Songfacts®:

• While Matt Olivo and Scott Carlson did 75% of the songs on Horrified, "Crematorium" was a collaboration by Aaron Freeman and Scott Carlson.
  In Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces, Scott Carlson tells us that "Crematorium" was one of the few songs on the album written around the blast beat, as opposed to throwing it in as an afterthought. It is definitely one of the last three songs they wrote for Horrified, and in fact "Crematorium" was written only a couple of days before it was recorded.
• As you listen to the drumbeats on this song, contemplate drummer Dave "Grave" Hollingshead's lament, also in the Precious Metal interview: "Well, Scott kept pushing me. Every practice: 'Could you, uh, play a little faster?' And as far as doing a one-two beat, like the classic Slayer thing, I hated going any faster because I couldn't double-time with my right hand, my hand on the ride, and it was like... cheating, until we got so fast it was, you know, ridiculous."
• A common refrain heard in independent music is "keep circulating the tapes." Independent media, after all, always gets around by word-of-mouth and "bootleg" distribution at first. So after forming in 1985 and recording this album as a demo (originally titled Slaughter of the Innocent) in 1986, it didn't get produced for three years until circulating the demo through various friends (including Shane Embury of Napalm Death and Jeff Walker of Carcass) won them a signing. The band had already broken up and gone their separate ways when they got the news!