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Rozz Williams founded Christian Death in October 1979, at the age of 16, with bassist James McGearty, drummer George Belanger and guitarist Jay (John Albert). The first Christian Death performance in front of a live audience was at a Castration Squad gig in 1980, when Castration Squad invited Christian Death on stage to play a couple songs. In 1980 and 1981, the band played many shows with 45 Grave, another L.A. deathrock group, though they also played shows with punk bands like Social Distortion and The Adolescents.

Despite being in the same area as the emerging West Coast movement, by the beginning of the 1980s, the group was not happy with the local scene, Especially the crowd that liked Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, given the crowd's penchant for becoming punks after punk became popular, and beating up hippies, when only a few years before much of that audience hated punk rock and beat up punks. Christian Death dismissed the followers of this movement as hillbilly punks in an interview.

In February 1981, the band went on hiatus. Williams concentrated on a side project with Ron Athey called Premature , but Christian Death got back together that summer with guitarist Rikk Agnew (formerly of The Adolescents) replacing Jay. A compilation alb*m featuring several local punk and deathrock acts called Hell Comes to Your House was released in 1981. The track that Christian Death contributed, Dogs, came from studio sessions financed by McGearty. The songs from those sessions would be released in France as the Deathwish EP three years later.