Welcome to Hell is the debut studio album by English metal band Venom. It was released in December 1981, through Neat Records, at the culmination of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement. The music of Welcome to Hell is often described as speed metal, but it had a great influence on the then-emerging thrash metal style, and crystallized the elements of what later became known as death metal and black metal. The sound of the album is very noisy and rough, perhaps in part because the band thought they were recording a demo when they recorded the album over a period of only three days.