The Black Metal Bands You Need to Know

Start with the verdict, because the rest of this is the defence of it: black metal is not a Norwegian genre. It was named in England, given its shape in a converted garage in Stockholm, weighted in Switzerland, sharpened in Brazil, and only then taken over for four years by a few dozen teenagers in Norway who played the loudest available version of it and were handed the credit for the whole thing. Almost everything that happened after 1994 happened somewhere else. A starter list that stops at the second wave is a list of one country's press cuttings.

So this is a map rather than a countdown. Every band below gets a record to start with, a year, a label where the label is part of the story, and one sentence that could not be written about anybody else. Where a name has been coasting for two decades on a reputation earned in eighteen months, that is said plainly and said once. If the chronology is what you want, with the tape post and the arrests and the shop that turned a scene into a movement, that is how black metal began.

The first wave, before the word meant a genre

The three from Newcastle who played faster than they could play cleanly gave the music its name and very little else, and the name was enough. Venom put out Black Metal on Neat Records in November 1982, recorded quickly and mixed roughly on purpose, and the title went on to describe music that sounds almost nothing like it. Start with Welcome to Hell (Neat, 1981) instead. The sound of a band swinging past the edge of its own technique is the invention here, and every Norwegian who mattered ten years later owned a copy of one or the other.

The sound itself arrives with a Swedish teenager working alone. Recorded in June 1984 at Heavenshore, a converted garage, with the tape machine run at half speed so the whole record would fit on one master and the entire job finished inside two or three days, Bathory's first album came out through Tyfon on 2 October 1984 in a run of a thousand copies with a yellow goat on the front, and it sold out in two weeks. Quorthon had the guitar tone, the shriek and the reverb before anybody had a word for the combination. Under the Sign of the Black Mark (1987) is the one to start with. Blood Fire Death (1988) and Hammerheart (1990) then walked out of the genre and founded another one on the way.

Switzerland supplied the weight and the sense of ceremony. Hellhammer's Apocalyptic Raids (Noise, April 1984) is four songs of deliberate primitivism that the European press treated as a joke and half of Scandinavia treated as instruction. When Tom Gabriel Fischer rebuilt the band as Celtic Frost, To Mega Therion (Noise, 1985) added horns, a female operatic voice and a Giger painting on the sleeve, and drew the line between blasphemy as noise and blasphemy as liturgy. Denmark supplied the theatre. Mercyful Fate's Melissa (Roadrunner, 1983) put a Satanic concept, twin harmonised guitars and King Diamond's falsetto into one package, and the corpse paint that Norway later made compulsory came off his face first.

The rest of the first wave gets dropped from most black metal bands lists because it did not happen in Europe's north. It should not be. Sarcofago's I.N.R.I. (Cogumelo, 1987) is Brazilian, faster than anything else released that year, and the photograph on its sleeve shows corpse paint, bullet belts and inverted crosses four years before Norway turned that into a uniform. Hungary's Tormentor recorded Anno Domini in 1989 with a seventeen year old Attila Csihar singing, and it circulated on tape for six years before anybody pressed it. Czech Master's Hammer put orchestral timpani and folk melody into Ritual (Monitor, 1991) before atmospheric black metal was a category anyone recognised. Canada's Blasphemy cut Fallen Angel of Doom (Wild Rags, 1990) and invented war metal while doing it. Von, from the United States, made one short demo, Satanic Blood, in 1992, and a quarter of the genre has been rewriting its two note riffs ever since.

Norway, 1991 to 1994

What the Norwegians did was not to invent the sound. It was to strip it of anything that could be mistaken for entertainment, and then to organise it. Euronymous opened the shop Helvete in Oslo in 1991 and ran Deathlike Silence Productions out of it, and for two years that basement worked as a label office, a clubhouse and a printing press for an ideology. Mayhem's singer Per Yngve Ohlin, who used the name Dead, killed himself on 8 April 1991. Fantoft stave church burned on 6 June 1992. Euronymous was stabbed to death in his Oslo flat on 10 August 1993 by Varg Vikernes, who was convicted the following May of that killing and of arson, given twenty one years, and released on parole in 2009. Those events are why the world knows the genre. They are also the least interesting thing about the records.

Mayhem sit at the centre of it and are the hardest band in the genre to listen to honestly, because the biography keeps getting in front of the guitar playing. Deathcrush (1987) was pressed in a thousand copies and sold by post. De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas was recorded at Grieghallen in Bergen across late 1992 and early 1993, with Euronymous on guitar, Hellhammer on drums, Attila Csihar singing and Vikernes playing bass uncredited, and Deathlike Silence released it on 24 May 1994, by which point the guitarist was dead, the bassist was in custody and the man who wrote the words had been gone three years. Nothing else in music has that shape. The riffs, which are what actually survive, are modal, awkward to play and unlike anybody's idea of a rock guitar part.

