In 1982, a trio of unknown musicians from Newcastle released an album called Black Metal, and inadvertently handed an entire genre its name. Conrad Lant, who sang and played bass on that record under the stage name Cronos, died on October 1, 2026, at age 63, according to a statement from his band, Venom, and his son Nathan.

Lant was born Conrad Thomas Lant on January 15, 1963, in Kensington, London, and moved to Newcastle upon Tyne at around age eight, the city that remained his base for the rest of his life. After leaving school he went to work at Impulse Studios, where he helped the owners launch the independent label Neat Records, trading unpaid studio labor for time to record demos with the band he was playing in. That band, formed in 1979, took the name Venom once Lant switched from guitar to bass. In 1980, when original singer Clive Archer departed, he stepped up to the microphone and took a new name for himself. "My planet is Saturn, and the Greek god of Saturn is Cronus," he told Louder in 2022. "So for me it was obvious."

Fronting the classic trio with guitarist Jeff "Mantas" Dunn and drummer Tony "Abaddon" Bray, Cronos helped turn a scrappy, low budget record into one of heavy music's most influential documents. The band's first release, the 1981 single "In League with Satan" backed with "Live Like an Angel," arrived the same year as its debut album, Welcome to Hell. Black Metal followed in 1982, and its title was adopted wholesale by the extreme metal scene that grew up around it. Decibel credits Lant's raw, guttural vocal style as an early blueprint for the singing style later used across black and death metal, tracing Venom's influence to musicians including Metallica's James Hetfield and Celtic Frost's Tom Gabriel Warrior. Follow-up albums At War with Satan, in 1984, Possessed, in 1985, and Calm Before the Storm, in 1987, consolidated the sound the three Newcastle teenagers had stumbled into.

Cronos left Venom for a solo career in the late 1980s before reuniting with Dunn and Bray to reform the band's original lineup in 1995. The reunited trio released Cast in Stone in 1997, but the partnership did not last, and Dunn and Bray eventually departed again. By the time Venom made its final records, Cronos was the only one of the band's original three members still playing in it, carrying the name forward largely on his own for the rest of its history. A serious setback arrived in early 2002, when a falling rock struck him in the neck during a climbing trip in Wales, damaging muscles and tendons badly enough that, according to Blabbermouth, doctors said the accident could have been fatal. Venom did not perform again for nearly two years.

He rebuilt the band around guitarist Rage (Stuart Dixon) and drummer Dante (Danny Needham), a lineup that carried Venom through two more decades of recording and touring. In 2004, Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl recruited Cronos for Probot, his all star extreme metal side project, after writing to say how much he admired Venom and had seen the band perform live. Cronos recorded three different vocal takes over the resulting track, "Centuries of Sin," so Grohl could choose his favorite, and a limited single pressing of 6,666 copies preceded the full album's release on Southern Lord Recordings in February 2004. "It was very, very strange," Cronos said of the approach. "I'm not preoccupied. I'm open for everything. And Dave's cool." Into Oblivion, released in May 2026, became Venom's sixteenth studio album and Cronos's last. "I want people in the future to think, 'That band Venom was crazy!' I just wanted to be part of the story of rock 'n' roll. I wanted to live that life," he said in an interview later quoted by MusicRadar.

Word of his death spread through the metal press within hours. "For more than four decades, Conrad's voice, bass and vision were at the heart of VENOM," the band wrote in its statement. His son Nathan thanked the band's global fan base, whom Venom followers call the Legions, writing that his father "has laid down his soul, and his music will live on. The legend of Cronos will never die." Gary Holt, guitarist of Exodus and Slayer, wrote on social media, "One of my all time hero's is no longer with us."

Sixteen studio albums carry Cronos's bass lines and voice, from the raw urgency of Welcome to Hell to Into Oblivion, finished only months before he died. The leather, spikes and inverted imagery he helped design for Venom's stage shows became stock visual language for an entire wing of heavy music, and the vocal roar he first tried out as a Newcastle teenager is still the basic grammar of black and death metal vocals decades later. Dave Grohl sought him out precisely because that sound had never gone away. Impulse Studios and Neat Records, the Newcastle label he helped start as a teenager trading his labor for recording time, are long gone, but the genre that borrowed its name from his band's second record is still being played by musicians who were not yet born when Black Metal came out.