The Setembro Negro Festival 2025 brings one of the most anticipated shows for extreme metal fans: Triptykon, featuring a special set of Celtic Frost classics. Fronting the band, Tom G. Warrior—a key figure in global heavy metal and a pioneer of black and death metal—returns to Brazil to celebrate his history and revisit compositions that have marked generations. In this exclusive interview, the musician discussed his expectations for the festival, the selection of the setlist, and the impact of finally playing a full Celtic Frost show in South America.

During the conversation, Tom also reflected on his artistic trajectory, the difficulties of Hellhammer's early days, Celtic Frost's creative boldness, the lessons learned from painful mistakes (including "Cold Lake"), and the renewal process that gave rise to Triptykon. With his characteristic candor, he spoke about legacy, philosophy, artistic freedom, his relationship with his late co-founder Martin Eric Ain, and even the future of music and humanity. A profound and honest portrait of one of metal's most influential and restless artists.

Marcelo Vieira

Hi Tom, it's a pleasure to have you here. To begin with, what can the Brazilian audience expect from this special show at Setembro Negro, focused on Celtic Frost's repertoire?

Why does everybody ask me that question? I've been around in the scene for 44 years. Don't they know now what to expect? I mean, you know, it's not my first day. Hey, people know what I am, what I stand for, what I do on stage. And I've played Brazil before several times. It's a very strange question to me. What can they expect? Well, I'm a musician. [So expect] Music.

Was there a particular criteria behind the song selection for this tour?

Well, the idea behind it is that we absolutely enjoy playing Brazil. And I'm not just saying that because I'm in an India or Chile and Argentina and all the countries we've played so far in South America. And also the combination of Triumph of Death and Triptykon. I've never been able to play a full Celtic Frost set in South America. Last time I played, we played a South America tour, which included Chile, Brazil, and some other countries. We played, I think, a mixed set, Triptykon, Celtic Frost. But this time, we have more chances to play more of the classic songs as the promoter requested. So the idea is that we feel very honored to be asked back to South America repeatedly in the last few years, especially since Celtic Frost, which was my main band for most of my life, never made it to South America. We tried several times to play South America, and for some reason or another, it never happened. And the very first time I was able to play in South America was with Triptykon, and then luckily also with Triumph of Death playing Hellhammer's music. And now we're coming back with both of these bands. So the idea is that we felt very, we felt very welcomed by the reaction of the audience.

Many musicians say that performing old songs feels like revisiting ghosts from the past. Do you feel that way?

Again, I have to refer to the audience with this. It really depends on your audience. If the audience is interested in also some older music, some classic thrash metal, proto-black metal, then it doesn't really feel like ghosts. It feels very present. It feels very up to date. Really, it depends. And the exchange between the audience and the band. Of course, these are songs that are rather old, that I've written maybe 40 years ago, some of them. But so far, we've been very lucky. The audience reactions, not least also in South America, have been as if it was brand new music. I don't know exactly why this is. I'm very, very happy it is like this. But we come on stage, and the audience is very mixed. There are young people, there's older people, my generation too. So it's a mixed audience. And the reaction is as if we would play a new album. You really have to ask the audience about that.

What are your strongest memories from performing in Brazil and connecting with the Brazilian audience?

Coming from Switzerland, I felt the audience was very energetic, very enthusiastic. Here in Switzerland, people are a little colder, a little more restrained, a little more conservative. I guess it's the national culture here. But when we played in many places, actually in South America, people were much warmer in a way, much more welcoming. Much more enthusiastic. They weren't afraid to show their enthusiasm. They weren't afraid to sweat and to headbang and to just engage with the music. That's really the main difference I felt.

