The verdict first, because it governs everything underneath it. Depressive black metal has produced perhaps a dozen records worth keeping and several thousand that mistook a mood for a piece of writing, and the difference between the two has nothing whatever to do with how badly the person holding the guitar was doing at the time. It is a matter of tempo, of harmony and of where the microphone was standing, exactly as it is on every other kind of record.
That is the standard applied below. These are albums about depression and about suicide, and they are judged here as albums: what is played, how it is recorded, whether the writing holds up on the fourth listen when the atmosphere has stopped being a surprise. The biography of the people who made them is stated where it belongs to the history of the record and left alone where it does not. Readers who want the wider shelf first will find it in the essentials.
Where the shelf starts
The founding record was made by a German band who did not use the term and would not have accepted it. Bethlehem released Dictius Te Necare through Red Stream in 1996 with Rainer Landfermann of the death metal band Pavor on vocals, and it remains the most extreme vocal performance in this entire corner of the music: shrieking and growling that shifts in volume and pitch from line to line, with no attempt at a consistent register anywhere across the album. The band called what they were doing dark metal rather than black metal. Underneath the voice is a slow, doom weighted guitar record with real chord movement, which is why it has outlasted almost everything built in its image.
The other ancestor is Burzum, and specifically the way Filosofem sounds rather than anything it says. A guitar plugged into a domestic stereo amplifier, a vocal taken through the worst microphone available in the building, and a mix in which the melody arrives from a distance: that combination gave the next generation its entire toolkit. Everything after 1996 is an argument about how to use it.
One album, and a mythology that outlived it
The Swedish duo who never played a concert made the most notorious record of the branch and then stopped. Silencer formed in 1995 around Andreas Casado on guitar and bass, took on the vocalist known as Nattramn in 1998, began recording in July 2000 with Steve Wolz brought in to play drums, and Prophecy Productions released the results in 2001, the opening track a re-recording of a song from the 1998 demo. The band never appeared on a stage and never gave an official interview. What has circulated ever since in place of information, including the claim that the singer was later committed to a Swedish hospital, has no evidence behind it and never has.
The record deserves better than its folklore. The vocal is what everybody remembers, and it is genuinely unlike anything else on tape, but the guitar writing beneath it is careful, patterned and closer to melodic doom than to raw black metal, and the piano passages are placed rather than sprinkled. Strip the rumours away and there is still an album there. That is more than can be said for most of what the rumours have been attached to since.
The solitary years
Between 2002 and 2008 the branch belonged almost entirely to men working alone in rooms with the door shut. Forgotten Tomb began in 1999 as one Italian, Ferdinando Marchisio, who played everything himself on Songs to Leave, issued by Selbstmord Services in 2002, and again on Springtime Depression for Adipocere the following year. The first of those is the one to own: forty minutes of slow, unresolved guitar figures that repeat past the point of comfort, with the doom influence carried in the tempo rather than in the tone.
Xasthur was the American equivalent and the more prolific by a distance. Scott Conner started it in December 1995 and recorded at home with an unstable line-up and rehearsal tapes circulating underground before any label was involved, and the two albums that matter are Telepathic with the Deceased, released by Moribund in 2004, and Subliminal Genocide, released by Hydra Head in 2006. The mix is the composition: guitars pushed so far back that the amplifier sounds as though it were two rooms away with the door between them closed, keyboards filling the space that leaves, and a voice at the very edge of audibility. It works on the first two records and becomes a mannerism on the later ones, which Conner appears to have concluded himself.
The mix is the composition. Push the guitar two rooms away, let the keyboard fill what is left, and the record has an argument before a note is written.
Sweden, where it became a written song
Two Swedish acts pulled the style back towards songwriting, and both are better records than the tag suggests. Shining, the Swedish band of that name, was started in 1996 by Niklas Kvarforth, who was twelve years old at the time, and by IV: The Eerie Cold in 2005 and V: Halmstad in 2007, both on Season of Mist, the band was writing in verses, choruses and lead guitar harmonies borrowed openly from seventies hard rock. The playing is the best in the branch and the arrangements are the only ones that would survive being transcribed. Kvarforth has also spent his career making public statements encouraging self harm, which is a fact about a person and is recorded here once, without amplification and without excuse.
Lifelover were formed in Stockholm in June 2005 by Jonas Bergqvist and Kim Carlsson and were barely a black metal band at all. Pulver in 2006 and Erotik in 2007 run a drum machine under clean guitar, spoken passages, piano and songs of three or four minutes with actual hooks in them, and the harsh vocal is one colour among several rather than the point. It is the most listenable music discussed here and the least imitated, because it requires ideas rather than a texture. Bergqvist died on 9 September 2011; the death was ruled accidental and attributed to an overdose of his prescription medication. The remaining members ended the band, saying he had written most of it, and played once more in Quebec in November 2015 to mark ten years.
The records that outlasted the tag
By the end of the 2000s the label had become an embarrassment attached to a great deal of worthless music, and two albums made after that point are the proof the form itself was never the problem. ColdWorld, one German working alone, released Melancholie² through Cold Dimensions on 24 March 2008, a record whose keyboards are warm and whose guitars are not, and the friction between those two decisions is the whole design. Woods of Desolation recorded Torn Beyond Reason at SLS Studios in Wollongong across February and March 2010, Northern Silence Productions released it on 25 February 2011 in a digipak limited to nine hundred and ninety nine copies, and it is the point at which the branch stopped sounding like a bedroom and started sounding like a band.
How to judge these
Three questions settle almost every argument about this shelf, and none of them is about sincerity. Does the guitar part change over the course of the song, or is the song a single figure with a running time attached. Is the vocal doing work the instruments are not already doing. And is the production a decision, audible as a decision, rather than the sound of somebody who could not afford better. The records above answer yes three times. The thousands that copied them answer no at least twice, and no amount of genuine misery on the part of the person recording will change that arithmetic, because a listener cannot hear sincerity and can hear a chord change. The genre that took minimalism furthest and got a masterpiece out of it did so with no despair in it at all, which is the subject of transilvanian Hunger and the Case for Minimalism.
