Most bands treat a split release as a footnote. Two tracks, a favour for a friend’s label, something that ends up in the discography’s basement where nobody looks. Abigail treat it like a passport stamp.
If you’ve already read our earlier introduction to the band, you know the broad shape of them: Tokyo, black metal, leather and bullet belts, absolutely zero interest in respectability. What that piece didn’t get into is the thing I find genuinely remarkable about them — the sheer volume of shared records, and what it says about how a Japanese underground band can build a life outside Japan without ever pretending to be from somewhere else.
A discography that reads like a map
Go looking for everything Abigail have put their name on and you’ll be at it a while. Splits, EPs, seven-inches with sleeves printed in colours that were clearly cheap that week. Partners from Europe. From South America. From other corners of Asia. The kind of tiny, stubborn labels that press three hundred copies, sell out through a distro mailing list, and never repress.
Here’s what that does. Every single one of those releases dropped Abigail into a completely different record collection. Some kid in Chile buys a split because he loves the other band, gets the sleeve home, flips it over, and finds two tracks of filthy, cackling, speed-addled black metal from Tokyo that he had no plans to hear. That’s how a cult gets built. Not through a campaign. Through a couple of thousand accidents, repeated for decades.
And it works both ways. You can hear the traffic in the music itself. There’s South American war metal in the way the riffs slur into each other, Teutonic thrash in the gang shouts, a whiff of old Scandinavian primitivism in the production choices — but the compound is theirs. Nobody else sounds quite like this. It’s the sound of a band who spent a very long time trading tapes with people who were also trading tapes with everyone else.
What the format demands
I’ve come around to thinking the split is the hardest format in metal. You get maybe eight minutes. You’re sitting next to a band whose fans mostly don’t know you, and half of them flipped straight to your side out of curiosity and are one weak riff away from flipping back.
Abigail are extremely good at this. Their short-form stuff has a kind of coiled efficiency to it — no ambient intro, no slow build, just a count-in and then everything at once. The songs know exactly how long they’ve got. Listen to enough of these tracks back to back and you notice how little fat there is anywhere in their writing, even on the full-lengths. Decades of having to make an impression in two songs will do that to a band.
There’s also something admirable in the refusal to sand anything down. Nothing about these records was made easier for foreign ears. No polished English sales pitch, no genre-tourism, no gesture toward what an overseas audience supposedly wants from a Japanese band. Just black metal played fast and mean and slightly drunk, offered to whoever wants it, and it turned out a lot of people did.
If you’re starting from zero, don’t start with the compilations. Find one split — any of them, honestly, it barely matters which — and let it do what it was designed to do. Play the Abigail side twice. Then go find the full-length that’s nearest to it in time, and keep pulling the thread from there. You’ll be at this for months.
That’s the whole trick. Small records, scattered wide, for a very long time.