Yes, we have. We have several recordings of Triptykon playing Celtic Frost Tributes. Because by now, a lot of festivals have asked if we could do this. So we've played, I don't know, maybe 10 times. We've played the Tribute set and we recorded several of these concerts. But Triptykon is also Triptykon, and we feel it's more important for us to release a new Triptykon studio album because we are an active band and playing the Celtic Frost Legacy is only a part of who we are. So once we record, as we recorded or finished the new studio album, which we are working on right now, then I think we will talk about releasing some of the material we've recorded. We have some favorite concerts that we recorded, and we will listen to them again and then do the mixing and maybe in the future to release a live album. Right now, we need to make a new Triptykon album.

Do you remember the first time you realized you wanted to dedicate your life to music?

Well, that was when I was probably a young teenager. I grew up with music. Music was very important to me because of the sometimes very difficult circumstances of my youth. Music became an escape for me, a sanctuary. And as I grew older, of course, this caused the desire to play music myself. And I began to understand music better. I began to understand, yeah, you have to go to a studio, and you have to buy instruments. As I was a young teenager, I started to understand how the music scene works. I read a lot of music magazines. And I really was immersed in the record collection that my mother had at the time, which was a very broad collection. From jazz to rock. I listened to all of this as a young teenager. So I began to really feel I wanted to try and instrument myself. And first I wanted to become a drummer. But we didn't have the money for a drum kit. So I started looking at basses. And that's really how it started.

You've often mentioned how Hellhammer was heavily criticized and that nobody wanted to support you back then. How did you cope emotionally with that rejection?

Well, it was a very divided reaction for us. On one hand, we said we don't care. We believe in Hellhammer, and we believe in what we're doing. And we also felt that we had created our own little world. And we didn't really care what anybody on the outside was thinking. On the other hand, it was of course difficult to deal with it. I mean, we're human beings. We were young human beings with feelings like everybody else. And it was sometimes difficult to deal with it, of course. You have to learn to deal with this. You have to learn to absorb this, to learn from it.

Looking back, do you feel that lack of support somehow fueled your evolution as an artist?

Well, yeah, of course. It made us more radical. It made us more determined. And we wanted to show the world, yes, our music is good. And we also wanted to show the world that, yeah, we can improve. We know we're not perfect, but we are working fanatically on improving ourselves as a band.

Today, many musicians from different genres cite Hellhammer as an influence. Has there been anyone in particular who really surprised you by saying so?

That's a very difficult question to answer. Because I try. I try not to think about that. It's very arrogant to walk around and to think, yeah, I'm an influence. I don't really work like this. I really care about the music. I'm very grateful that people listen to my music. I'm very grateful that people allow me to be a musician. That I'm still here as a musician after over 40 years. Now, I look at it, to me, it's a gift that people listen to my music. And it's a gift that people allow me to play all across the world, including South America, as a musician. That's not something I would have taken for granted. And it was, like we said earlier, a dream of mine when I was a teenager. And people have made this possible. So I'm extremely grateful for that. That's really, that's really all I can say about that.

Celtic Frost quickly stood out for its boldness in including strings, keyboards, and female vocals. Where did that drive to break barriers come from?

Well, it's very simple. It's the music that I listen to, the music that Martin Ergain listened to. We were die-hard heavy metal fans, of course. But we also listened to jazz music, classical music. New wave music at the time. And we liked a lot of that. And we didn't understand why, at the time, people said, you cannot combine this with heaviness. We were very curious to hear how, for example, new wave elements sounded with heavy music. Or how some classical instruments sounded with heavy music. And if you look at the bands that were before us, like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, for example. We played classical instruments, and it sounded fantastic. Or rock music, the early rock music of the 1970s that I was quite a fan of. They combined a lot of new wave elements with rock music, with heavy guitars and everything. And it sounded fantastic. So we wanted to try what it sounds like with our sound, with even heavier guitars, with a heavier sound. And we didn't understand why you couldn't do that.

At the time, did you have any sense that you were creating something ahead of its time?

No, not at all. It was really just the music that we liked. And we really didn't understand that we did something new. We started realizing this when the media wrote about it. Or when people from the audience talk to us about it. Or when magazines like, at the time, for example, Kerrang! Magazine came to us and said, this sounds like something we'd never heard. The combination of this and that has never been done. That's when we started understanding. But for us, it was really a very personal thing. It was just the music we were passionate about. We simply used the musicians that inspired us. We wanted to do music like this, too.

