This is the branch that travelled furthest. The second wave was twelve men in two Norwegian cities; thirty years later the best records in its atmospheric wing are being made in Kharkiv, in a Swiss canton, in the hills of eastern Kentucky and on the edge of a Scottish moor, mostly by people who have never met anybody else in the style. The names below are the ones that hold up, with the dates and the reasons rather than the adjectives.
Where the branch sits against everything else the genre split into is drawn on the subgenre map.
The Austrian and Swiss school
Summoning, formed in Vienna in 1993 and reduced to Richard Lederer and Michael Gregor since 1995, are the only band in this list who have never played a single concert and have no intention of doing so. Eight albums between 1995 and 2018, all through Napalm Records, all built the same way: keyboards carrying the melody, drums programmed in from a keyboard rather than a machine, guitars holding the middle, and words lifted from Tolkien. They describe themselves as composers rather than musicians, which is unusually accurate self assessment for a metal band. Start with Dol Guldur from 1996 or Stronghold from 1999.
Paysage d'Hiver is one man, Tobias Möckl, working in Switzerland since 1997 and releasing album length recordings as demos for two decades before finally calling one a record. Everything he has put out belongs to a single continuing story about one figure walking through winter, and the tape and vinyl runs have been held at two hundred and three hundred copies while the compact discs stay unlimited, which is the fairest version of the scarcity game anybody in this music plays. Darkspace, from the same country, replaced the forest with vacuum and produced the coldest records the genre has.
Ukraine
Drudkh formed in Kharkiv in 2002 around Roman Saenko, and have been more private than any other band in the genre: no interviews at all, and for several albums no printed lyrics. What they set to music instead are verses by Ukrainian poets, Taras Shevchenko and Oleh Olzhych among them. Forgotten Legends in 2003 established the long form, Autumn Aurora in 2004 added the keyboards, and Blood in Our Wells in 2006 brought in progressive rock structures and actual lead guitar. The band's nationalism has drawn objections over the years and they have never answered them, because they have never answered anything.
The American northwest and the Appalachians
Weakling made one album and stopped, and that album turned out to be the founding document of American black metal: five pieces, none under ten minutes, seventy six minutes in total, recorded in San Francisco in 1998 and released in 2000. Wolves in the Throne Room, formed in Olympia in 2002 by the brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver, built the rest of the framework, from Diadem of 12 Stars in 2006 through the Southern Lord run of Two Hunters, Black Cascade and Celestial Lineage, and have said plainly that they play black metal on their own terms and for their own reasons.
Agalloch, from Portland and formed in 1995 by John Haughm, sit at the edge of the style rather than inside it, with Pale Folklore in 1999 and The Mantle in 2002 leaning as much on folk and doom as on tremolo. The band split in May 2016 over a straightforward disagreement about touring, one member being a professor and two others having families, and reunited in 2023 for a small number of shows. Panopticon is Austin Lunn, working from Kentucky since 2007, whose Kentucky in 2012 put banjo, fiddle and the history of the coal industry into a black metal record and made the combination sound inevitable.
Britain and Ireland
Three projects, three different pieces of ground. Winterfylleth formed in Manchester in 2006, call what they do English heritage black metal, and reached their best form on The Mercian Sphere in 2010 and The Threnody of Triumph in 2012, across Candlelight and later Napalm. Fen, formed the same year in the Fens of eastern England, have built seven albums out of flat wet country, from The Malediction Fields in 2009 through the Prophecy Productions run that began with The Dead Light in 2019. Altar of Plagues, founded in Cork in 2006 by James Kelly, made three albums and then walked away from the style entirely: White Tomb in 2009, Mammal in 2011 and the harsh, half industrial Teethed Glory and Injury in 2013, followed by the announcement in June of that year that they were finished.
Saor is Andy Marshall alone in Scotland, working since 2013 under an earlier name and under this one from Aura in 2014, with Guardians in 2016 and Origins in 2022. Bagpipes, fiddle and whistle sit in the arrangements as instruments rather than as ornaments, which is the difference between this and most of what gets called folk influenced.
| Band | Country | Start here | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Summoning | Austria | Dol Guldur | 1996 |
| Weakling | United States | Dead as Dreams | 2000 |
| Drudkh | Ukraine | Autumn Aurora | 2004 |
| Wolves in the Throne Room | United States | Two Hunters | 2007 |
| Winterfylleth | England | The Mercian Sphere | 2010 |
| Altar of Plagues | Ireland | Mammal | 2011 |
| Panopticon | United States | Kentucky | 2012 |
| Saor | Scotland | Aura | 2014 |
Two more that belong on any honest list
Lustre is Henrik Sunding, working alone in Östersund since 2008, and he does the thing the style is always accused of doing but rarely commits to: the guitars and the vocal are pushed to the very back and the keyboards carry everything, melody, harmony and mood together. Night Spirit, released on 24 May 2009 through De Tenebrarum Principio, is where that inversion is cleanest, and it is either the purest record in this branch or the emptiest depending on how much you need a riff.
Spectral Lore is Ayloss, alone in Greece, and works at the opposite extreme of ambition: III, released on 10 May 2014 through I, Voidhanger, runs past ninety minutes, takes in progressive rock, drone and ambient, and holds together across every one of them. It is the strongest evidence available that the long form in this style is a genuine compositional discipline rather than an excuse, and it came out of a country with almost no atmospheric black metal scene at all.
The edges, where it stops being black metal
Blut aus Nord have been in France since 1994 doing something adjacent to this and answerable to nobody, and their dissonant middle period is the strongest argument that atmosphere does not have to mean beauty. At the other end sit the projects that took the style into ambient and never came back, and the ones that took it into shoegaze and produced an entirely separate audience.
A band that stops calling itself black metal is usually telling the truth, and it is usually the moment its records get better.
What none of these projects share is a scene. There is no city, no club and no circle of twelve, and there never was; the style spread by post and then by broadband, and the strongest evidence that it works is that a record made alone in Kharkiv and a record made alone in Kentucky are recognisably the same music. The mechanics behind that are in the first wave, the second and everything after, and the branch that took the same tools in the opposite direction, inward instead of outward, is set out in what Is DSBM.
