Conrad Lant, known as Cronos, the snarling frontman for the British heavy metal band Venom, which with its punk-savage music and diabolical image explored the darkest fringes of metal and influenced major acts like Metallica and Slayer, has died. He was 63.
The band announced the death on social media, but provided no further details.
Venom formed in the late 1970s and emerged in the early MTV era, when metal-lite hair bands like Def Leppard and Whitesnake were starting to scale the pop charts.
There were no such crossover dreams for Mr. Lant and his group. Taking a more barbarian turn, Venom drew from the raw aggression of Motörhead and the occult musings of Black Sabbath, and ventured into even grimmer territory, pioneering extreme subgenres like black metal — the name of which was drawn from the title of Venom’s 1982 sophomore album — and thrash metal.
As Lars Ulrich, the Metallica drummer, once put it, Venom’s first album, “Welcome To Hell,” “was a classic. Black metal, speed metal, death metal, whatever you want to call it, Venom started it all with that one record.”
Kerry King, the Slayer guitarist, paid tribute in a 2007 interview with The Columbus Dispatch. “To me,” he said, “it was all about Venom.”
The band’s sound, filthy and ferocious, was marked by the sledgehammer drum fills of Anthony Bray (whose stage name was Abaddon); the machine-gun guitar riffs of Jeff Dunn (Mantas); and the bulldozer bass and hounds-of-hell vocals of Mr. Lant, who took his name from the Greek god who castrated his father with a sickle.
While bands like Black Sabbath and Mötley Crüe occasionally invoked Lucifer in their lyrics, Venom summoned the devil so often that he might as well have been sitting in on keyboards. A core text for the group was “The Satanic Bible,” by the Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey. The band’s logo — a goat head within an inverted pentagram — was designed by Mr. Lant, who adapted it from the Sigil of Baphomet, a familiar satanic image.
“We take it very seriously,” Mr. Lant said of the dark arts in a 1982 interview with Sounds.
In what could be taken as a kind of honor for the band, Venom’s “Possessed” was one of the original “filthy 15” songs singled out for their objectionable lyrics by Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center during the record-labeling wars that began in the 1980s.
Concerned parents may have had a point. Venom’s 1981 track “In League With Satan” actually did include satanic preaching recorded in reverse.
Others, including Ozzy Osbourne — both in his days as the Black Sabbath frontman and in his solo career — were known to reference Satan. But, as Mr. Lant once put it, Mr. Osbourne “was singing about the devil. I wanted to be the devil.”
Conrad Thomas Lant was born on Jan. 15, 1963, in the Chelsea section of London. His brother Anthony, known as Antton, played drums with Venom for a period, and his brother Graham was a drummer for the art-pop band Prefab Sprout.
The family moved to Newcastle, in the north of England, when Conrad was 7. “When I came up to Newcastle, it was nothing to do with music and all to do with shipyards and coal mines and depression,” he said in a 2010 interview with The Quietus.
Mr. Lant joined what became Venom as a guitarist before switching to bass, and took over lead vocals when Clive Archer — known onstage as Jesus Christ — left the band.
The members’ monikers were “more than stage names,” Mr. Lant told Sounds. “They’re states of mind. It’s sort of like a possession.”
To the initiated, Venom’s no-quarter musical approach was eye-opening. The influential British music journalist Geoff Barton called “Welcome to Hell” the “musical equivalent of the earth splitting asunder, opening up and revealing a filthy gaping maw to the Kingdom Below.”
Not everyone, though, was aching to cruise down the River Styx. Venom never achieved the commercial success of many of the bands it influenced. Its highest-charting album, “At War With Satan” (1984), topped out at No. 64 in Britain. Still, the band, with various lineups and pauses, trundled on, releasing 16 studio albums over the decades.
Information about Mr. Lant’s survivors was not immediately available.
With his gravelly voice and bulldozer bass, Mr. Lant was often compared to Lemmy from Motörhead. His flamboyant leather outfits, against a backdrop of fiery pyrotechnics, evoked for some Gene Simmons of Kiss.
To Mr. Lant, though, Kiss’s onstage explosions reminded him of “children’s party firecrackers,” he said in a 2015 interview with Collide. In the early days, he added, Venom would check out Motörhead shows and “think, ‘Oh, I thought this was going to be louder.’ We’d listen to Black Sabbath albums and think, ‘I thought these guys were supposed to be scary?’”
For Venom, Mr. Lant said, “it was just a case of putting all the things we saw missing from their music into our music.”
Alain Delaqueriere contributed reporting.
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