For those who don’t know anything about Absurd, here’s a quick introduction.
The band formed while the members were in high school, and the group's early members are more or less known for all taking part in murdering a 15-year old boy named Sandro Beyer in 1993.
According to press and the book Lords of Chaos (which we know have a lot of faulty things in it), the reasons for killing schoolmate Beyer were because the boy would frequently hang around the young Absurd members despite that the members did not like him, eventually Beyer left them alone but then began writing slander and condemning the group for their Satanic views. A final threat posed by Beyer was that he threatened to expose an affair one of the band members were having with a mother of a student enrolled at the school. Hendrik Möbus's girlfriend spoke to Beyer with the intent to trick him into thinking she was on his side. She claimed to agree with his criticisms that he had about Absurd and that she wanted to help him "put a stop to them.”
She told him to meet at a certain point in a nearby forest at 8:00 PM to "resolve certain issues." Beyer arrived to the location at 8:00 PM that night as planned only to find the whole band of Absurd there, and that it was a setup. They led Beyer to a nearby shed, where they proceeded to strangle him with an electrical wire, and he died in a matter of moments. The members were collectively charged with murder, but were released from prison in late 1998. JFN was incarcerated again shortly after due to various crimes, including fleeing from Germany to the United States, in order to hide from the police. He was eventually apprehended by American police.
While the convicted members of Absurd were in jail, the band was called In Ketten (German for "In Chains").
The first releases were infuenced by punk/Oi! and hard rock/metal bands like Danzig, Mercyful Fate, OHL and Der Fluch. On their later albums, they became more influenced by extreme metal.
Despite constantly being labeled "NS black metal", Absurd have predominantly worked with morbid and barbaric themes on both their early and their later releases. The only exception have been the releases between 1995 and 1999. The first pressing of Thuringian Pagan Madness contained a dedication to Adolf Hitler and the Greater Germanic Reich. The Asgardsrei release in 1999, having NS-references in the lyrics, the liner notes and the symbolism used.
Here are the infamous article in the German Magazine Stern from 1993, in German.
