Black Metal

Frost in the treble

The coldest heresy in heavy metal, black metal, starts by ripping out the floor: the palm-muted chug that death metal builds its riffs on is torn away, the guitars climb into the treble and ring open, and the bass abandons any line of its own to double them, until the whole band crowds into the upper half of the sound like rime spreading across the inside of a window. Nothing sits underneath. That is the first thing to hear.

The right hand does the rest. Tremolo picked at speed, chords and single lines alike, while the harmony above them shifts no faster than a glacier, the riffs pull the ear away from the rhythm and into the harmony, and the drummer ranges from blast beats, snare and kick alternating flat out, to slower stamping passages that let a figure sit and repeat. The vocal is shrieked, rasped or snarled rather than growled. It lives in the treble too.

Minor keys rule, and the tritone, the flattened fifth, turns up wherever a riff needs dread. Most songs refuse the verse and chorus arrangement the way a monastery refuses visitors, running instead on long blocks of a single figure, and the production, raw and starved of low end on the first demos, stayed that way by choice for many black metal bands long after proper studios were within reach. Poverty became a creed.

What separates the genre from its neighbours is where the force is kept. Thrash and death metal load it into the rhythm: the stop, the palm mute, the break that detonates a pit. Black metal buries it in harmony and repetition, a figure hammered dozens of times over not as padding but as method, wearing the listener down the way wind off an ice field wears down a cabin wall, less by any single gust than by its refusal to stop. The lyrics followed the music into the cold: Satan and the war on Christianity first, then winter, the pre-Christian north and misanthropy, and later the forest and depression.

Black metal, cracked open

Spreading out from the Norwegian records of 1992 to 1994 like cracks from one hammer blow across a frozen lake, the genre's map is a web of fractures, each one following a single element of the sound until it splits away as a style with founders, rules and quarrels of its own. Keyboards gave the symphonic school. It begins with the record the Notodden band Emperor made at the Grieg Hall in 1993, and Dimmu Borgir later dragged it to full orchestral tonnage with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra on Death Cult Armageddon in 2003.

Length and scenery gave atmospheric music, from Summoning in Austria to the Pacific Northwest bands who pulled Satan down from the altar, planted the forest in his place and were labelled Cascadian. Speed and noise, compacted to the density of death metal, gave war metal, also called bestial, whose founding document is Fallen Angel of Doom, released by the Canadian war party Blasphemy on Wild Rags in 1990. Dissonance gave the French school of Deathspell Omega and Blut Aus Nord. Myth gave Viking and pagan metal, opened by the later records of Bathory and carried on by Enslaved.

Slowness and isolation gave the depressive strand of one-person projects such as Xasthur, and a deliberate lean toward death metal gave blackened death, where Behemoth ended up. Geography did the rest: black metal bands in Sweden and Finland answered Norway within a few years, Greece and France built styles nobody in Oslo would have recognised, and Iceland raised a dissonant school of its own after 2010. The ice kept cracking. The whole chronicle, from Venom through the church fires to the present, is laid out in the complete history of black metal.

One fracture runs outside music altogether. The national socialist strand, NSBM, grew up in the 1990s around bands such as Graveland in Poland, whose founder Rob Darken described his own convictions to Decibel in 2006 as extreme right wing. Many prominent black metal musicians have rejected it in public.

The borders get crossed in record shops every day, always over one borrowed element rather than the whole arsenal. The Californian quartet Slayer sang about Satan and played thrash. The Finnish band with the shred guitarist and the permanent keyboard player, Children of Bodom, took speed and keyboards and made melodic death metal. The Portuguese band Moonspell recorded their earliest material close to the scene and built a career in gothic metal, the Latvian band Skyforger are folk and pagan metal, and Alcest, the project Neige started alone, carried tremolo guitars into shoegaze and left blackgaze on the far side of the line.

Where to start

Eight records carry black metal from the first frost to the newest forms. Each one breaks open a different door.

• Bathory Under the Sign of the Black Mark Under One Flag, 1987

  The template in its original form, hammered out in Sweden before Norway had released a single album in the style, and the whetstone every later blade was sharpened on.

• Darkthrone A Blaze in the Northern Sky Peaceville, 1992

  The raw sound at its most direct, every trace of warmth scraped off the tape, and the record that answers what all the fuss was about.

• Immortal At the Heart of Winter Osmose, 1999

  The easiest bridge from thrash, huge riffs marching through a blizzard under a clear production by Peter Tägtgren.

• Emperor In the Nightside Eclipse Candlelight, 1994

  Keyboards raise the fury into a frozen cathedral the size of a mountain range, and the grandest door into the genre stands open inside it.

• Mayhem De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Deathlike Silence, 1994

  A monolith of black ice, and the album the whole Norwegian second wave is still measured against.

• Ulver Bergtatt Head Not Found, 1995

  Acoustic guitars, choirs and clean singing set against the shrieks like firelight against a winter forest, for anyone arriving from folk.

• Blut Aus Nord The Work Which Transforms God Appease Me, 2003

  Dissonance and industrial texture that strip the form down bolt by bolt and weld it back together as something colder.

• Wolves in the Throne Room Two Hunters Southern Lord, 2007

  Songs running close to eighteen minutes, the devil driven out of the chapel and the forest standing where he used to.