The band

Who is who

Ravenstorm is a band of musicians and talebearers who go by the following names (from left to right):

Yuri Nuijten-van den Broek
Vocals, screams, grunts, storytelling

Jasper Bogers
Guitars, vocals

Paul Martens
Bass

Mathias Delahaye
Drums

The tale of Ravenstorm

Ravenstorm was founded somewhere around 1997 in Oosterhout, Holland. In that time, we focused on melodic black metal without getting into any antichristian tendencies that so many black metal bands have. Religion, hate and anger simply don’t play that big a part in our lives, while fantasy and storytelling do; thus we focused on that. Although musically we’ve also been influenced by all sorts of blackmetal bands, the concept of the musical content is more in the vein of the bands that have also gone outside of that genre. Over the years, the black metal element became less obvious as our songs became more catchy and contained more variations in speed and style. Although we’ve had several line-up changes, the musical direction has always been unanimous: a combination of black metal, folk metal, pagan metal, and any element we find appropriate within our songs; the story is the key and all else is used to shape that story. For a while we used keyboards, and we’ve also experimented with flutes, but thusfar this has not resulted in new Ravenstorm material yet.

Ravenstorm songs are always stories that are told in two ways: the vocal part, and the musical part. Our songs tend to be lighthearted, with a gruesome twist. The bandname refers to ravens that fly from one scene to the next, always witnessing what happens and foreboding the horror that is to come. The bandmembers come from a variety of backgrounds, but all share the same big imagination and love for music, which is the driving force behind Ravenstorm.

We take care of our own artwork and website management. It’s taken 7 years before the release of our first demo, but we’ve done shows of which some live-recordings might be floating around the internet, and there are some compilations on which songs from the demo appear. The songs are from varying points in the history of our band, up to 2005. We do have a lot more material that can be admired live. More about our music and lyrics can be found in the music section.