Four and a quarter million people, one record shop that never turned a profit, and perhaps thirty of them who mattered. Those are the numbers underneath every claim made about this country, and they are worth holding on to, because the scale of what came out of Norway between 1991 and 2001 is out of all proportion to the number of people who did it.
What the country contributed was not a sound. It was a method, and the method was refusal: take away the low end, take away the dynamics, take away the studio's instinct to make things comfortable, and see what remains standing. That is why the best Norwegian black metal albums do not all sound alike, and why so many of the records made in imitation of them do. The wider international shelf, which puts these beside the Swedish, French, Polish and American entries and files everything by what it changed, is the twenty eight black metal albums that piece argues for. This one stays inside one country and one decade.
The received version of this list runs from February 1992 to May 1994 and then stops, as though a border closed. It is wrong by about seven years. Four of the fifteen records below were made after the second wave was declared over, and two of the four are better than most of what the second wave managed.
- Darkthrone, Under a Funeral Moon (Peaceville, 1993)
- Mayhem, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas (Deathlike Silence, 1994)
- Burzum, Hvis lyset tar oss (Misanthropy, 1994)
- Emperor, In the Nightside Eclipse (Candlelight, 1994)
- Immortal, Pure Holocaust (Osmose, 1993)
- Darkthrone, A Blaze in the Northern Sky (Peaceville, 1992)
- Enslaved, Vikingligr veldi (Deathlike Silence, 1994)
- Ved Buens Ende, Written in Waters (Misanthropy, 1995)
- Ulver, Bergtatt (Head Not Found, 1995)
- Satyricon, Nemesis Divina (Moonfog, 1996)
- Gorgoroth, Under the Sign of Hell (Malicious, 1997)
- Immortal, At the Heart of Winter (Osmose, 1999)
- Taake, Nattestid ser porten vid (Wounded Love, 1999)
- Windir, Arntor (Head Not Found, 1999)
- Thorns, Thorns (Moonfog, 2001)
The eighteen months everybody means
The band from the commuter town at the end of the Oslo line began it by throwing a career away. Darkthrone were a competent technical death metal act with an English contract when they went into Creative Studios in Kolbotn in August 1991 and came out with something that had no low end, no dynamics and a vocal that shrieked instead of growling. Peaceville received the tapes, judged the sound too weak to release and only relented when the band said they would take it elsewhere. It came out on 26 February 1992. Their own bass player disagreed with the change and played the sessions as a hired hand.
Everything that followed is a variation on that refusal. Under a Funeral Moon (June 1992, released 15 February 1993) removed the last death metal in the writing and remains the finest thing the country produced. Immortal made Pure Holocaust at Grieghallen in Bergen and Osmose released it in 1993, forty minutes at a single speed about a landmass that does not exist on any map, and it has aged better than its neighbours because there is nothing in it to regret. Enslaved's Vikingligr veldi went out on Deathlike Silence in 1994, five long pieces in Old Norse, and proved the form could carry a subject other than blasphemy.
Emperor cut In the Nightside Eclipse at the same Bergen desk in July 1993 with Eirik Hundvin engineering, and Candlelight released it on 21 February 1994; the keyboards sit beneath the guitars as weather rather than above them as melody, which is the one thing about that record nobody managed to copy. Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, tracked in the same building between June 1992 and May 1993 and released by Deathlike Silence on 24 May 1994, carries the strongest songwriting in the whole period. Burzum's Hvis lyset tar oss, recorded in September 1992 and issued by Misanthropy in April 1994, is the most disciplined use of repetition anybody in the style has managed.
The method was refusal. Take away the low end, take away the dynamics, take away the studio's instinct to make things comfortable, and see what is still standing.
The years the country is not given credit for
Then the border supposedly closed, and it did not. Ulver recorded Bergtatt at Endless Lydstudio in Oslo in November and December 1994 with Kristian Romsoe engineering, and Head Not Found released it in February 1995: five chapters, clean singing, flute, real dynamics, and the first demonstration that the atmosphere had never depended on the distortion. Two years later the same band made Nattens madrigal, which is nothing but distortion, and then walked out of the style altogether. The pair together is the best evidence anybody has produced that all of this was a choice.
Satyricon's Nemesis Divina (Moonfog, 1996) has a real budget behind it and riffs written by somebody who had gone on listening to heavy metal without apologising for it. Gorgoroth recorded Under the Sign of Hell at Grieghallen in 1996 and Malicious Records released it on 20 October 1997, thirty three minutes long, with Pest singing, Infernus playing guitar and most of the bass and Grim on drums, and it is the most concentrated record of the whole second half of the decade. Nothing is stretched. Nothing is decorated.
The best Norwegian record of 1999 was made by a band down to two members. Demonaz's tendinitis had ended his playing, so Abbath took the guitars, the bass and the vocals, Horgh drummed, Demonaz wrote the words, and the three of them went to Peter Tagtgren's studio in Sweden in November 1998 to make At the Heart of Winter, which Osmose released on 22 February 1999. It is closer to thrash than to anything on this list, it moves faster and hits harder than the records made in the famous eighteen months, and it is routinely left off national lists for the offence of having arrived late. That is the decade's real shape, argued in full in the Best Black Metal Albums of the 1990s.
The same year gave up two more. Taake recorded Nattestid ser porten vid at Grieghallen across 1997 and 1998, with Hoest writing everything and a session player handling bass and drums, and Wounded Love released it on 7 January 1999 with the lyrics printed in runes. Dodheimsgard went in the opposite direction on 666 International, released by Moonfog on 11 June 1999, dragging keyboards, drum machines and industrial rhythms into a form that was supposed to have banned all three.
Two records that are on nobody's national list
Three men from other people's bands made Written in Waters at Endless Studios in May 1995 and Misanthropy released it that October, and a quarter of a century later it still does not sound like anything else. Vicotnik played guitar and screamed, Skoll played bass and keyboards, and Carl-Michael Eide drummed and sang the clean parts, and the chords they used were the dissonant voicings that French bands were given the credit for inventing a decade afterwards. Ved Buens Ende then stopped, having made one album.
Thorns had been going since 1989 under another name, in Trondheim rather than in Oslo or Bergen, and the 1991 demo Grymyrk was circulating among the people who went on to write the famous records. Snorre Ruch went to prison in 1994 as an accomplice to the killing of Euronymous, and the band's only album did not appear until Moonfog released Thorns in 2001, with guest vocals from several of the scene's other principals. It is cold in a way none of the 1993 records are, because the coldness is mechanical rather than atmospheric.
What the national frame hides
Two things, and both of them matter. The first is that almost nothing on this list was invented here. The guitar tone, the shriek and the reverb are audible on a Swedish record from 1987, the blueprint for the whole approach to recording was arguably laid down in Czechoslovakia in 1990, and Finland got to the ritual end of the style before anybody in Oslo did. What Norway supplied was doctrine, discipline and a story the foreign press could not stop printing.
The second is that the story cost the music something. A scene of thirty people spent three years being written about as a criminal organisation, and the fifteen albums above spent thirty years being read through the newspapers rather than through the speakers. The full account, the shop and the arrests and the sound and everything that came after, is the long version. Play the records first. The rest keeps.
