Today (Jan. 4) would have marked the 60th birthday of Type O Negative legend Peter Steele, who died in 2010, and his surviving bandmates honored him with a brief but touching social media tribute.

"We miss our friend and brother every day. Today would have been his 60th birthday and we celebrate him," the group began in a tweet that was accompanied by a photo of the beloved 'Green Man' lying in a grassy field in his usual attire of green torso garment and black jeans.

Referencing a track off 1999's World Coming Down and imbuing Steele's sardonic wit and sarcasm, Type O continued, "While it may be true that Everything Dies we still wish it wasn’t yet with you."

The reportedly 6'8" Steele left behind a musical legacy as towering as his physical presence — seven total albums with Type O Negative and two with the thrash/crossover predecessor Carnivore. His '90s breakout on the back of two massively successful Type O Negative albums — 1993's Bloody Kisses and 1996's October Rust — not only positioned him as a pioneer of the goth metal style, but as a sex icon as well. He even notoriously posed nude in a 1995 issue of Playgirl.

Born Petrus Thomas Ratajczyk on Jan. 4, 1962 in Brooklyn, New York, he was the youngest of six total children with five older sisters. He formed his first band, Fallout, in 1979 and later adopted the moniker 'Lord Petrus Steele' upon founding Carnivore just a couple years later. From the ashes of Carnivore came Type O Negative, who radically altered their sound and distanced themselves from the thrashy overtones of their first pair of records and went head-first into a resplendent hybrid of Black Sabbath and The Beatles, draped in a vampiric aura and bathed in lyrical cynicism, gallows humor and a fair amount of cheekiness.

On April 14, news broke that Steele had died at the age of 48 and it was later determined that his cause of death was attributed to Meckel's diverticulum after reports of heart failure had originally surfaced.

Type O Negative's Peter Steele Through The Years

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