by Niklas Göransson

While signings like Proclamation drew Nuclear War Now! deeper into the Ross Bay lineage, the rise of Midnight and Bone Awl pushed the label beyond instinctive, passion-led work and toward the practical beginnings of real infrastructure.

 

YOSUKE KONISHI: I resisted European black metal for the longest time. Not from lack of interest – quite the opposite – but because that’s where everyone else’s attention seemed to be. Instead, I curated my own corner of the underground with a stronger focus on more obscure scenes.

Built on a catalogue populated by titles from the likes of BLASPHEMY, MORBOSIDAD, BLACK WITCHERY, and SARCÓFAGO, Nuclear War Now! soon became widely associated with bestial black metal.

YOSUKE: I was already getting pigeonholed as a ‘BLASPHEMY label’, which never sat right with me. N.W.N! released music I wanted to hear – genre boundaries didn’t factor in. Sure, I signed bands like PROCLAMATION, but the catalogue ranged from MIDNIGHT to BONE AWL and ARES KINGDOM: all completely different-sounding bands.

The summer of 2006 saw Nuclear War Now! – in conspiracy with BLASPHEMY guitarist Ryan Förster’s new label, Ross Bay Cult – release PROCLAMATION’s “Advent of the Black Omen”. Arguably, the Spaniards presented one of the most definitive articulations of the so-called war metal aesthetic to date.

YOSUKE: PROCLAMATION almost served as a tribute band at a time when the bestial sound was becoming increasingly prominent in the underground. Bands like BEHERIT and BLASPHEMY had grown more popular around then, even if their releases were still hard to come by.

Worth noting is how much of this resurgence grew out of soil cultivated by underground labels like Full Moon Productions, Dark Horizon, and Nuclear War Now!, whose releases helped maintain interest long before the style became fashionable again.

YOSUKE: Some credit also belongs to Osmose for picking up bands like BLACK WITCHERY, REVENGE, and AXIS OF ADVANCE. Obviously, the label was already working with BLASPHEMY, so Hervé clearly has good taste. Or at least he had good taste – I don’t really know much about their roster these days.

 

In August 2006, Nuclear War Now! released its first title featuring new material from MORBOSIDAD – one of the earliest bands to join the label. Their “Legiones Bestiales” seven-inch offered two songs totalling three and a half minutes, with the remaining ninety seconds filled by an intro and outro courtesy of Yosuke and Jason Campbell’s old black noise project, EREBUS.

YOSUKE: The EREBUS thing was entirely Jason’s doing. By then, he’d moved to the Bay Area and started attending law school. We were all hanging out at the time, and MORBOSIDAD needed something to open and close their new EP, so he offered to handle it.

Back in 2001, after hearing MORBOSIDAD’s self-titled debut, Yosuke secured a licence for a vinyl edition. Repulsed by the original presentation, he extracted border art from an old gig flyer and designed a new cover – pushing it towards a stark, xeroxed look rooted in classic underground aesthetics.

After founder and frontman Tomás Stench pledged to work with Nuclear War Now! for future releases, Yosuke commissioned a new band logo. However, MORBOSIDAD’s 2004 follow-up album, “Cójete a Dios por el culo”, instead surfaced through Evil Morgue Entertainment – an Oakland label run by IMPALED drummer Raúl Varela.

YOSUKE: Tomás and I were constantly fighting and arguing over random things. We had a pretty tumultuous relationship – partly because I was dating, and later married, his sister. When MORBOSIDAD recorded that album, he and I weren’t even on speaking terms, which explains how it ended up on a different label.

You must have been delighted to see the logo you commissioned paired with that cover artwork.

YOSUKE: No – I really, really hated it. To this day, I still tell them the cover is total shit. It’s basically a cheap copy of “Desecration of the Holy Kingdom” (BLACK WITCHERY) but executed by an inferior artist. Let’s just say Tomás had a somewhat less discriminating eye, as evidenced by the original version of their debut.

By this point, had MORBOSIDAD made it beyond the Satanic Hispanic scene?

YOSUKE: Definitely. As drummer for IMPALED, Raúl had solid reach in the underground – even bleeding into the commercial side of things – and a strong CD distribution network. He also licensed a European vinyl edition to From Beyond, which helped the album circulate more widely.

 

Interpersonal friction aside, MORBOSIDAD’s place in the local N.W.N! orbit brought several live opportunities. For instance, they joined ABIGAIL on the 2002 West Coast run, then appeared with other Bay Area N.W.N! bands on SABBAT’s San Francisco date three years later.

In October 2006, MORBOSIDAD opened for DESTRÖYER 666 as the Australians’ Wolves over America Tour reached San Francisco’s Elbo Room.

YOSUKE: I organised the show with Lucifer’s Hammer, the booking company run by Matt Shapiro, who also owned the venue. What happened was that Stan from R.I.P. Records had put together a DESTRÖYER 666 tour – but he completely dropped the ball on the Bay Area date.