How do you see the relationship between music and visual arts in your work?

That has always been very important for us. Martin and I always felt that the visual side was like a gift. It allowed you to express yourself on yet another level, not just musically. But there was a different side to art. Art can be visual, art can be audio. And we felt the visual side of it was just as creative as the audio side.

What are your strongest memories from the creation and recording process with Martin?

I think we were both very strong characters with a lot of ideas. And we were very different people from each other. Which sometimes made it very complex to arrive at one result. But it also made it extremely interesting. I think I learned a lot from Martin's ideas, which sometimes were very strange to me. And I think Martin learned a lot from my ideas, which sometimes were very strange to him. And I think the result was that we were both growing as people. I heard opinions that I would have never heard. And the same for him. And at the end of the day, even if we had disagreements sometimes, I think at the end of the day, we always arrived at something very creative. In fact, at the very last time I sat together with Martin A. two weeks before he died, we talked about exactly this. We said, yeah, we had a lot of conflict sometimes about what to do with a certain song or what idea to use. But at the end of the day, when we had discussed everything, we felt it was something new. And we always managed to turn conflicts into something artful.

It is now known that Nirvana listened to To Mega Therion in their van before recording Nevermind. What was your impression of Nirvana when you first heard them?

Well, at the time, for my ears at the time, Nirvana was something very new and I had to get used to it. I had to listen to it a few times to start to understand it. Because they too, I think they simply tried to do something new. And I think at the time, heavy metal was a very tiring scene. It had become very decadent, including Celtic Frost, with all the hair metal and everything, the Hollywood influence on metal. I think it made heavy metal way too decadent at the end of the 1980s or early 1990s. And Nirvana came and swept all of this away. Nirvana came and showed that true rock music probably needs to be created in a garage and not by millionaires with hairspray. And I think that was actually very refreshing. But it was also a shock because Celtic Frost had also become very decadent. And Nirvana really pushed all of this out of the scene and said, no, this is the essence of rock music. And it was a wake-up call, including for me.

Cold Lake is still seen as an oddity in your discography. What lessons did that record bring you as a musician and as a person?

Well, it was a catastrophic record, in my opinion, and I bear responsibility for it, which at the time was difficult. But on the other hand, I have to say, because we were very honest with ourselves about it once we had realized what we had created. I think we all were very honest with ourselves. And especially myself, I think I felt that I owed it to myself to be honest about it and to really analyze it and not just say, yeah, it's a good album because I did it. I felt I had to admit to myself, no, it wasn't a good album. So I think it forced me to grow up as a musician, to become more mature as a musician. And to also look into the future and say, why did this happen? What is bad about it? What is good about it? What do I have to avoid in the future? Is my quality control sufficient or do I need to have much stricter quality control when I do an album? I also realized that I had given away much too much control to other musicians or to the producer. And I swore to myself, this will never happen again because my name is in the album. So I have the responsibility, and people will look at me no matter who was involved. My name is on there and I'm for the quality. So I think it made me grow a lot as a musician and as an individual. And hopefully ever since then, I haven't done another Cold Lake album.

Even knowing that there's fan demand, why are you so resistant to the idea of reissuing Cold Lake?

Because it's a waste of resources and we are wasting enough resources on this planet. You know, releasing it as a vial, for example, takes a lot of oil and it would pollute the environment. It would be a waste of resources. Look, I don't have the rights to Cold Lake. The record company owned the early Celtic Frost material. By now, these rights are with BMG in London. So if BMG one day decides to reissue it, I can't stop it. And I'm sure this is going to happen at the latest when I'm going to die. Because then they think, okay, now Tommy's in the headlines, so let's release everything we have to make some money. So I think you will see a reissue at the latest when I die. So far, they listened to me when I said, please don't reissue this album. But I'm sure eventually they will reissue it because they have the rights to it. It's simply market Reality, isn't it?

