Cronos, the bassist, singer and face of Venom for the better part of five decades, has died at 63. The band confirmed the death of Conrad Lant this week, according to Louder; no cause has been given. His son Nathan wrote: ‘I want to thank all of the Legions for all of the support you have given my dad over the years.
He has laid down his soul, and his music will live on.’ The Cronos Venom story is one of the strangest and most consequential in British metal: a band from Newcastle who couldn’t really play, who recorded two albums in two years that half the metal world laughed at, and who, with the title of the second one, handed an entire genre its name. He had just released Venom’s twelfth album, Into Oblivion, and he died with the thing he built still running.
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What We Know
Not much, and that’s deliberate. Venom confirmed the death. The family statement came from Nathan Lant and was about gratitude, not detail. There is no cause, no location, no account of the circumstances, and nobody close to him has offered one. We’re not going to guess, and I’d ask you not to in the comments.
What we can say is that it was not a man winding down. Venom announced a new studio album earlier this year, the first since 2018, and delivered it — Into Oblivion, the twelfth record to carry his name. The lineup around him was the one he’d had for years: Stuart ‘Rage’ Dixon on guitar and Danny ‘Dante’ Needham on drums.
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The Man Who Named A Genre
Conrad Lant was born in London in 1963 and moved to Newcastle at eight. He joined the band that became Venom in 1978, at the height of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and if you want to understand why Venom mattered you have to understand what the NWOBHM sounded like around them. Iron Maiden were tight. Saxon were tight. Def Leppard were already looking at America.
Venom were none of those things. Welcome To Hell, released in 1981, is a record where the bass is distorted because nobody told Cronos it shouldn’t be, where the vocals are a bark because he couldn’t sing like Dickinson and decided not to try, and where the songs are about Satan because that was the fastest way to make your parents’ generation hate you. It was recorded in days. It sounds like it. And it’s one of the most important heavy metal records ever made, because every teenager in a bedroom who couldn’t play either heard it and thought: I can do that.
Then, a year later, Black Metal. The album is faster and nastier than the debut, but its real legacy is two words on the sleeve. Nobody in 1982 thought they were christening anything. A decade later, when Norwegian kids who’d grown up on Venom started burning churches and recording in the woods, the genre they built needed a name and they already had one. Mayhem, Darkthrone, Emperor, Immortal — every one of them traces back to a Newcastle band putting a title on a record because it sounded evil.
That’s not the only line that runs from him. The 1984 European tour had a young support band from San Francisco called Metallica, and the thrash movement that followed took Venom’s speed and Venom’s attitude and learned to play. Slayer took the Satan. Metallica took the velocity. Cronos never got the credit either of them did, and he never seemed to expect it. Venom’s name on the list of Rock Hall snubs will stay there a long time, and it should.
Leaving, Returning, Staying
He left Venom in 1987 for a solo band that carried his own name, and the records from that period are mostly for completists. He came back in 1995, and from then on Venom was Cronos’s band in every sense. Mantas and Abaddon, the other two-thirds of the classic trio, eventually went their own way and formed Venom Inc., which meant for the last decade there were two Venoms on the road, with the original three split one and two.
That split never fully healed, but it had been thawing. Mantas has spent the past couple of years publicly calling for the classic lineup to reunite, and as recently as this year said Cronos had been invited to a Welcome To Hell anniversary celebration. It didn’t happen. Now it can’t.
What He Was Actually Like
Here’s the thing about Cronos that the obituaries will get wrong. He was not a cartoon. The on-stage version — the bullet belts, the growl, the pentagram — was a performance he was completely clear-eyed about, and in interviews he was funny, sharp, and faintly amused that anyone had ever taken the Satan stuff literally. He knew Venom couldn’t play in 1981. He thought that was the point. He’d tell you that the energy of three lads from Newcastle who’d never been in a studio was the record, and that cleaning it up would have killed it.
He was right. Forty-five years of bands that learned to play and lost the thing prove it.
What Happens Now
Venom’s plans for Into Oblivion — touring, promotion, whatever was on the calendar — are presumably on hold, though the band hasn’t said. Nathan Lant’s statement addressed the Legions, Venom’s name for their fans since the early eighties, and that’s where the tributes will come from first. Mantas and Abaddon haven’t commented at the time of writing. When they do, it’ll matter more than most.
Put on Welcome To Hell tonight. Play it loud enough that it sounds as bad as it did in 1981. That was always the right way to hear it.
TL;DR
- Cronos, born Conrad Lant, bassist and singer of Venom, has died at 63. The band confirmed it; no cause of death has been given.
- His son Nathan thanked the Legions: ‘He has laid down his soul, and his music will live on.’
- He joined Venom in 1978; Welcome To Hell (1981) and Black Metal (1982) gave extreme metal its blueprint and black metal its name.
- Left in 1987, returned in 1995, led Venom through 12 albums, the last being 2026’s Into Oblivion, with Rage and Dante.
- Mantas had invited him to a Welcome To Hell anniversary celebration this year. The classic lineup never reunited.
FAQ
How did Cronos from Venom die?
No cause of death has been announced. Venom confirmed Conrad Lant’s death this week and his son Nathan issued a brief statement thanking fans. No further details have been released.
How old was Cronos when he died?
Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant was 63. He was born in London in 1963 and raised in Newcastle from the age of eight.
Did Venom invent black metal?
Venom named it. Their 1982 album Black Metal gave the genre its title, and their speed, imagery and lo-fi attack directly shaped the Norwegian second wave of the early 1990s — Mayhem, Darkthrone, Emperor and Immortal all cite Venom. Musically, Venom were closer to proto-thrash and speed metal than to what black metal became.
Who is in Venom now?
At the time of Cronos’s death, Venom was Cronos on bass and vocals, Stuart ‘Rage’ Dixon on guitar and Danny ‘Dante’ Needham on drums. The band released its twelfth album, Into Oblivion, in 2026. Original members Mantas and Abaddon perform separately as Venom Inc.
What was Cronos’s real name?
Conrad Thomas Lant. He adopted the name Cronos when Venom formed in Newcastle in the late 1970s.
Which Venom record changed your life — Welcome To Hell or Black Metal? Tell us in the comments, and play one tonight. Follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.
The post Venom’s Cronos Has Died, And Black Metal Lost The Man Who Named It appeared first on Loaded Radio.
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