Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Most genres treat a first album as an apprenticeship. This one treats it as the whole career. Count the records that anybody outside the underground can name and a startling share of them are debuts, made by people who had never seen the inside of a studio, on equipment they did not understand, in sessions costing less than a week's wages. The best black metal debut albums are not promising. They are finished.
There is a mechanism behind that and it is not romantic. A band arriving with one idea and no technique will execute the idea, because they have nothing else to do with the time. A band arriving with technique will decorate. The style punishes decoration more brutally than any other form of metal, which is why so many second albums here are worse than the first, and why several of the bands below never made a third worth owning. The wider shelf, sorted by function rather than by career position, holds the records to own with their years, labels and studios.
The first one of all
The Swede who built the sound in a garage before there was a scene to build it for did it in about two days. Bathory recorded their first album at Heavenshore Studio in Stockholm in June 1984, in a converted garage with a homemade eight channel tape recorder, and because there was not enough tape they ran the machine at half speed to fit the sessions onto a single master. Between thirty two and fifty six hours covered the recording and the mixing. Tyfon released it on 2 October 1984 with a yellow goat on the sleeve, and the pressing of a thousand copies was gone inside a fortnight. Everything that the northern bands were praised for eight years later is on that tape already.
It is also, by any fair reading, a first album by people who could not yet play, and that is the point rather than an excuse. The record works because Quorthon had one idea, which was speed with the bottom taken out of it, and no means of dressing the idea up. His third album is the better one. His first is the one that had to exist.
The debuts nobody in the band ever beat
Four records here are the high point of the band that made them, which in any other genre would be a tragedy and in this one is close to standard. Emperor made In the Nightside Eclipse at the Grieg Hall in July 1993 with Ihsahn seventeen years old when he wrote the keyboard parts, and Candlelight released it on 21 February 1994; the three albums that followed are all more accomplished and none of them matters as much. Enslaved's Vikingligr veldi, released by Deathlike Silence in 1994, is five long pieces in Old Norse by a band who have since made twice as many records without ever again sounding that severe.
Weakling recorded Dead as Dreams in 1998, split up, and left tUMULt to release it in 2000 in a first pressing of three hundred cassettes. It is their entire discography. Ved Buens Ende did the same thing with Written in Waters, cut at Endless Studios in May 1995 and released by Misanthropy that October, and then stopped for good. Between them those two albums account for more of what happened to the genre after 2000 than most of the famous Norwegian records do.
A band with one idea and no technique will execute the idea. A band with technique will decorate. This music punishes decoration.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
The debuts that were beaten, and by how far
Dissection spent the first six days of March 1993 at the Hellspawn and Unisound studios with Dan Swano engineering, and No Fashion Records released The Somberlain on 3 December that year, with Jon Nodtveidt singing and playing guitar, John Zwetsloot on the classical and rhythm parts, Peter Palmdahl on bass and Ole Ohman drumming. It is a fine album that has spent thirty years standing in the shadow of the one that came next, and the gap between them is smaller than the reputations suggest.
Immortal and Darkthrone are the two clearest cases of a band that had to make one record before it could make the right one. Immortal's first album is competent and generic; Pure Holocaust, a year later, is neither. Darkthrone's is a technical death metal album with an entirely different band inside it. Neither of those first records is on this list and neither should be, which is the necessary counterweight to the argument above: the debut is not automatically the good one, it is simply the one most often unimproved on.
The modern debuts
The pattern did not stop when the Norwegians did. Wolves in the Throne Room recorded Diadem of 12 Stars at Louder Studios in San Francisco with Tim Green engineering, and Vendlus Records released it on 7 February 2006: three tracks, an hour long, made by two brothers and a second guitarist, and Southern Lord signed the band on the strength of it before the year was out. Watain spent April 2000 at Necromorbus Studios in Sweden and Drakkar Productions released Rabid Death's Curse that December, thirty eight minutes by four men in their early twenties who were still finding the thing they later became very good at.
Deafheaven made the most consequential modern one in four days between December 2010 and January 2011 at Atomic Garden in East Palo Alto with Jack Shirley producing, and Deathwish released Roads to Judah on 26 April 2011: four tracks, thirty eight minutes, and the whole argument about whether shoegaze belonged anywhere near this music already fully formed two years before the record that started the fight in public. Taake's Nattestid ser porten vid (Wounded Love, 7 January 1999) and Windir's Soknardalr (Head Not Found, 1997) belong in the same column, both of them made by one man with a session player and neither improved on since.
In most genres a first album is an apprenticeship. In this one it is frequently the whole career, and the second record is where the trouble starts.
How to use the pattern
Two practical things fall out of it. If a band from this genre is new to you and has more than four albums, start at the beginning rather than with the one the write-ups call mature, because mature here usually means keyboards and a bigger studio. And if a band made exactly one album and then stopped, that album is worth more of your attention than its obscurity suggests, because in this music stopping is often a sign that the idea was completed rather than abandoned.
That principle also produces the shelf nobody assembles, which is the set of records that were finished, correct and then simply not heard, some of them debuts and some of them not. That list is the Most Underrated Black Metal Albums, and it is longer than it has any right to be.
