Welcome to our Realm...

...you are entering Heavy Horror Metal!

Check out these official pages of the true Heavy Horror Metal Band Solemnity. Click around, hear some sound samples, view some nice photographs and look our pyromaniac live performance at our video 'Lords of the Damned'. And we will be glad if you would give us some feedback and leave us a message in our guestbook.

2018 (!!!)

THE DEAD ONES LIVE JUST LONGER - SO AFTER 5 YEARS OF HYBERNATION WE DECLARE SOLEMNITY TO BE IRREVERSIBLY DEAD!!!

Having started this project for almost exactly 20 years on the day we now bury it in a cold grave and say goodbye...

Fortunetely there´s no need for any grave reunion ever as we played already as last band on the first Keep It True,so it has to last what already has been.

BUT!!!! Over the years we have collected quite a number of never released songs and videos that didn´t fit on any of our albums so we thought it is time to give you a late Christmas present as we post them in a youtube-channel. Just press the link on each gadet here and enjoy a ride back in time:

- A GRAVE MISTAKE (audio) This song was meant to be a part and namegiver for an EP that for several reasons never saw the light of day back in 2009. We even made a videoclip for this, but the tapes were destroyed before the master. Nice up-tempo tune and a part from the LOTD sessions.

- AXE ATTACK (video) We made this nice little piece of hunting titties video back in 2004(?) right around the corner of Ralf´s house in the Allgäu alps for our SOS album. One of the funniest days ever and what a stupid movie:-)

- DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE (audio) From the LOTD sessions 2007, but in the end a bit too freaky for the CD.

- LONELY (audio) This is indeeed a CRIMSON GLORY cover that we recorded for a tribute-sampler, but the guy putting it together never had the guts to release it so it ended up in a dark box and never saw the light of day. I´m not too proud on the vocals and I didn´t want to mess with the immortal Midnight anyway who could make unbelievable high pitches, but it is a tribute to one of my fave bands ever.

- LORDS OF THE DAMNED (video) This is a destilled video made from our LIVE DVD 2008. Of course you can still order the DVD and get the complete concert and everything in HD.

- OTHER BANDS PLAY, SOLEMNITY SLAY (video) This is the entire live concert from our DVD release 2008 of course in a very compressed version. If you like you can still order a DVD to watch it in HD.

- DR. HORROR (audio) We recorded this for an official RUNNING WLD tribute sampler, but never put it on one of our own records, so maybe not all of you are aware of this peace of meat. Covering one of their so called milestones was not our target, but polishing this underrated raw diamond worked out quite nice?

- TORTURE IS MINE (audio) This was our first song to be written as a four-piece back in´98 and we only released it as a terrible live-version from our first gig on a demo CD back in 1998. This is a studio-version from the COP sessions 2011, but somehow it has grown old for me while we never released it.

- A TALE OF TERROR (Spanish Guitar Cannibal Blues) (audio) Oh yeah, this was by far the most weird song we ever put together. Nevertheless even after ten years of recording it is has a kinda charme of its own. Enjoy!

- ONE RODE TO ASA BAY (audio) All right this is our mighty BATHORY Cover which was recorded under dubious conditions in the highest cathedral of the world to show tribute to the mighty Quorthon. Only available on our 10" EP, so this is the first time you can hear it digital, but you can still order some rest pieces of the vinyl which has a furous analog sound playing with the orchestra.

- THORN IN THE EYE (live 2008) (audio) A blasting thundering live version from our Eastern Europe tour 2008.

- CAPATAIN RIDICULOUS (audio) We recorded this track as a contrbution for a friend needing some audio while making one of the worst C-movies in history. Beg you never see this shame of movie:-)

- GATES OF HELL (audio) I think this was part of our SOS sessions 2004 and a nice little bass-tune by Ralf which was lost in a box for unknown reasons. He really was a beast on the bass!

- THERE WILL BE BLOOD TONIGHT (audio) This was recorded for a never released LIZZY BORDEN tribute and it was part of our 10" release, so here is the first time a digital release. Our interim drummer still suffers in hell for the worst drum-tracks one ever did so I was never proud on it. At least we played our last show in 2012 as co-headliner for Lizzy Borden at the Headbangers Open Air.

