participants in the black mass. This shared, intimate theatre was the highlight of the evening. The boundary between worshipper and witness dissolved.
Their set list consisted of We Bow Down Before Your Cross by The Orthodox Singers as the usual opening and closing atmosphere inducing backing. They played the songs Pesn (hymns) 1 to 8 from Panahida (Requiem) and several Yekteniya (Litany) from Litourgiya.
Religious ritual and concert can indeed occupy the same space, as the ecstasy of liturgy and the catharsis of heavy music draw from the same well.
By grounding their work in genuine Orthodox tradition rather than cartoon Satanism, they’ve created something far more interesting. A black mass that makes you question where worship ends and profanation begins.
The ritual worked on its own terms, the candles, the coffin, the suffocating sonic immersion, creating an evening that was less about watching a band and more about participating in ceremony.
Sacred or profane? Perhaps, as Tenma suggested about the god’s dance and the moshpit, that’s a false distinction.
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