The Band

Two decades of silence, then the slowest and heaviest thing Malta has produced.

Victims of Creation were formed in 1992 by Rex and Dino Mifsud Lepre, at a time when Malta's metal scene was small enough that a band playing at this tempo had no obvious room to exist in. Their first recorded appearance came in 1996, when the track “Lotions and Potions” was included on the compilation The Core of Creation (Storm Records) — a different, pre-hiatus line-up, and for a long time the only document the band left behind.

What followed was a hiatus of roughly thirteen years. The band did not so much split as go quiet, and stayed that way until 2008, when guitarist AJ Burd joined and became the catalyst for putting the thing back together.

Victims of Creation, four members photographed in a corridor — The band, reassembled.

The comeback

In 2009 they were invited to play the first Malta Doom Metal Festival — the return show, and the start of a run that would take them back to that festival repeatedly across 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2014, as well as to Metal Days in Tolmin, Slovenia. In 2011 the German label Cyclone Empire signed them, which put a Maltese doom/death band on a roster with international distribution for the first time.

The debut album, Symmetry of Our Plagued Existence, arrived on 26 April 2013. They launched it live at Doom Shall Rise VIII in Germany. Five tracks, the last of them past the twenty-minute mark — nothing on it is in a hurry.

The band seated at a table with candles and old books — Candles and old books — the register the record works in.

The touring that followed put them on some serious bills. On 31 October 2014 they played Dutch Doom Days XIII at Baroeg in Rotterdam, on the same bill as Orange Goblin and Saint Vitus.

Lyrically the album sits in an old vein: apocalyptic and end-times imagery, fallen-angel and anti-clerical mythology, sin and corruption figured as a tree that renews itself through decay rather than redemption. Suffering is treated almost liturgically — despair as ritual, pain as transformation — and the closing track resolves into cosmic nihilism, a void left over once the gods have faded. It is medieval and ecclesiastical iconography turned inside out, not horror-film gore.

Line-up

Rex Bass & vocals — founding member, 1992
Dino Mifsud Lepre Drums — founding era
AJ Burd Guitar — joined 2008
Emanuel Portelli Guitar — from the 2013 Malta Doom Metal Festival onward

Recorded by

Daniel Bartolo played guitar on the 2013 album line-up, before Portelli took the position live.

Word is a follow-up has been simmering since 2021. Nothing has been announced, and nothing here should be read as a promise — when there is something to hear, it will surface on the band's Facebook page first.