In the year of 1993 Pär Johansson was playing in a band called Dawn of Darkness.
Things moved slowly and the band did not progress much what so ever, mostly because of the fact that most of the members were more involved in other projects.
Thus started a brainchild to form in the plans of Pär. He wanted to play in a real extreme band with people sharing the same vision.
As time went on he got rather occupied by his solo project Belsemar, and the plans for what was to become Satariel was lying pretty still for almost a year.
Eventually Pär discussed his idea of a new band with Mikael Degerman (also he a former member of Dawn of Darkness, tired of nothing happening) and Magnus Alakangas. They all joined forces and in short a couple of songs were done.
At this time they went in the vein of the original idea - as brutal as possible that is - and was rather primitive, quite inspired by bands such as Darkthrone and similar bands. No drummer was originally used when composing the first songs, only programming.
As this is a very boring way to play they took Mikael Granqvist (from The Moaning) in as a drummer. Something which made the band change it´s musical direction quite a bit, as he could not play very fast at all, much because he was a guitarist and definitly not a drummer to begin with. A demotape ("Thy Heavens' Fall") was recorded in 1994 containing songs of mid-tempo black metal. Not much to mention about it nowadays. Satariel had at this moment in time not quite found their own direction and and was technically very limited in their composing.
The demo did anyway lead to an offer of a record contract with Impure Creations Records from France. As the deal was not that good Satariel chose to refuse it and keep searching for better deals. During this time the band played around the cities of northern Sweden quite some which led to a growing awareness of how limited they were by Mikael Granqvist´s drumming performances. After quite some strange turns a new drummer was found in Andreas Nilzon (from The Moaning also). The funny thing was that eveyone in the band thought Mikael Granqvist was on terms with this, and that he was to play second guitar from hereon. Well, it soon got clear that everyone except Mikael Granqvist knew this. He did not have a clue about these plans, and thought he was the drummer all until at a drunken event the band discussed the last rehearsal with their new drummer. At this time Mikael Granqvist was not too interested in continuing in the band (which might figures!).
Though there never was any real hard feelings from any part regarding this. As the mess cleared Satariel was ready to record their next demotape which came to be known as "Hellfuck" demo (which Dan Swanö later on picked as name for the Infestdead album). This demo started to show a totally new dimension of the band, and got a very good response from magazines and fans around the world. It did also result in a couple of offers to record deals, but as there always seemed to be something crappy with the offers also this demo resulted in zero deals. More gigs were done and Satariel was broadcasted on swedish national radio P3 when they opened for At The Gates among other events. Yet frustrated over not getting a decent deal and the coming and going of several members as second guitarrist, they once again decided to put some new songs on tape, resulting in "Promo '96".
This tape once again showed a more distinct direction of the band and got the band voted among the ten best unsigned bands ´96 (Satariel got third place) by swedish major metal magazine Close-Up. There soon came an offer from Pulverised Records for an album deal. It was not much better than previous offers, but the band decided to go for it anyway, as it sure would be better to at least put an album out rather than recording yet another demo. Around this time Andreas Nilzon left the band due to lack of inspiration and motivation for Satariel. He was immediatly replaced by Robert Sundelin, who at the time also played in Necromicon. In Robert they found a new force for the band and things progressed very positive. Before the recording of the album they felt that a second guitarist would be preferable, as they had been playing with only one guitarist (Magnus) for the last months.
Mikael Granqvist was asked once again if he was more interested this time. And that he was. Once more the original four members were gathered to strike down on the world, now with addition of Robert. So in 1997 they entered legendary Sunlight Studio with Tomas Skogsberg to record the debut album "Lady Lust Lilith". The album once more showed a band more and more forming their special brand of melodic death/black metal and turned out really great. Due to Pulverised the album did not hit the shops before 1998 though, but was met by reviewers around the globe with mostly very good words. After this things started to go slow, which may seem a paradox. But as their label did anything but distribute and promote well, it might not be that strange. 1999-2000 was spent doing gigs here and there rather sporadically, and it was quite silent about Satariel for this period of time.
Tired of nothing moving forward Pär finally decided it was time to find another label, as all confidence in Pulverised Records was gone. So in the winter of 2000 Pär and Magnus compiled some new songs which they hoped would get them signed to a bigger and better label. A promotion CD was sent to a couple of interesting labels, but the first copy went earlier than the others to Hammerheart Records, as Satariel wished to get a deal with them the most. Based upon other bands experiences it seemed a good label, and Pär had also had some dealings and contacts with them previously during the years. To Satariel´s great joy Hammerheart responded immediatly offering a new deal. The band decided to use some different studio apart from the more common as Abyss and Studio Fredman for their next album to get a more personal and better suited sound and production this time.
So in May to April they recorded their upcoming release in Dug-Out Studios with producer Daniel Bergstrand in Uppsala. It turned out amazing with a more mature and balanced direction of their far developed melodic death-metal. Also, Satariel hooked Messiah Marcolin (vocalist from Candlemass & Memento Mori) to the recording, which was quite a happening as all the members spent their early teens as big Candlemass fans.