Songfacts®:

• "Left Hand Path" is the title track from the Entombed debut album. It is written by the whole band, with lyrics by Nicke Andersson (drums, bass) and Alex Hellid (guitar), and music by Nicke Andersson, Uffe Cederlund (guitar, bass) and Leffe Cuzner (guitar, bass).
  
  Both the title of Left Hand Path and this song's inspiration come from Anton LaVey's work The Satanic Bible. In Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces, Alex Hellid affirms that he was reading the book at the time and drew the title from it, even though he can't remember the exact passage. We get the word "sinister" from the old-world word for "left"; conversely, the word for "right" is "dexter." Hellid says, "The Satanic Bible is about thinking for yourself, so a few of the lyrics are about that."
• Keep your ears pricked for the middle bridge at the 3:50 mark; that's a phrase out of the theme to the 1979 horror film Phantasm. The whole band cite influences from horror films such as the Evil Dead series and Hellraiser, and of course the literary influence of H. P. Lovecraft.
• Entombed originated out of a couple of other bands - Petrov and Cederlund played previously with Morbid, while the remaining cast, with bassist Johnny Hedlund, were a band called Nihilist before splitting with Hedlund, who went on to play in Unleashed, while the others formed Entombed. Entombed hails from Stockholm, Sweden, and are considered pioneers of Swedish death metal and the "buzz saw" guitar sound. At the time of recording Left Hand Path, their ages ranged from 15 to 19.
• The recording of this song took place at Sunlight Studios, under management of Tomas Skogsberg. The studio was so small that they actually had to use digital drums because a whole drum kit wouldn't fit! The only parts of the drums that are real are the snare and cymbals. Nicke Andersson had a hard time with these because the drum sticks bounce differently than on a real drum.