Hellhammer was an early
black metal band, popular briefly in
Europe in the mid-
1980s.
Tom Warrior[?] (later of
Celtic Frost),
Bruce Day[?] and
Steve Warrior[?] formed the band in
1982 (
1982 in music). A demo tape called
Apocalyptic Raids[?] became an underground, word-of-mouth hit and was eventually released by
Noise Records[?] (
1984 in music). By then, the band had already broken up, but the recording was one of the original black metal recordings, and spawned a legion of imitators, playing
doom metal,
Norwegian death metal and
industrial metal[?].