In December 1993 a label run out of the back of a failing record shop in Oslo released the first album by a band from Tokyo. That single fact does more damage to the standard account of this decade than any argument about riffs, because the standard account has the whole thing happening in one Scandinavian country between 1992 and 1994 and then stopping.
The decade had a shape and it was not that one. It has a runway of three years, a peak year that is not the famous one, a middle stretch in which the music left Norway for good, and a closing three years in which almost nobody outside the underground was paying attention and the records quietly got better. The 1990s black metal albums below are arranged that way rather than by rank, because the order they arrived in is the argument. The companion shelf, which runs past the decade in both directions and sorts everything by what it changed, is twenty eight black metal albums with the years, the labels and the studios attached.
| Year | The record | Band | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1991 | Ritual | Master's Hammer | Monitor |
| 1992 | A Blaze in the Northern Sky | Darkthrone | Peaceville |
| 1993 | Under a Funeral Moon | Darkthrone | Peaceville |
| 1994 | De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas | Mayhem | Deathlike Silence |
| 1995 | Storm of the Light's Bane | Dissection | Nuclear Blast |
| 1996 | Far Away from the Sun | Sacramentum | Adipocere |
| 1997 | Under the Sign of Hell | Gorgoroth | Malicious |
| 1998 | Slaughtersun (Crown of the Triarchy) | Dawn | Necropolis |
| 1999 | At the Heart of Winter | Immortal | Osmose |
The runway, 1990 to 1992
Five men in a Prague studio over five days in December 1990 built the template before the people usually credited with building it had left school. Master's Hammer recorded Ritual at Studio C between the fifth and the ninth of that month, Monitor released it in Czechoslovakia in February 1991, and Osmose put it out internationally three years later, by which time everyone had decided the idea came from somewhere else. It has timpani on it, and keyboards, and a vocal that howls rather than shrieks. Fenriz of Darkthrone has described it as the first Norwegian black metal album despite the band being Czech, which is a joke with a real point inside it.
His own band then made the record that turned the method into a rule. A Blaze in the Northern Sky was cut at Creative Studios in Kolbotn in August 1991 and released by Peaceville on 26 February 1992 over the label's objections, and it is half a death metal album and half something with the low end surgically removed. The same winter, Burzum's first album was recorded at the Grieg Hall in Bergen and issued that March. In November and December 1992, in a studio in Athens, Rotting Christ made Thy Mighty Contract, a record whose melodies come out of heavy metal rather than out of hardcore, and which nobody in northern Europe listened to properly for another fifteen years.
1993, which is the best year, and not the famous one
Ask which year the genre peaked and the answer that comes back is 1994, because 1994 is the year the newspapers arrived. On the records themselves the answer is 1993. It gave up Under a Funeral Moon, released by Peaceville on 15 February; Immortal's Pure Holocaust, cut at the Grieg Hall and released by Osmose; Beherit's Drawing Down the Moon on Spinefarm, which is slow, muddy and closer to ritual ambient music than to metal, and which took two decades and a generation of French and Icelandic bands before anyone understood it; and the Greek record above.
It also gave up the one that proves the point about geography. Sigh recorded Scorn Defeat in Tokyo in March 1993, with Mirai Kawashima singing and playing keyboards and bass, Shinichi Ishikawa on guitar and Satoshi Fujinami drumming, and Deathlike Silence Productions released it that December. The label was run by a man in Oslo who was murdered four months before it came out. A Japanese band on a Norwegian label with a title lifted from a Newcastle album of 1981 is not a footnote to this decade. It is the decade.
Ask which year the genre peaked and the answer that comes back is 1994, because 1994 is the year the newspapers arrived. On the records themselves the answer is 1993.
1994 to 1996, when the music left
The famous year did produce four permanent records, and their circumstances are inseparable from their sound: De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas released on 24 May, In the Nightside Eclipse on 21 February, Hvis lyset tar oss in April and Transilvanian Hunger on 17 February, three of them made in the same Bergen concert hall and one in a bedroom. All four belong to one country and one eighteen month window, which is the subject of the Best Norwegian Black Metal Albums and does not need repeating here.
What happened next is the part the standard account misses. Samael recorded Ceremony of Opposites in Switzerland in January 1994 with Waldemar Sorychta producing and Century Media released it on 18 February, thirty six minutes of mid paced writing that pointed straight at the industrial records the band would make later. Dissection cut Storm of the Light's Bane in March 1995 with Dan Swano engineering, and Nuclear Blast released it that November; its harmonies come from heavy metal, its structures from death metal, and none of it sounds soft because the tempos never relent. Sacramentum made the record that stands closest to it, Far Away from the Sun, at Unisound in Sweden in June and July 1995, and the small French label Adipocere released it on 15 May 1996 into almost total silence.
1997 to 1999, when nobody was watching
By 1997 the press had moved on, the arrests were three years old and the scene was assumed to be finished. The three years that followed contain the best playing of the decade. Emperor made Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk for Candlelight in 1997, which is the more accomplished album and the less influential one. Gorgoroth recorded Under the Sign of Hell at the Grieg Hall in 1996 and Malicious Records released it on 20 October 1997: thirty three minutes, nine songs, all written by Infernus, with nothing stretched and nothing decorated.
Dawn spent April 1997 at Peter Tagtgren's studio in Sweden and then waited sixteen months while Necropolis Records got around to releasing Slaughtersun (Crown of the Triarchy) in August 1998, seven tracks across fifty eight minutes, written entirely by Fredrik Soderberg out of a stock of thirteen songs. Terrorizer later placed it among the hundred most important albums of the nineties, which is the sort of recognition that arrives long after the band that earned it has stopped. The decade closed with Immortal reduced to two working members making At the Heart of Winter in November 1998 and Osmose releasing it on 22 February 1999, faster and harder than anything from the famous eighteen months.
What the shape means
Three things follow from reading the decade in order. The first is that the peak and the fame do not coincide, and never have in any genre. The second is that the interesting records get further apart geographically every year, from one shop in Oslo in 1992 to Prague, Athens, Tokyo, the Swiss lakes and rural Sweden by 1996. The third is that a great many of these are first albums, made by people who had never been in a studio before and never made anything as good again, which is a pattern strange enough to deserve its own accounting and gets it in the Best Black Metal Debut Albums.
What the nineties did not do was end anything. The idea that the decade is a closed collection, with a first record and a last record and nothing worth hearing on either side of it, has survived because it makes for a tidier story than the truth. Play the nine albums in the table in order, one a year, and the tidy story falls apart in about six hours.