- EYES OF A STRANGER (audio). O.K. this is NOT Solemnity, but LIGEIA the band of my wife Dani and I was producing the track at the same time for the never released tribute to Lizzy Borden as well, but this one saw never the light of day at all and you can hear me on backings so I thought it was nice thing for most of you knowning her legacy to listen to it.

- TANZ IN DEN TOD (audio) All right, blame me for it and it was not really a Solemnity track, but putting it together with PT Lerf for one of his audiobooks. As PT helped out numerous times as a live-drummer for us we colaborated on different things over the years and this kind of a German language midage song which is not my favourite genre, but the song kicks ass somehow, right?!

- LIVE IN MUNICH/SHOCKERS HALL MAY 19th 2000 (video) One of our first early live-videos of us in a nice bootleg quality. Great time back in those early days and oh my God we had bees in our asses!

- LIVE IN KUSEL/BE-INSIDE OCTOBER 7th 2006 (video) A video from a very small club with quite some things going wrong, but we had a great time especially when the audience is so close! It was PT Lerf on the drums helping us out once again at those times and up today we never rehearsed together with him a song, so just meeting on stage and doing it so I think this was really great teamplay.

- THE VOID OF TIME (audio) This was a nice little hypnotic instrumental I did by myself around 2003, once planned as an outro or so, but it never saw the light of day and even stood unmastered.

- UNHOLY ANGEL (audio) This was a demo I did in 2002. Everything is programmed and played by myself alone and it sounds weird or at least wicked. Good it took another 10 years to see the light of day:-)

- RITUAL OF THE BEAST (audio) This was a try of mixing the RIH album in a different way. Today it has a certain charme, but I´m glad we made it more powerful and did not the Hammerfall-way:-)

- THE LOST SOULS TALE (audio) This was recorded at our very first live show and we never recorded it properly, so this is by far the only good sounding version of this never released song.

- TORTURE IS MINE (audio) This was a DAT record (does someone rembember this format?) at a show in Munich in 2000. Originally planned for RIH and one of the first three songs we had written, but someone did mess up the recordings as I remember so it ended up not on the album. We tried to re-capture the song in 2011, for COP, but never released it. At least you have both versions here and now.

- ONCE IN A WHILE (audio) A demo of me only with my last words to you... (always wanted to redo the high pitched vocals as they were a bit spooky here and there, but as time fades we all fade...)

Moreover you can find in my youtube channel the completely unreleased LIGEIA album "Beyond The Sky" from 2002 on which you can hear my wife Dani The Mistress plus the Solemnity musicians Harry Reischmann amd Wolfgang Fetzter plus me doing some backing vocals plus some other cool audio and video stuff. Enjoy!

ALL RIGHT, THAT´S IT AND THAT WAS IT. YOU ARE THE KEEPER OF THE FLAME NOW!

ETERNALLY, Sven The Axe.

2013

The PROJECT KNOWN AS SOLEMNITY SLEEPS...

...it is NOT DEAD!!!!

2012-07-13

FAREWELLSHOW AT HEADBANGERS OPEN AIR...

We confirm that our last live-show on earth will be at the Headbangers Open Air in Brande on 26th July 2012 as co-headliner to Lizzy Borden. After this event Solemnity will fall asleep....

See you there for a final bombardement!!!!

2012-03-21

CIRCLE OF POWER (release date Walpurgisnight 2012)

We confirm that our new and FINAL album CIRCLE OF POWER will be released on April 30th as CD and limited Double-Gatefold LP in BLUE and as well BLACK colours. Both vinyls will be strichtly limited to 100 pieces each so please make pre-orders! A pre-sale will be available at the Keep It True Festival!

Here we lift the artwork and the tracklist of the album in advance.

Tracklist:

- CIRCLE OF POWER

- IN HONOUR TO THE BEAST

- SURVIVING THE SUN

- ANUBIS

- RETURN OF THE HAIRFÜHRER

- TOWER (cover by ANGEL)

- A DRAGON´S TALE (feat. Ferdy Doernberg)

- UNHOLY ANGEL

- LUCIFER`S LIGHT

- VOODOO

- LUDICROUS SMILES (cover by SAVIOUR MACHINE)

- QUEEN OF ICE

an hour of pure metal mayhem await YOU!!!!

