Hard to believe this is 25 years old, and even that 1993 is now 20 years ago.
Not really for me. I mean, I'm a few months younger than this album, so that might be part of it, but something about this album always seemed ancient and timeless to me. From the first time I heard the Emperor cover version, that riff set after the initial acoustic section in "A Fine Day to Die" felt familiar yet distant to me, like I heard the melody in a previous life or something.
This album does tend to get bogged down in the middle with sounding a bit too much like generic thrash at times, but at its best, something about this album activates something deep inside my genetic memory. Not many other albums do that, at least not to the extent this one does.
Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism and
Thousand Swords come to mind in this regard, and both of those albums were heavily influenced by Bathory's 1988 opus.