There were periods when you stepped away from music and worked in regular jobs. What perspective did those more "anonymous" times bring you?

Well, I came out of Celtic Frost after Celtic Frost had dissolved for the first time in early 1993. And I was very frustrated by, in a sense, the 1980s record industry, who were stealing money and interfering with music and with songwriting and with album set lists and everything, with album covers. I mean, the record companies in the 1980s basically interfered with everything that a band wanted to do. And at the end of the day, they stole your money. So after years of Celtic Frost enduring this, I was very frustrated. And yeah, I sold all my equipment, and I tried to be a regular person, and I worked a regular job. But then I went to concerts, and it was very painful to see other bands playing. I started avoiding concerts because it was too painful to see that. So I realized, no, I have to try it again. I have to try to be a musician again. I can't stand this. I can't stand it. For example, my ex-wife at the time took me to a Queensryche concert and they were phenomenal. And it hurt me to stand there and not play music myself. So I decided I'll try it again in the mid-1990s. But the main difference was that now I formed my own record company, and I found my own publishing company to have full control over what I'm doing. And that was the best decision of my life. And these companies still exist. And everything I've been doing ever since then, including the Celtic Frost reunion album and all the Tryptophan albums, are done on my own record company that is in partnership with another record company. I have full control of everything. That's the big lesson.

The comeback with Monotheist was widely acclaimed. How was it for you to experience such a creative rebirth after so many years of silence?

Well, Martin and I felt that Celtic Frost wasn't really finished. That Celtic Frost hadn't really said everything. We had wanted to say, not least because of the interference of record companies. And we also didn't like that basically one of the last things Celtic Frost had done was the Cold Lake album. We felt we needed to make a statement, a major statement. So when we reformed Celtic Frost in, I think it was 2001, we didn't just rush into the studio and do a quick album. We decided we'd take our time. We write a million songs. And then when we feel the time is right, we assemble the best songs of that and release an album. At the end of the day, it took five and a half years and a million demos of a million songs until we arrived at Monotheist. But we were very happy that we took the patience and didn't just rush out an album. We wanted to make an album that felt right to us and every song had to be right. And that's why Monotheist is the way it is.

Triptykon was born right after Celtic Frost's definitive end. Do you see it as a spiritual continuation of that era, or as a fresh new beginning?

It's very much a continuation of Celtic Frost. I left Celtic Frost not for musical reasons. I was very happy with the music that Celtic Frost created at the end. I left it for personal reasons because there were certain people in Celtic Frost that put ego over music. So when I formed Triptykon, I asked the last guitar player of Celtic Frost, Thuy Santura, to be the guitar player. Because I knew he didn't have any ego problems. He was a phenomenal musician, and he loves creating music just like me. And we both said we want to continue what Celtic Frost has done. Simply leave away all the ego problems. All the star trip thing. We left the music, and we wanted... The goal behind Triptykon was to continue to develop what Celtic Frost had started.

You are often cited as a central influence in both black and death metal. Do you still feel surprised by the longevity of that legacy?

Absolutely. It still seems very strange to me. I know my limits as a musician, and I think I'm a very mediocre musician. I'm an average musician. No, seriously. It's not artificial. I really see myself like this. I'm still growing. I'm still learning. And there's musicians out there like bands like Yes or Opeth that I look at and I'm like, wow, how can you be so good? I don't know how to become so good. I look up to these musicians. Mikael of Opeth, for example. He's an absolute genius. And I wish I were as good as him, but I know I can never reach that level. So I look at myself much more humbly. And right now, as I'm doing this interview with you, I'm sitting three kilometers away from what was Hellhammer's rehearsal room over 40 years ago. Meaning I'm still very connected to Tom, the young Tom, learning guitar, learning every note by himself. And it was quite a challenge for me, a struggle. And I still feel like that. I never stopped trying to learn on my guitar, trying to learn as a songwriter. Writing a song is still a challenge to me. It's still a mountain that I have to climb. You know, I don't have a secret plan or a secret recipe for this. So I see myself, I think, much more realistically. And I see myself much more as an average musician. And I'm very glad when I'm finishing a song because it's always a challenge. And it blows my mind if somebody says, well, you're an influence. It blows my mind because I don't see myself like that.

