On 14 November 2025 a project that began as one man with a drum machine in a bedroom in California released a nine song album built around a three part title suite. Lamp of Murmuur put The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy out through Wolves of Hades, and it sat on year end lists next to records made by bands with orchestras and tour buses. That is the state of the last fifteen years in one sentence: the best of it arrives without a scene attached, the way weather arrives rather than the way news does.
What follows is the shelf from 2010 to now, grouped by what each record did, with an order at the end. The decade before it, and the argument about where the modern era starts, sits in black metal 2000s.
The 2010s belonged to two bands
Two catalogues dominate the decade and neither of them did any promotion. Mgla released With Hearts Toward None in 2012 and Exercises in Futility in 2015, and the second of those is the most imitated black metal record made since the nineties: six numbered pieces, a drummer who plays behind the beat on purpose, and melodies that keep resolving a step away from where the ear has been trained to expect. Age of Excuse followed in 2019 on the band's own label. Four albums, no photographs worth the name, no interviews.
Deathspell Omega closed its theological trilogy with Paracletus in 2010 and then went somewhere harder still: The Synarchy of Molten Bones in 2016 is thirty minutes of music that behaves like a collapsing building, and The Furnaces of Palingenesia in 2019 pulled the same material back into something a listener can hold. Between them these two bands set the terms every serious project of the period has worked against.
The records that arrived from nowhere
The decade's other habit was the debut nobody saw coming. Misthyrming released Söngvar elds og óreiðu on 7 February 2015 and announced an entire Icelandic scene in one record. Batushka put Orthodox liturgy inside black metal on Litourgiya the same year and was copied within eighteen months. Panopticon, one man in the American midwest, put banjo, fiddle and Appalachian union songs into Kentucky in 2012 and followed it with Roads to the North in 2014, and nobody had to approve either because there was nobody to ask.
Then Deafheaven's Sunbather in 2013, which put shoegaze guitars and a pink sleeve in front of an audience that had never bought a black metal record and started a fight that is still running. Zeal and Ardor built Devil Is Fine in 2016 out of American spirituals and tremolo. Wiegedood in Belgium and Oathbreaker next door took the form toward hardcore. Not all of these are black metal by any strict reading. All of them brought people in.
The best of it arrives without a scene attached, the way weather arrives rather than the way news does.
The 2010s records the lists keep missing
Underneath the famous ones sits a second row that has aged better than most of the first. Blut aus Nord spent 2011 and 2012 releasing a trilogy of albums numbered rather than named, three records that treat dissonance as an architecture rather than an effect. Wolves in the Throne Room made Celestial Lineage in 2011, the most carefully produced record the Cascadian wing has managed. Krallice put out Years Past Matter in 2012, five long pieces of two guitars playing lines that should not fit together.
Iceland supplied Svartidaudi's Flesh Cathedral in 2012, which is where the country's ceremonial, unsettled chord writing first became a style rather than a habit, and Sinmara carried it forward through the rest of the decade. Germany's Der Weg einer Freiheit made Stellar in 2015 for people who want the form played loud and long by an actual band. In New York Yellow Eyes spent ten years recording guitars in rooms with the wrong acoustics on purpose. None of these sold in any quantity. All of them are still being argued about, which in this genre is the only currency that holds its value.
The 2020s, when the underground overtook the top
The current decade has produced more good records than any comparable stretch, and almost all of them come from bands of one to four people on labels with no staff. Gaerea released Limbo in 2020 into a year with no tours in it and Coma in 2024 into festival main stages. Spectral Wound made A Diabolic Thirst for Profound Lore on 16 April 2021 and Songs of Blood and Mire on 23 August 2024, two records that do nothing except riffs at speed and do it better than anyone. Afsky set old Danish poetry against melodies of real grief on Ofte jeg drømmer mig død in May 2020.
The veterans held up better than expected. Darkthrone made Eternal Hails in 2021 and It Beckons Us All in 2024, both of them long, slow and entirely indifferent to what anyone wants from the band. Dodheimsgard came back with Black Medium Current in 2023 after eight years. Vemod took eleven years over its second album and released it in the same year. Deathspell Omega added The Long Defeat in 2022.
| Year | Record | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Gaerea, Limbo | Atmospheric black metal built for large rooms |
| 2020 | Afsky, Ofte jeg drømmer mig død | One man, Danish poetry, melodic grief |
| 2021 | Spectral Wound, A Diabolic Thirst | Riffs at speed, nothing else, no apology |
| 2022 | Deathspell Omega, The Long Defeat | The theological project continued |
| 2023 | Dodheimsgard, Black Medium Current | Avant garde black metal, eight years in the making |
| 2024 | Darkthrone, It Beckons Us All | Two men, no concerts, still working |
| 2025 | Lamp of Murmuur, The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy | Bedroom raw black metal grown to nine songs |
2025, and where it actually stands
The most recent full year is the strongest the genre has had in a decade, and the spread of it is the point. Deafheaven returned to screaming on Lonely People with Power, released through Roadrunner on 28 March 2025. Blackbraid, one man in the Adirondacks, self released Blackbraid III. Havukruunu in Finland made Tavastland. Agriculture put out The Spiritual Sound on The Flenser, and Avantgarde Music issued a first album by Bianca. When Louder published its ten best black metal albums of 2025 on 24 December, the list ran from bands on major label money to records with no label at all, which has never previously been true of a single year in this music.
The order, stated once
- Mgla, Exercises in Futility (2015)
- Deathspell Omega, Paracletus (2010)
- Panopticon, Kentucky (2012)
- Misthyrming, Söngvar elds og óreiðu (2015)
- Spectral Wound, A Diabolic Thirst (2021)
- Deafheaven, Sunbather (2013)
- Batushka, Litourgiya (2015)
- Gaerea, Limbo (2020)
- Afsky, Ofte jeg drømmer mig død (2020)
- Darkthrone, It Beckons Us All (2024)
Ten records, seven countries, and not one of them made by a band that could have existed inside the scene the genre is still described by. The unit that produced most of them is one person in one room, which is a format with its own rules and its own failures, and that is the subject of one Man Black Metal Bands.
