Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant, frontman of UK heavy metal band Venom, dies aged 63

LONDON, 2 OCTOBER 2026 —

Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant, the singer and bassist who fronted the UK heavy metal band Venom, has died aged 63.

The announcement was made in a Guardian Music article published on 1 October 2026, which noted that Lant performed under the stage name Cronos, appearing with an eerie pallor and in show‑boating leather ensembles while making theatrical declarations about witches, Satan and the underworld, and that he also played bass for the group.

Lant was born in Chelsea, London and moved with his family to Newcastle when he was seven years old. His brothers were musicians; one was a drummer who later joined Prefab Sprout – a band Lant later described as “shite” – and another brother drummed for Venom during the band’s 21st‑century period.

Venom began as Guillotine, which Lant joined at the age of 16, initially playing guitar before switching to bass and then becoming vocalist after the previous frontman left. The group was renamed Venom and its lineup solidified around Lant, guitarist Jeff Dunn (known as Mantas) and drummer Tony Bray (known as Abaddon).

Their debut album, Welcome to Hell, appeared in 1981 and contained the controversy‑baiting single In League with Satan, which featured reversed speech about the devil and helped introduce satanic imagery into metal.

Lant said that he was inspired by punk and that Venom intensified the heaviness of early British heavy metal by playing at a furious pace. He told the Guardian in 2019: “I had that snot and piss and shit element, which I wanted to put back into metal. I saw more and more bands shoving socks down their pants and putting lipstick on, and I just was disgusted by that, to tell you the truth.

Fucking hell, if heavy metal was anything it had to be raw and dangerous and in your face.” That impulse carried through five more albums during the 1980s, including Black Metal, whose demonic cover art and raw, hellish sound “carved in stone some of the essential features” of the black‑metal genre, according to scene historians Michael J Moynihan and Didrik Söderlind in their book Lords of Chaos.

Lant, who co‑produced Black Metal, said the making of it was “pure mayhem from start to finish”, noting the use of steel plates cut with a chainsaw and a makeshift coffin onto which earth was dumped.

Venom went on hiatus in 1988, after which Lant considered a career in forestry before releasing two solo albums as Cronos in the early 1990s. The band reformed for another seven studio albums, the most recent being Storm the Gates in 2018. A shorter hiatus occurred in the early 2000s while Lant recovered from a climbing injury.

In the 1990s he trained as a fitness instructor, remarking later that “I did loads of classes, I played rave”, and he also pursued parallel careers in computer engineering and graphic design, although Venom continued to tour, including appearances at festivals in summer 2026.

The band’s pace, ferocity and darkness proved seductive to a new generation of metalheads in the 1980s, especially thrash acts such as Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax. Scott Ian of Anthrax said admiringly of Welcome to Hell: “It was so, so evil. This was a new kind of insanity.” Lant collaborated with Dave Grohl on Grohl’s metal supergroup Probot in 2004.

After Lant’s death, his son Nathan thanked Venom’s fans, saying: “I know he really appreciated you all. He has laid down his soul, and his music will live on. The legend of Cronos will never die.”