How do you handle being labeled a "pioneer" of such extreme genres, considering you never wanted to limit yourself to labels?

It's an honor, of course. But like I told you. Like I just said, to me, it's very strange to hear this. I still think I need to improve massively. I still think I have much to learn. And I also know that in my career, I've made many mistakes, musically and otherwise. So, you know, I'm flattered. I'm very grateful. And I feel very honored if people say that. But I personally, I'm much more critical of myself. I see myself at a much more on a lower level than that.

Why did you find it so important to emphasize that "only death is real"? What did you hope to evoke in those who read that phrase printed on your albums?

Well, look at the history of mankind. Look at what mankind has done in maybe the last 15,000 years. We know that there's a lot of things on this planet that could be positive. I mean, we know there's love, there's art, there's music, there's science. But what are we best at? We're best in killing each other. We're best in conducting war, lying to each other, cheating to each other. For power, for money, for control over people. That's unfortunately, I guess, the nature of human beings. And at the end of it all, what does it bring us? Nothing. Everybody will die eventually. Everything on this planet will die. Even a stone eventually will be ground to dust. So death is the universal reality of everything on this planet. Even this planet eventually will die. Our sun will die eventually. Whether we like it or not, I guess that's the overwhelming reality on a small scale, human beings, and on the big scale, the universe.

Have you ever considered recording something completely outside of metal, like an experimental or acoustic album?

Well, yeah, of course, from time to time. But on the other hand, a band like Celtic Frost or a band like Triptykon gives me a platform to do pretty much whatever I want to do. In Celtic Frost and Triptykon, I've done jazzy things. I've done electronic things. I've done classical things. I've done experimental things. I've done sampling, you know. I'm lucky. I'm very lucky that I was in Celtic Frost and in Triptykon, which are bands that are very open artistically. So I, of course, occasionally you think I could do a solo album, or I could collaborate with somebody else, which occasionally I've done. But in general, I can really do whatever I want to do. In my band, I'm not limited. I don't ever feel limited in my band.

Is there any contemporary artist or band you would like to work with in the future?

There's a lot of artists that I look up to and that I admire, but I don't know if I'm good enough to collaborate with any of them. And really, this is an honest answer. I've been asked by some people that I really look up to. If I wanted to join them on stage, for example, and I told them, I don't think I'm good enough. So I try to stay realistic.

After so many years in music, what would you say was the highest point of your career?

I've answered this question recently in an interview. And I had to think about it. But I concluded that the most important moment in my entire career of 44 years now was when I first met Martin Ergain, because that really changed my life. And it changed his too, of course. I think my life would have been very different without that collaboration. I think we learned so much from each other and we created such unique music together that this really, I think, for both of us was the most important point, regardless of all the other things that we experienced .

Brazil has always welcomed you and your bands with great enthusiasm. What message would you like to leave for your fans before these special shows?

It is absolutely true that Brazil has been a very special country for us. Not least the last time I played there with, I think it was with Triumph of Death, also the September Negro Festival. I'm simply deeply grateful to the audience who have made this possible and who are inviting us back to South America. If you come from a tiny little village in Switzerland, especially at my time in the early 1980s, when there were hardly any Swiss musicians that did anything internationally, you never think you would ever play in South America. And to be invited to play on a different country, on a different continent, across the ocean, is such an honor and is something you don't take for granted that I'm simply extremely grateful. And I'm trying to show gratitude when I go on stage, and we interact with the audience and we're exchanging adrenaline and power. It's an absolute honor.

Video version: youtube.com/watch?v=7X33TUZnMl8

Original publication (in Portuguese): https://www.marcelovieiramusic.com.br/2025/09/tom-g-warrior-triptykon-celtic-frost-hellhammer-entrevista.html