Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.John Milton, Paradise Lost
Every list of the best black metal bands is really a list of the best black metal moments, and the two are not the same thing. A group that made one perfect album in 1994 and nine years of diminishing echoes afterwards is not a better band than one that has been putting out records worth owning since 1991 without a single collapse. So the test here is the whole shelf. Take the discography down, walk its length, and count the rooms with nothing in them. Fewest empty rooms wins. Records are ranked separately and by a different measure; if you want the chronology instead, start from the beginning.
The shelves with no gaps
Darkthrone take the top place and it is not close. Two men, more than twenty studio albums since 1991, and three separate careers inside one name: a death metal record, the three albums that wrote the second wave rulebook, and then everything from The Cult Is Alive in 2006 onward, which is crust punk and old heavy metal played by people who have nothing left to prove and no interest in being told they left the genre. The doom and speed records of the 2020s, Eternal Hails...... and Astral Fortress and It Beckons Us All......., are the work of two men in their fifties writing for themselves. Almost nobody else in extreme music has managed thirty five years without a bad decade.
Blut aus Nord come second on the same measure and the numbers are absurd. One Frenchman, working from 1994 and mostly alone, has put out seventeen albums that fall into at least four incompatible bodies of work: the frozen melodic pair of the nineties, the industrial and dissonant sequence around The Work Which Transforms God in March 2003 and MoRT in 2006, the three part 777 cycle, and the Lovecraftian noise of the Disharmonium records. Not one of them is a repeat of the last. Very few musicians in any genre have that record and none of the others do it in this one.
Enslaved, formed at Haugesund in 1991 by two teenagers, have sixteen albums and the longest continuous curve in the music: viking black metal at the start, progressive rock at the end, and no single album where you can point at the seam. Rotting Christ have been going since the late eighties, have never had a fashionable year, and are one of the very few original bands whose new material justifies the ticket on its own. Immortal belong here for the opposite reason, which is refusal to develop: ten albums about the same invented winter, played better each time, and the two made after Abbath walked out in March 2015, Northern Chaos Gods in 2018 and War Against All in 2023, are not the embarrassment everybody expected.
Short shelves that still rank high
Four bands made too little to compete on volume and too much of it is perfect to leave them out. Emperor released exactly four studio albums between 1994 and 2001 and then stopped, with three reunions since and no new record, and every one of the four is a different argument: the atmospheric one, the fast and dense one, the overreaching one, the one that abandoned the genre entirely. Dissection have three albums and the third is the divisive one Jon Nodtveidt made after his release from prison in 2004, which leaves two, and those two are enough. Deathspell Omega have written nothing since 2004 that a lesser band could have written, and their refusal to give interviews or play more than a handful of shows is not a marketing position but a working method. Mgla have four albums, two men, no song titles worth the name and no explanation for anything, and every one of the four is tighter than the last.
A band that stopped is worth more than a band that continued out of habit, and the shelf is where you see the difference. Habit leaves rooms with nothing in them.
Eirik Solvang
Where the reputation and the records come apart
Mayhem are the most famous name in the genre and belong somewhere in the middle of any honest list. One essential album, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, recorded by a line-up that had ceased to exist before anyone heard it; one deliberately alienating follow-up in 2000 that has aged better than its reception; and four further records that nobody argues about. The biography does the work the catalogue cannot. Burzum's case is the same shape with an extra problem attached: the four albums between 1992 and 1996 are a genuine body of work, everything recorded after prison is thin, and the man himself has spent thirty years publishing far right material under his own name. Both facts stay in the same paragraph and neither cancels the other.
Venom are not on this list at all, which will look like provocation and is not. They gave the genre its name and one exciting album, and the catalogue behind it does not survive the test being applied here. The same reasoning removes several bands who are on every ranking of black metal bands ever printed. Bathory are the hardest case: Quorthon made five albums between 1984 and 1990 that changed two genres, and then most of a decade of material that even his defenders skip. That is still a top ten career. It is not a top three shelf.
Three names are missing because the test cannot yet be applied to them, which is a statement about the clock and not about the music. Watain have seven albums since 2000 and the middle three, Sworn to the Dark, Lawless Darkness and The Wild Hunt, are the strongest run any Swedish band has managed since Dissection stopped; the two that follow are thinner and the shelf is still open at one end. Spectral Wound out of Canada have four albums with no atmosphere, no concept and nothing on them but riffs, which is a harder discipline than it sounds and a very difficult one to keep up. Misthyrming arrived in 2015 with a record that took French dissonance and gave it back its physical weight. Ask again in 2035.
Take the discography down, walk its length, and count the rooms with nothing in them. Fewest empty rooms wins.
The order, stated once
- Darkthrone, for thirty five years and three careers without a bad decade.
- Blut aus Nord, seventeen albums and not one of them a repeat.
- Enslaved, the longest unbroken curve in the music.
- Emperor, four albums, four arguments, then silence.
- Deathspell Omega, the most demanding body of work anyone has assembled here.
- Immortal, for refusing to change and getting better at it.
- Rotting Christ, still writing material worth the ticket after thirty five years.
- Mgla, four records, no filler, no explanation.
- Bathory, the greatest six years and the worst decade after them.
- Dissection, two albums, both permanent.
Two names people expect at the top are outside it, and the reason in both cases is arithmetic rather than distaste. Mayhem and Burzum are why most readers found the genre; neither has a shelf that stands up next to the ten above. Something similar is true in reverse of a whole generation of nineties bands who were never famous enough to be overrated in the first place, made two or three records each on labels that went under, and then vanished. Several of them are better than entries eight, nine and ten here. That list is the Most Underrated Black Metal Bands of the Nineties, and it is the more useful of the two if you already own everything above.
