On 22 April 1996 a Norwegian black metal band released a music video. That is the whole fact, and in 1996 it was close to a scandal: the genre had spent five years arguing that it existed to be unavailable, and here was Satyricon putting "Mother North" on a screen. The video outlived the argument. It later turned up in a mainstream American film, and a great many people who own no black metal at all can hum the opening figure.
That is what a song does and an album cannot. The album is the unit this music chose for itself, and every list of records makes the same case in the same order, but a small number of individual tracks broke loose from their sleeves and went out into the world alone. Ten of them are below, with the reason each one travels, and the albums they came off are laid out in the chapter this belongs to.
The ten
- Bathory, "Enter the Eternal Fire", from Under the Sign of the Black Mark (1987)
- Mayhem, "Freezing Moon", from De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas (1994), 6:23
- Emperor, "I Am the Black Wizards", from In the Nightside Eclipse (1994), 6:01
- Darkthrone, "Transilvanian Hunger", from Transilvanian Hunger (1994)
- Dissection, "Where Dead Angels Lie", from Storm of the Light's Bane (1995), 5:53
- Satyricon, "Mother North", from Nemesis Divina (1996)
- Weakling, "Dead as Dreams", from Dead as Dreams (2000), 20:39
- Wolves in the Throne Room, "I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots", from Two Hunters (2007), 18:16
- Deafheaven, "Dream House", from Sunbather (2013), 9:15
- Behemoth, "O Father O Satan O Sun!", from The Satanist (2014)
The three that fixed the vocabulary
The Swede in the converted garage got there first, as he did with almost everything. Bathory put "Enter the Eternal Fire" on Under the Sign of the Black Mark in 1987, six minutes that open on a bell and a slow clean figure before the guitar arrives as a single sheet of treble, and every slow black metal song written since is standing in its footprints. Nothing about it is fast. It established that the genre's weight would come from space rather than from tempo, three years before Norway had a scene to argue about it.
Mayhem supplied the anthem. "Freezing Moon" existed in the band's set from 1990, appeared on a compilation and on the Live in Leipzig tape before the studio version was finally issued on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas in 1994 at six minutes and twenty three seconds, and its authorship is still argued about, with Necrobutcher's account crediting himself and Dead for the writing and Euronymous with a single riff. What is not in dispute is the reach. Dissection, Immortal, Dark Funeral, Carpathian Forest, Gorgoroth, Behemoth, Vader, Enslaved and Cradle of Filth have all recorded it, which makes it the closest thing this music has to a standard.
Emperor wrote the third. "I Am the Black Wizards" runs six minutes and one second on In the Nightside Eclipse, recorded at the Grieg Hall in July 1993 with Pytten at the desk, and it is the piece that taught a whole subgenre what keyboards were for: not a melody line laid over the guitars but a wash held behind them, so that the tremolo picking reads as one instrument with a shadow rather than as two instruments competing. Ihsahn was seventeen. The rest of the album is uneven and this track is not.
A great black metal song is a single riff held up like a torch at the head of a procession, and everything else on the record walks behind it.
The two that proved melody was allowed
Dissection recorded Storm of the Light's Bane between 17 and 30 March 1995 at the Hellspawn and Unisound studios with Dan Swanö engineering and mixing, Nuclear Blast released it on 17 November 1995, and "Where Dead Angels Lie" at five minutes and fifty three seconds is the track that gets covered and reissued. Its harmonies come straight out of heavy metal and none of it sounds soft, because Jon Nödtveidt sang the melodies as though they were charges being read out. The album was the band's last before his imprisonment in 1997, and eleven years passed before another one.
"Mother North" does the same job from the other direction. Moonfog released Nemesis Divina on 22 April 1996, forty two minutes cut at Waterfall Studios, with a sleeve designed by Halvor Bodin and Stein Løken that put colour and actual graphic design on a black metal record for the first time in years. The song is built on a keyboard figure a child could play and a riff that swaggers, and it is the moment the genre admitted it wanted to be heard by somebody. That admission is the whole story of the years that follow, and it is told in order across the rest of the history.
The long ones, where the song swallows the album
Two tracks past eighteen minutes make the case that this music's natural unit was never four minutes at all. Weakling's title piece runs twenty minutes and thirty nine seconds in second position on Dead as Dreams, directly behind a ten minute opener, and it moves through four distinct sections without a single moment that announces the change. Wolves in the Throne Room closed Two Hunters with "I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots" at eighteen minutes and sixteen seconds, recorded with Randall Dunn and carrying Jessika Kenney's clean singing into the last third. Neither is an endurance test. Both reward the fourth listen more than the first, which is the opposite of how a great song is supposed to behave and is precisely why they belong here.
The modern three
Deafheaven opened Sunbather with "Dream House" at nine minutes and fifteen seconds, Deathwish released the album on 11 June 2013, and the track is the single most effective recruiting device the genre has produced this century: blast beats, tremolo picking and a chord progression borrowed from shoegaze, arranged so that a listener who has never tolerated a harsh vocal gets three minutes of momentum before the voice arrives. Purists spent a decade arguing about it. The argument is the proof that it landed.
Behemoth closed The Satanist in 2014 with "O Father O Satan O Sun!", written after Nergal's treatment for leukaemia, and it is the only piece by a band of that commercial size in thirty years that sounds like it had to exist. Mgła answered it a year later from the opposite pole: the second movement of Exercises in Futility, released by Northern Heritage in September 2015, has no title beyond a Roman numeral, was written by two men who give no interviews, and has a melodic construction tighter than anything Norway managed in the nineties. Between those two the modern genre is fully described.
What makes one of these stand alone
Every track above has one figure you can carry out of the room in your head, and that is the entire criterion. Not the production, which varies from the Grieg Hall to a bedroom. Not the length, which runs from under six minutes to over twenty. Not the sincerity of whoever wrote it. The songs that escaped their albums did so because somebody wrote a shape memorable enough to survive being hummed badly by a stranger, which is an unfashionable thing to demand of a genre that spent a decade insisting it was above such considerations. The records those shapes came from, ranked and argued over properly, are the Best Black Metal Albums of All Time.
