In October 1995 a band whose members were also playing in Arcturus, Satyricon, Virus and Dodheimsgard released one album called Written in Waters, on an English label, and then stopped. There was no second record. It has gone in and out of print for thirty years, it is cited by half the strange black metal made since, and it appears on almost none of the lists written about this country.
That is the shape of the problem. The census of Norwegian black metal is not ten bands. It is somewhere north of a hundred, and the reason most readers can name four of them is that four of them had a murder trial attached. The famous ten have their own article, KaosMetal's list of norwegian Black Metal Bands, and they are deliberately not repeated here. What follows is the roll call underneath them: who was in the room, who was doing the interesting work while the cameras were pointed elsewhere, and which records are worth finding.
In the room, and never on the poster
Thorns is the sharpest case. Snorre Ruch formed it in Trondheim in 1989, under a different name, with Bard Eithun on drums from 1990, and put out three demos in two years, Grymyrk in June 1991, Trondertun and The Thule Tape in 1992, none of which reached a shop counter. Nobody bought them because they were never for sale. The riff shapes on those tapes went into the records that everyone else got credit for, and the band's own first album did not arrive until 2001, on Moonfog, seven years after the style it helped build had been declared finished.
Around it sat a row of one album careers. Fleurety made Min tid skal komme in 1995 with high clean female vocals over a black metal band, six years before anyone called that a subgenre. Kvist released For kunsten maa vi evig vike in 1996, a keyboard heavy record with actual melodic writing in it, and never made a second. Mysticum put drum machines under black metal on In the Streams of Inferno in 1996 and spent the next eighteen years failing to follow it. Isengard and Storm were both side projects of the same Darkthrone drummer: the first a folk and doom hybrid, the second a set of Norwegian traditional songs cut in 1995 with the singer from a well known gothic doom band, which is as close as the scene got to a crossover record.
Four names took the searchlight. The other forty did the work in the dark it left behind.
The avant garde wing, which Norway invented and then walked away from
The strangest music this country produced came out between 1995 and 1999 and got almost no attention at the time. Ved Buens Ende wrote in dissonant chords with a bass carrying the melody and a vocal that talks as often as it shrieks. Dodheimsgard took the same personnel and made 666 International in 1999, a record with samples, electronics and industrial rhythm sitting inside black metal structures, which was received at the time as a joke and is now the most influential Norwegian album of its decade after the famous ones. Arcturus spent La Masquerade Infernale in 1997 building a cabaret out of the same instruments. Solefald and In the Woods... were doing related things at the same moment.
All four were treated as heresy by the orthodox wing and all four turned out to matter. The genre spent the 2000s catching up with records it had refused in the 1990s, which is the oldest story in music and no less true for it.
The black thrash axis
The other reaction to the symphonic drift of the late nineties was to strip the music back to speed and filth. Aura Noir put out Black Thrash Attack in 1996 and named the whole tendency in the title; the band contained musicians who had played on some of the records they were reacting against. Carpathian Forest from Bergen made the same argument with more nastiness and a better sense of humour. Urgehal, Ragnarok, Koldbrann and Tsjuder carried it into the 2000s, and Khold did something quieter and stranger with it: four albums in five years, sung entirely in Norwegian, at walking pace, with the guitars playing something closer to blues phrasing than to tremolo. Nobody else sounds like that.
One man, one room
Norway produced more solo black metal than any other country of its size, and it is a direct consequence of the conditions. No venues, no money, no obligation to keep four people in agreement, and a four track machine that costs less than a drum kit. Taake has been Hoest by himself since 1993, with hired players for shows, and Nattestid ser porten vid from 1999 is the best thing in that wing of the scene. Mork is one man in a town on the Swedish border who has put out a run of albums since 2013 and improved on almost every one of them.
The regional scenes worked the same way. In Sogn, on the west coast, Terje Bakken built Windir around the dialect and the folk music of his own valley and called the result Sognametal, which nobody else was allowed to use. He set out for a family cabin on 14 January 2004, was caught in a snowstorm, and was found dead of hypothermia three days later. He was twenty two. The band ended in March of that year, and the surviving members formed Vreid, who have now been going for longer than Windir ever did.
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
The ones nobody expects
Two facts belong in any honest census and are almost never printed. The first is that Norway produced Christian black metal, in the same decade and the same country as the church fires: Antestor released The Return of the Black Death in 1998 on an English label whose roster otherwise pointed the other way, and the record is a perfectly competent piece of melodic black metal with the wrong lyrics on it. It was refused by most of the scene and it has outlasted a good deal of what refused it.
The second is that the scene was almost entirely male and stayed that way for twenty years. The exceptions are worth naming precisely because there are so few of them: a guest vocal on a Fleurety album, the singer on Storm's Nordavind in 1995, and very little else until the 2010s. Any account that treats this scene as a broad cultural movement has to reckon with the fact that its census fits in a small hall and that half the population was not in it.
| Band | Active from | Start with | Year | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thorns | 1989 | Thorns | 2001 | The demos wrote the style; the album came a decade late |
| Ved Buens Ende | 1994 | Written in Waters | 1995 | One album, still being copied |
| Fleurety | 1991 | Min tid skal komme | 1995 | Clean female vocal over black metal, years early |
| Kvist | 1993 | For kunsten maa vi evig vike | 1996 | The best one album career in the country |
| Mysticum | 1991 | In the Streams of Inferno | 1996 | Drum machines, a decade before anyone else |
| Arcturus | 1990 | La Masquerade Infernale | 1997 | Black metal rebuilt as theatre |
| Dodheimsgard | 1994 | 666 International | 1999 | The most influential Norwegian record nobody bought |
| Aura Noir | 1993 | Black Thrash Attack | 1996 | Named a whole tendency in three words |
| Carpathian Forest | 1990 | Black Shining Leather | 1998 | The filth wing, done properly |
| Taake | 1993 | Nattestid ser porten vid | 1999 | One man, the best solo record of the second generation |
| Windir | 1994 | 1184 | 2001 | A dialect and a valley made into a subgenre |
| Khold | 2000 | Mørke gravers kammer | 2004 | Nobody else plays black metal at that tempo |
| Antestor | 1990 | The Return of the Black Death | 1998 | Christian black metal, from Norway, in 1998 |
| Mork | 2013 | Katedralen | 2021 | The tradition still being worked, one man at a time |
None of this displaces the founders. The four years in which the sound was fixed are set out in KaosMetal's chapter on norwegian black metal, and everything in this article is downstream of them. But a genre remembered through four names has been flattened, and the flattening is what allowed a phrase printed on a record sleeve in 1994 to be used for thirty years afterwards as a border post.
Where that phrase came from, who printed it and what it was built to keep out is the subject of what Does True Norwegian Black Metal Actually Mean.