2011-07-19

BACK FOR THE ATTACK!!!!

We confirm our first show in 2012 at the legendary HEADBANGERS OPEN AIR in Brande (26-28.7.2012). THis time the garden willl burn like never before!!!

2011-06-14

Just a brief update as we get quite a lot of emails from you asking us for the next SOLEMNITY album. Well, the recordings are almost done except for some little things that are left to do, so we plan to release it this Autumn:-)

The album will be called CIRCLE OF POWER and will start right there where we left you with LOTD and the artwork is again by our good friend Ferenc B. Regös. More will be unveiled in the next two months right here!

2011-02-26

While we are recording the new Solemnity album Sven The Axe & Harry Reischmann together with former Stormwitch musicians just released their prog-metal side-project DORIAN OPERA on Solemnity-Music. If you like Symphony X, Shadow Gallery or early Dream Theater get hold on this CD which you can exclusively buy here in the shop.

2010-11-04

The song "Tanz in den Tod" by our former drummer PT Lerf and Sven The Axe which we recorded for the DRAGONBOUND series for SONY is now available for free download on the FACEBOOK site.

SONY decided not to make any commercial effort of it, but to give it away for free to our fans:-) ENJOY!!!

Click here to find it: DRAGONBOUND on FACEBOOK

SOLEMNITY news: We decided to skip the promised CD with unreleased stuff from the past decade as our videoclip producer has gone to India for a while with our unfinished videoclip of " A Grave Mistake", but we wanted that to be a part of it so thios release will come out somewhen 2012. Instead as our songwriting for our fifth CD is finished we enter the studio in December to start working on "THE CIRCLE OF LIGHT" which will hopefully see the light of day before Summer 2011.

We changed some of the prices in our online-shop, so all you cheesy bootleggers have a good reason to buy something for a bloody Christmas:-)

2010-10-25

Last week was the release date of the new SONY Entertainment audio-book DRAGONBOUND 5 and YES we are proud to be a part of it!!! The first ever song by Sven the Axe in German language called "Tanz in den Tand" (english: "Dance into Death" ) was a part of this epic fantasy drama!!!

More infos here: www.dragonbound.de

2010-08-03

While we are writing songs for our fifth album to come we wanted to tell you the news that we plan to release at the end of this year an album with partly new material, recently old unreleased stuff and some covers plus a videoclip of our new song "A Grave Mistake". More infos to follow soon!

Moreover here is a link to the page of great fan of ours, Jon Zaremba from the United States, who made a tremendous work in making an awesome videoclip to our song "The Book Of Eibon" which we originally dedicated to the legacy of the horror movie director Lucio Fulci. This is an awesome collage with pictures of the master who fit perfectly to our soundtrack. Thanxxx a lot & All the be(a)st to Jon Zaremba!! You can watch it directly on his homepage under the link::

http://www.jonzaremba.com/music/misc/the_book_of_eibon_video.wmv

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We have just released our first live video: '...other Bands play - Solemnity slay! - Solemnity Live in Concert 2009'. Over 100 minutes live action. Look out in our shop.

We've videotaped the whole show at the 'Kaminwerk' in Memmingen (Germany) on 17th march 2009. The DVD comes with some extra stuff, region code free and released in Dolby Digital Stereo. Look at this video sample.

2010-05-02

Now we've at last started our guestbook. It's moderated - this means that our webmaster has to activate every single entry. So it can last up to 24h until an entry is online. We have made this decision after careful consideration, because of badly experience with spam flooding in the past.

But now: Leave us a message in our guestbook.

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2010-02-23

And as you can see, we've changed the concept of our website to improve the readability. By the way the 'badly torn view' at screen resolutions bigger than 1024 x 768 pixel should have been solved. So we hope it works for you all. If you find any bugs or broken links please feel free to send us a message.

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2009-07-22

We are finally on MYSPACE. Thanks to our good friend Vanessa who put us up. Just take a look (you're leaving this page): www.myspace.com/officialsolemnity.

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2009-07-05

As a teaser for our upcoming live-DVD (probably this Autumn) we posted our new video clip 'Lords Of The Damned' completely on our homepage. Just check out our metal madness at our media page.

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