Sacrosanct

Thrash Metal from Enschede, the Netherlands! 1988: A few months after the release of the debut-album "Malleus Maleficarum" by the death-metal band Pestilence (Nld), the German guitar player Randy Meinhard abandons the band followed shortly by Marco Foddis to give life to his own musical child called Sacrosanct. Within weeks the young band is completed with the right members. Michael Cerrone is joining Randy with the guitar riffs, Remco Nijkamp is taking the bass, Ronny Scholten replaces Foddis at the drumkit and Michael Lucarelli completes the line-up on vocals

1988:

A few months after the release of the debut-album "Malleus Maleficarum" by the death-metal band Pestilence (Nld), the German guitar player Randy Meinhard abandons the band followed shortly by Marco Foddis to give life to his own musical child called Sacrosanct.

Within weeks the young band is completed with the right members. Michael Cerrone is joining Randy with the guitar riffs, Remco Nijkamp is taking the bass, Ronny Scholten replaces Foddis at the drumkit and Michael Lucarelli completes the line-up on vocals

1989:

The band releases their first and only demo called "The Die Is Cast". Soon after the band signs a one-album-contract with the No-Remorse Records-label (Virgin).

1990:

The debut album "Truth Is What Is" is released. It is described as techno-thrash. The press is quite impressed. Because of a poor promotion and little back-up from the record-company, the band is not able to do live-performances as much as they want to. After a short while No-Remorse-Records goes bankrupt. This setback leads to the departure of Cerrone and Nijkamp by the end of the summer. The two start up the band Imperium (Nld). Some time later that year Ronnie deserts the band to appear in the band Genetic Wisdom much later. Randy Meinhard and Michael Lucarelli sign up the guitarist Gerrit Knol, the German bass-slammer Christian Colli and the 16 year old drum-animal Haico van Atticum to replace the lost musicians.

1991:

With this cast, a promo-demo is recorded to find a new record deal.Due to the contractual 'small-print' of the contract with the demo-studio, these three brilliant songs will never appear on an album. After a (too) long wait, a deal for two albums is signed with the German 1 M F-Records-label.
It takes twenty-one days to record the second album "Recesses For The Depraved".

1992:

In January and February, Sacrosanct tours through Europe together with Invocator as a support of Dark Angel.The recording of the third CD is planned for the summer. But during the pre-productions they find that the musical direction has completely changed. The radical turn makes that Lucarelli's thrashy vocals do not fit the music anymore ? by far. After deliberation they decide that SACROSANCT has to let go of Lucarelli. He soon will reappear in Genetic Wisdom. Two weeks prior to the recordings, Sacrosanct call an old friend to fill in the blanks on the vocal tracks. The recording sessions are postponed and the new guy Collin Kock is trained to do his thing within the tracks that have been written so far. After only three weeks Gerrit Knol is the next to leave the band (he joins his friend Lucarelli in Genetic Wisdom). Collins brother Michael Kock offers to help the band in writing the new material, live gigging and maybe even the recording when necessary. His work is appreciated so much that he is accepted as a member of the group only after a two weeks. To give the two rookies some practise in the studio, they only performed with the dutch metal-coverband PHARAOH, the band records their latest track Shining Trough, to be released on the ? Stop War Campaign-compilation CD ? in october. The profits from the sales of that CD are donated to the victims of the Yugoslavia-war.

1993:

After rehearsing and writing three new tracks and adjusting the old material and repeatedly postponing the recordings they hit the studio in February. This time Sacrosanct only gets 18 days to record and mix their new CD. Due to some vocal problems, the lack of capacity of the studio and the lack of support from the record company they have to delay the release another month.

On the 24th of May, ?Tragic Intense? is released.

The Press is very happy with this release and give it a very warm welcome. The new style of Sacrosanct is hard to classify. The slow, heavy, brutal, tight, intense, melodic, atmospheric power-doom-metal is hard to categorize. The press can only describe this ?darkness' by referring to big names such as Black Sabbath, the old Omen, Queensryche but also Metallica and Pantera.