The best black metal album of the 2000s was made in France by musicians whose names have never been confirmed, released by a label with no shop window, and it contains Orthodox chant, Latin, and a theological argument that most of its audience did not follow on the first attempt. That is the verdict, and the rest of this piece defends it. What the decade actually left behind is a shelf rather than a scene, and the records on it have almost nothing in common except that each one was made by people who had stopped asking Norway for permission.
These are the albums, grouped by what they did rather than by year, with an order stated once at the end. The bands themselves, and the ones that came after, are covered in modern Black Metal Bands.
The record at the top
Deathspell Omega's Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice came out on Norma Evangelium Diaboli in 2004 and made every other ambitious record of the period look tentative. The band had spent two albums playing ordinary raw black metal and then abandoned it completely: dissonant chord voicings that never settle, tempo changes that arrive without warning, choral passages set against blast beats, and lyrics that treat damnation as a problem in theology rather than a costume. There are no photographs, no credits and no concerts. Everything the band wants said is on the record, which is a discipline almost nobody else in the genre has been willing to accept.
Kenose in 2005 and Fas in 2007 completed the argument, and Paracletus in 2010 closed it. Taken together they are the most demanding body of work black metal has produced, and the only serious objection to them is that they ask more of a listener than most records in any genre do.
The three that changed the shape
Three albums told everyone that the form could be built differently. Weakling's Dead as Dreams, recorded in San Francisco in 1998 and released by tUMULt in 2000, runs seventy six minutes across five tracks, one of them past twenty minutes, and it treats repetition as the point rather than as a shortage of ideas. Blut aus Nord's The Work Which Transforms God, out on Candlelight in 2003, does the opposite with the same insight: the guitars are detuned into a permanent state of wrongness, the rhythms lurch, and the record sounds broken on purpose in a way that took the rest of the genre a decade to understand.
The third is Wolves in the Throne Room's Two Hunters, released by Southern Lord in 2007. Two brothers from Olympia took the long form Weakling had proved and filled it with something nobody in Norway had ever put in a black metal record: a stated subject, the forest they lived in, and a female voice singing over the top of it. It is the most influential American black metal album since the nineties, and the entire Cascadian wing comes out of it.
What the decade left behind is a shelf rather than a scene, and the records on it have almost nothing in common except that each was made by people who had stopped asking Norway for permission.
The orthodox wing, and the veterans
Sweden supplied the decade's most disciplined records, made by people for whom the content was not negotiable. Watain's Casus Luciferi in 2003 and Sworn to the Dark on Season of Mist in 2007 are the two that travelled furthest, the second of them tightening the songwriting without giving up anything else. Funeral Mist's Salvation in 2003 is harsher and stranger than either. Sargeist's Satanic Black Devotion in 2003 did the same job in Finland with half the budget.
The veterans had a better decade than they are given credit for. Immortal made Sons of Northern Darkness at The Abyss in Sweden with Peter Tagtgren producing, released it through Nuclear Blast on 4 February 2002, reached number fifty eight in Germany and then stopped, which is a hard way to go out and a good one. Enslaved recorded Isa at Grieghallen in Bergen with Pytten in the summer of 2004 and released it that October, and it is where the band's progressive turn finally worked rather than merely being attempted. Emperor's Prometheus in 2001 is the most difficult record any of the founders made, and Satyricon's Volcano in 2002 is the most efficient.
The doors that opened
Four records from the second half of the decade set the terms for everything that followed. Agalloch's The Mantle, on The End Records in 2002, put acoustic guitar, neofolk and doom into the form and made the result sound inevitable rather than assembled. Drudkh's Autumn Aurora, released by Supernal Music in 2004, is long, melodic and entirely uninterested in aggression, and it reached its audience across Europe with no interviews and no photographs at all.
Alcest's Souvenirs d'un autre monde, through Prophecy Productions in August 2007, removed the aggression completely and replaced it with shoegaze, and every argument about blackgaze since begins there. Mgla's Groza, on Northern Heritage in 2008, went the other way entirely, stripping the music back to two men and six numbered pieces, and it is the seed of the most admired catalogue of the following fifteen years.
A decade is judged by what still gets played twenty years later, not by what sold at the time. On that test the two thousands beat the nineties in every category except mythology.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
The depressive wing, and the near misses
One whole branch of the decade is missing from the list above and has to be accounted for, because it produced more records than any other and almost none of them survive a second listen. The depressive strain came out of Sweden and the American west coast at the same time, and its three durable names are Shining, whose Halmstad in 2007 is the only album in the style with real songwriting under it; Xasthur, one man in California whose Telepathic with the Deceased on Moribund in 2004 buries every instrument under the same grey wash and means to; and Leviathan, whose The Tenth Sub Level of Suicide in 2003 is the harshest of the three. The rest of the wing is imitation of imitation, and there is no point pretending otherwise.
Then the near misses, any of which would rank in a thinner decade. Craft made the coldest guitar sound of the period in 2005. Anaal Nathrakh's The Codex Necro in 2001 fused black metal to grindcore and industrial noise before anyone had a name for the result. Ihsahn began a solo career in 2006 that has outlasted the band he is known for. Krallice arrived in 2008 with two guitarists playing lines that do not fit together and somehow do. Nachtmystium spent the same year dragging the form toward psychedelia and got further with it than seemed possible.
The order, stated once
- Deathspell Omega, Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice (2004)
- Weakling, Dead as Dreams (2000)
- Blut aus Nord, The Work Which Transforms God (2003)
- Wolves in the Throne Room, Two Hunters (2007)
- Immortal, Sons of Northern Darkness (2002)
- Watain, Sworn to the Dark (2007)
- Drudkh, Autumn Aurora (2004)
- Agalloch, The Mantle (2002)
- Alcest, Souvenirs d'un autre monde (2007)
- Mgla, Groza (2008)
Set against the nineties this is a smaller, colder, better made shelf, with far less mythology attached and far more music. The one thing it lacks is a centre, and that turned out not to matter. The decade that followed took the same conditions and produced more records than any period in the genre's history, which is the subject of the Best Black Metal Albums of the 2010s and 2020s, and the ten years described here are the middle of black metal 2000s as a whole.
