Seventy six minutes and eight seconds. Five songs, the shortest of them ten minutes and twenty eight seconds, recorded in 1998 by a San Francisco band that had dissolved before anybody outside the city heard a note of it. Weakling made Dead as Dreams and then made nothing else, and tUMULt released it in 2000 into a market with no shelf to put it on. Every record below is judged by the measure that album demands: what it does with its length.
That measure rules out most of what gets filed under the tag. Atmosphere is the cheapest commodity in extreme music, and a long reverb over a slow tremolo figure will imitate it well enough to fool anybody listening from the next room. What follows is a shelf of eleven albums that survive close attention, arranged by what each one made possible rather than by rank, and it assumes the reader already knows the essentials and wants the branch taken on its own terms.
The shelf
| Album | Band | Year | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hvis lyset tar oss | Burzum | 1994 | Misanthropy |
| In the Nightside Eclipse | Emperor | 1994 | Candlelight |
| Bergtatt | Ulver | 1995 | Head Not Found |
| Dol Guldur | Summoning | 1997 | Napalm |
| Dead as Dreams | Weakling | 2000 | tUMULt |
| The Mantle | Agalloch | 2002 | The End |
| Autumn Aurora | Drudkh | 2004 | Supernal Music |
| Two Hunters | Wolves in the Throne Room | 2007 | Southern Lord |
| Dark Space III | Darkspace | 2008 | Avantgarde Music |
| Kentucky | Panopticon | 2012 | Pagan Flames |
| Im Wald | Paysage d'Hiver | 2020 | Kunsthall Produktionen |
Norway wrote the grammar in three records
The founding trio is not in dispute and does not need re-arguing at length. Burzum recorded Hvis lyset tar oss at Grieghallen in September 1992, Misanthropy held it until April 1994, and it demonstrated that a single figure repeated for eight minutes is a unit of composition rather than a failure of writing. Emperor cut In the Nightside Eclipse in the same building in July 1993 and Candlelight issued it on 21 February 1994 with the keyboards mixed as a wash instead of as a melody line, which is the distinction every symphonic imitator of the following decade missed. Both records are hostile on the surface and enormous underneath. Both are usually praised for the wrong reason.
The third is the one that gets left off, and it is the most useful of the three to anybody trying to hear what this branch actually does. Ulver recorded Bergtatt at Endless Lydstudio in Oslo across November and December 1994, Head Not Found released it in February 1995, and its thirty four minutes carry clean singing, flute, acoustic guitar and five movements with no anti Christian content anywhere on them. Nothing about it is loud. It is nonetheless the coldest object on this list, which is the argument the branch has been making ever since: the rime is in the writing and not in the distortion. Records passed over for exactly that kind of reason are gathered in the Most Underrated Black Metal Albums.
Austria, where the guitar stopped leading
The Austrian duo who gave up on riffs did more damage to the rulebook than anybody in Norway managed. Summoning, meaning Protector and Silenius and nobody else, recorded Dol Guldur at Hörnix Studio in October 1996 and Napalm Records released it in January 1997, sixty eight minutes and fifty seconds in which the keyboard states every melody, the drums are programmed rather than played, and the guitar is reduced to a bed of treble laid under the horns. Most of the words came from P.K. of Abigor, with Tolkien credited separately in the booklet for the passages taken from his books. The programmed drums are the part critics still hold against the record and the part that makes it work: a machine set at a marching pace and left to walk the entire length of a siege, never tiring, never accelerating, never once acknowledging that anybody is listening.
The American record with no scene behind it
Weakling's only album is the origin of nearly everything American in this style and it was made by five people with no audience, no label interest and no intention of continuing. They tracked it in 1998, broke up the following year without announcing it, and tUMULt pressed it in 2000: "Cut Their Grain and Place Fire Therein" at ten minutes and twenty eight seconds, the title track at twenty minutes and thirty nine seconds directly behind it, then three further pieces, none of them under thirteen minutes. The guitar tone is thick where the Norwegian records were thin, and the keyboards sit so far under the surface that most listeners need three passes to notice them at all. Chronicles of Chaos gave it ten out of ten and AllMusic four and a half stars out of five, both of them written far closer to the reissue than to the pressing nobody bought.
A record of this kind is not composed so much as accumulated, one fall of snow at a time, until the ground underneath has a different shape.
Ukraine, Switzerland and the long spread
The Ukrainians who refused to explain themselves made the warmest record here and never printed a word of it. Drudkh recorded Autumn Aurora during the winter of 2003 and Supernal Music released it on 28 November 2004, forty minutes and seventeen seconds built on Roman Saenko's guitars and the first synthesizers the band had used, with the lyrics withheld from publication as they had been on the debut. Chronicles of Chaos named it the best album of its year. Season of Mist remastered it with new artwork on 9 November 2009, and that remaster is the version most people now own, which is a small loss: the original mix is muddier and considerably better at the one thing the record exists to do.
Switzerland then took the same principles in two opposite directions. Paysage d'Hiver, one man since Tobias Möckl started it in 1997, released everything after Steineiche on cassettes limited to two hundred copies before reissuing them on compact disc without limit, and put out Im Wald in 2020 through the label he runs with his wife. The hiss is not poverty and never was. Darkspace, formed in Bern in 1999, went the other way with the same logic and built Dark Space III for Avantgarde Music in 2008 out of processed guitar and programmed drums until the record stopped describing a landscape at all and started describing vacuum. The city gave the band its music prize in October 2019, which is either an act of civic generosity or the strangest sentence in this article.
The forest records, and where the branch stops
Three American albums took the length and pointed it at terrain instead of at hell. Wolves in the Throne Room recorded Two Hunters at London Bridge Studio and at Aleph with Randall Dunn, Southern Lord released it on 25 September 2007, and the forty six minutes of the compact disc turn on Jessika Kenney's clean singing arriving on the third track like light through a break in the canopy. Agalloch had gone further out still. The Mantle was recorded between November 2001 and April 2002, The End Records issued it on 13 August 2002, and Decibel inducted it into its Hall of Fame in 2012, a record that is only intermittently black metal and never once apologises for it.
Panopticon closed the argument in 2012 by proving the form could carry a subject nobody had tried on it. Kentucky puts banjo, field recordings and the history of the Appalachian coal strikes inside the structure, and by every reasonable expectation it should collapse on contact. It does not, because the tremolo picking and the banjo are doing the same job, which is to hold one figure until the ground moves under it. Where this branch runs into its nearest neighbour, and how the two get told apart, is sorted in the Best DSBM Albums.
The test
One test separates these eleven from the thousand records released under the tag every year, and it takes ninety seconds. Drop into the eighth minute of any of them and ask what has changed since the second. On Dead as Dreams, on Hvis lyset tar oss, on the better Summoning records, a great deal has changed and almost none of it announced itself while it was happening. On the imitations nothing has moved at all, and the running time is the idea rather than the vehicle for one. Desolation is easy to record. Making forty minutes of it feel like a place somebody has actually walked through is not, and these eleven manage it convincingly enough that the shelf is worth defending.