In what way?

YOSUKE: Stan seems to have assumed the band would contact someone locally and everything would magically fall into place. Instead, a few days before they arrived, he called me and said, ‘DESTRÖYER 666 are coming to the Bay Area; there’s no roadie lined up and nothing’s been organised, so you’re gonna have to deal with it.’

Wolves over America, DESTRÖYER 666’s first US tour, stood out for its gruelling logistics: early-morning flights between shows, followed by overnight airport layovers instead of sleep. By the time they reached California, everyone was running on fumes.

YOSUKE: It worked out great for the band and me – less so for Jason, who drank too much whiskey and got a DUI <laughs>. I still remember receiving a phone call from Chris (DESTRÖYER 666): ‘Listen, he’s being arrested.’ To be fair, the cop was nice enough to drive the band members back to the hotel.

 

YOSUKE: Athenar (MIDNIGHT) and I started talking when I was working on the second “Outbreak of Evil”; Omid from Outlaw Recordings introduced us. We kept in touch afterwards and eventually agreed to collaborate, beginning with a full reissue of his entire discography.

In November 2006, following an appearance on “Outbreak of Evil Vol. 2”, MIDNIGHT’s “Complete and Total Fucking Midnight” compilation marked the Ohio one-man speed metal band’s definitive arrival on Nuclear War Now!.

The year before, Shifty Records, My Mind’s Eye, and Outlaw Recordings had issued an earlier version as a small CD run that sold out almost immediately. N.W.N!’s edition, released on both CD and double-LP, gathered MIDNIGHT’s 2003 demo, the 2004 “White Hot Fire” EP, rare compilation tracks, and several unreleased songs.

YOSUKE: The double-LP became one of our best-selling releases; I think the second run alone was at least two thousand copies. I know it went through several pressings because I kept tweaking the colour scheme, but my strongest memory is realising that N.W.N! needed broader distribution into physical stores.

Besides its curatorial role with popular archival releases, the label was now home to several rising contemporary acts. Bands such as TOXIC HOLOCAUST and MIDNIGHT had begun selling in quantities far beyond earlier titles.

YOSUKE: Albums from MORBOSIDAD, PROCLAMATION, and ABIGAIL, I could distribute myself. Selling copies one at a time or trading with European labels like Northern Heritage was easy enough, but I didn’t have the infrastructure required to get records into stores.

Even as file-sharing and the post-9/11 recession hollowed out record shopping, physical store presence still mattered. Retail offered visibility, impulse purchases, and a foothold in scenes where people still discovered new releases by browsing shelves. But landing titles there required a distributor who could handle invoicing, warehousing, and shipping – tasks well beyond the scope of a part-time solo operation.

By the mid-2000s, most US distributors once handling extreme metal had collapsed. Dutch East India went under with thousands of Full Moon Productions titles trapped in its warehouse; Big Daddy, crushed by store returns, folded while owing Necropolis tens of thousands of dollars. The few survivors either consolidated or abandoned independent music entirely, leaving small labels with almost no reliable pathways to retail.

YOSUKE: I basically sat down and wrote out a list of viable distributors on paper – and Ebullition immediately came to mind. I remembered them from when I first discovered punk and hardcore; they were just getting started then, and their fanzine was circulating at local shows.

Founded in 1990, Ebullition began as a California punk label grounded in the classic ecosystem of fanzines, flyers, and mail-order catalogues. Over the next decade and a half, it expanded into a serious wholesale operation – still firmly underground in ethos, but built to move serious volume.

Rather than courting retail the way larger distributors did, Ebullition operated on blunt, functional terms: payment up front, a strict no-consignment policy, and high minimum orders. For a small label wanting shop presence without entering a corporate pipeline, this model was ideal.

YOSUKE: I admired their extremely rigid, uncompromising, almost militant approach to DIY. Ebullition even had a rule where any submissions bearing a barcode would automatically get trashed <laughs>. I sent them some copies of my releases, and they said, ‘Okay, we can distribute this.’

 

In late 2006, Yosuke gave CULT OF DAATH’s debut album the full double-LP treatment. Originally released on CD through Deathgasm Records the year prior, the N.W.N! vinyl edition of “Slit Throats and Ritual Nights” received a complete visual overhaul by LEVIATHAN’s Jef Whitehead.

YOSUKE: Jef painted all the artwork – essentially every panel in the layout – but due to a mistake on our designer Mark Reategui’s part, someone else’s signature ended up on the sleeve <laughs>. You should bring that up next time you talk to Jef; it was a bit of a sore point for a while.

How did that even happen?

YOSUKE: That release came shortly after the “Anxious Death / Forever Under” (INQUISITION) double-LP, and Mark used the same gatefold jacket template. He stripped everything back, but forgot to delete the previous artist’s signature – which then carried over onto the CULT OF DAATH cover.