The Best Black Metal Albums of All Time

The best black metal album ever made is Under a Funeral Moon, and the reason it is almost never the one named is that it arrived with no anecdote attached to it. That is the argument of this list compressed into a sentence. What follows applies one test and no other: what a record is like to live with, played loudly on speakers, three decades after the newspapers stopped caring who set fire to what.

Influence is a separate measurement and it produces a separate order. A record can kick a door open and still be the fourth best thing that walked through it, and a great deal of the received canon rests on chronology rather than on riffs. The companion shelf, arranged by what each release made possible instead of by how good it is, holds twenty eight black metal albums filed by function, with the years, the labels and the studios. This piece is a judgement instead. The two do not agree, and they are not meant to.

The test, and the two demotions it forces

The four young men from a commuter town south of Oslo who had thrown a death metal career away the year before went back into Creative Studios in Kolbotn in June 1992 and came out with the record that settles what this music is actually for. Darkthrone handed Under a Funeral Moon to Peaceville, who released it on 15 February 1993, and every decision on it points the same way: Zephyrous playing lead over Nocturno Culto's bass and vocal, Fenriz drumming with the kit pushed back into the room, distortion smeared across the whole mix rather than kept politely on the guitars. None of that is a theory about production. It is eight pieces of writing that hold their edge after thirty years of handling, the way a blade does and a slogan does not.

Which forces the first demotion. Transilvanian Hunger, made a year and a half later on a four track machine in Fenriz's bedroom, is the more discussed album by a wide margin because it is the purer statement of an idea, and an idea is easier to write a thousand words about than a set of riffs. It is a fine record. It is not the band's best one. The second demotion is Filosofem, which loses its place to the album Burzum had finished two years before it, and the case for that sits below.

A record can kick a door open and still be the fourth best thing that walked through it.

The top of the shelf

Tracked across sessions that ran from June 1992 into May 1993 inside a fifteen hundred seat concert hall in Bergen, paid for by a label with almost no money in it, and released on 24 May 1994 into a country that had spent eighteen months reading about its makers in the news, Mayhem's only album of the period sits second here for reasons that have nothing to do with the court file. The songs are the strongest writing the style produced. "Freezing Moon" and "Life Eternal" carry melodies rather than atmospheres, Hellhammer plays with a control nobody else in the scene possessed, and Attila Csihar's vocal refuses every convention the genre had already agreed on. Two of the men who made it were dead before it reached the shops.

Burzum's Hvis lyset tar oss was cut in the same concert hall in September 1992 with Eirik Hundvin engineering, and Misanthropy released it in April 1994. Four pieces, forty four minutes, the longest of them past fourteen, and the discipline is the whole point: the repetitions are timed, the closing keyboard piece is placed where it belongs instead of dropped in as an experiment, and nothing on it needs explaining before it works. It is the better half of a two record argument, and the more famous half is the one with the equipment story attached to it.

Emperor recorded In the Nightside Eclipse at the same Bergen desk in July 1993 and Candlelight released it on 21 February 1994. What puts it fourth is the treatment of the keyboards, which sit under the guitars as weather rather than over them as melody, a distinction every symphonic band of the following decade failed to hear. What keeps it from climbing is a second half that loses its shape. Dissection's Storm of the Light's Bane, cut in March 1995 with Dan Swano at the desk and issued by Nuclear Blast that November, takes fifth on writing alone, and Immortal's Pure Holocaust takes sixth for the opposite virtue: forty minutes at one speed about a country that does not exist, with nothing on it anybody later had to apologise for.

The records that got better as the scene got worse

The four modern entries are not there out of politeness. Deathspell Omega did something in 2004 that nobody in Norway had attempted, building the music on an actual reading of theology and then writing guitar parts whose chords refuse to resolve, so that the songs have to be finished on nerve. Blut aus Nord had gone at the same wall from the other side a year earlier, using detuned guitars and mechanical percussion on The Work Which Transforms God to make a record that is structurally wrong on purpose and rewards exactly the repeat listening it appears to punish.

Mgla released Exercises in Futility through Northern Heritage in September 2015: six tracks numbered in Roman numerals, no titles at all, two men who give no interviews, and melodic construction tighter than anything Norway managed in its best year. Weakling earned ninth place with a single album by a band that had already broken up, recorded in 1998, released by tUMULt in 2000 in a first pressing of three hundred cassettes, five songs across seventy six minutes with a guitar sound thick where the northern one was thin. Almost everything American in the style descends from it.

There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of the happy time in misery.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Three that miss by an inch

Beherit's Drawing Down the Moon (Spinefarm, 1993) is slow, muddy and closer to ritual ambient music than to metal, and it took two decades and a generation of French and Icelandic bands before the rest of the world worked out what it had been doing. Enslaved's Vikingligr veldi (Deathlike Silence, 1994) is five long pieces in Old Norse and the first proof that the form could carry a subject other than blasphemy. Spectral Wound's A Diabolic Thirst (Profound Lore, 2021) has no concept, no atmosphere and no ambition beyond riffs, which is why it is the most purely enjoyable thing the genre has made this decade.

Six of the ten above came out of one small country inside three years, a concentration worth separating out and arguing over on its own terms, and that argument is the Best Norwegian Black Metal Albums. The other four came from Poland, France, California and the long shadow of the same Bergen concert hall, which is the answer to anyone still saying the story finished in 1994.

How to argue with this

Every ranked list is an invitation to disagree, and the only ones worth reading state their test out loud so that the disagreement can be specific. The test here was durability under repeated playing. Apply the influence test instead and Transilvanian Hunger and Filosofem both climb, A Blaze in the Northern Sky enters, and the four modern records fall off the bottom, because none of them has yet had time to father anything. Apply a sales test and the best black metal albums become a different set entirely, and a much duller one. Pick the test first. The order follows from it.

One instruction holds across all ten. They were mixed by people who assumed you would play them loudly on real speakers, in a room, with the treble allowed to become a physical event rather than a texture leaking out of a phone. The founding claim of the genre was that music could be built hostile enough to turn away anybody who did not want it, and the full account of how that claim was arrived at, from a Newcastle sleeve in 1982 to the present, is where it all began. The claim still holds. It is still the best reason to listen.

Sources and notes

• Wikipedia: Under a Funeral Moon
• Wikipedia: De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
• Wikipedia: Hvis lyset tar oss
• Wikipedia: Si monvmentvm reqvires, circvmspice
• Wikipedia: Exercises in Futility
• Wikipedia: Dead as Dreams