Darkthrone did the more useful thing, which was to work out the grammar and then publish it. Soulside Journey (Peaceville, 1991) is a death metal record with a Swedish studio sound; within a year the same two men had thrown all of that away. The distance covered in those twelve months is the cleanest demonstration anybody has of what separates the two genres. A Blaze in the Northern Sky (February 1992), Under a Funeral Moon (1993) and Transilvanian Hunger (17 February 1994) are the three albums that told everyone else what the rules were: no audible bass, no solos, no production, tremolo picked chords held until they stop sounding like a guitar and start sounding like weather. The last of the three was made on a four track machine in Fenriz's bedroom, which he called Necrohell. Its original back cover carried a slogan the band apologised for and Peaceville removed after distributors objected, and Fenriz has since described his own statements from that period as disgusting. Both facts belong in the same paragraph.

Burzum is the case where the music and the man have to be separated with a knife, and this piece separates them. Vikernes is a convicted murderer and arsonist who has spent thirty years publishing far right and antisemitic material under his own name, and nothing written here is an argument with that. The records are still the reason a hundred one man projects exist. Hvis lyset tar oss (Misanthropy, 1994) is four long pieces of repetition that behave more like minimalist composition than like metal. Filosofem, recorded in March 1993 at Breidablik and not released until 31 January 1996, was made by plugging the guitar into a domestic stereo amplifier and asking the engineer for the worst microphone in the building, which turned out to be an old helicopter headset. That is not an anecdote about equipment. It is the whole aesthetic argument in one signal chain.

Tremolo picked chords held until they stop sounding like a guitar and start sounding like weather.

The rest of the country is where the range is. Emperor recorded In the Nightside Eclipse at Grieghallen in July 1993 with Pytten engineering, released it through Candlelight on 21 February 1994, and mixed it while two of its four members were facing prison, one for a murder and one for arson; Ihsahn was seventeen and writing the keyboard parts that every symphonic band since has copied badly. Immortal dropped the theology altogether and wrote about an invented frozen kingdom instead, which is why Pure Holocaust (Osmose, 1993) has aged better than most of its neighbours and why At the Heart of Winter (1999) still gets played. Enslaved opened with Vikingligr Veldi (Deathlike Silence, 1994) and have spent thirty years turning into a progressive rock band without ever fully leaving. Any ranking of black metal bands that can leave two of those three out is not a ranking, it is a preference.

Satyricon's Nemesis Divina (Moonfog, 1996) is the best record made by anybody who later went on daytime radio. Ulver built Bergtatt (Head Not Found, 1995) out of folk melody and clean singing, then built Nattens Madrigal (Century Media, 1997) out of nothing but treble, and then left the genre for good. Gorgoroth's Antichrist (1996) runs twenty five minutes and contains no idea that is not necessary, which here counts as a discipline. A dozen more from those same four years never got a distribution deal, and several of them wrote better songs than the ones that did.

Sweden and Finland, the other north

Sweden brought back the thing Norway had banned, which was melody. Dissection's Storm of the Light's Bane was recorded between 17 and 30 March 1995 at Hellspawn and Unisound with Dan Swano engineering and released on 17 November that year, and its achievement is that the guitar harmonies are lifted wholesale from heavy metal and nothing about the result sounds soft. Jon Nodtveidt was convicted in 1997 as an accessory to a murder, served until 2004, made one further album and died in 2006. Marduk went the other way and removed everything except speed, which peaked with Panzer Division Marduk (Osmose, 1999), half an hour at a single tempo. Watain turned the whole thing back into ritual, and Lawless Darkness (Season of Mist, 2010) is where the ambition and the songwriting finally arrive together. Dark Funeral and Craft cover the two remaining Swedish positions, the first all velocity and the second all misanthropy.

Finland never took instruction from anybody. Beherit's Drawing Down the Moon (Spinefarm, 1993) is slow where the Norwegians were fast, murky where they were sharp, and nearer to occult ambient music than to metal; the rest of the world took twenty years to catch up with it. Impaled Nazarene put out Tol Cormpt Norz Norz Norz (Osmose, 1992), which is punk played by people who had heard too much grindcore, and apologised for none of it. Archgoat, Horna, Sargeist and Clandestine Blaze built the second Finnish generation almost entirely through the Northern Heritage label, on small pressings and no press at all. Oranssi Pazuzu are the outlier, a band who took the tremolo picking into psychedelic rock and won a national music prize for Mestarin kynsi (Nuclear Blast, 2020). None of it is a comfortable place to start, which is more or less the Finnish position.

France, where the genre stopped being Norwegian

The French made two contributions and they are opposites. The first was Les Legions Noires, a closed circle of bands who traded tapes in runs of dozens and refused distribution on principle. Mutiilation's Vampires of Black Imperial Blood (Drakkar, 1995) is the record that escaped, and it is the loneliest sounding album the genre owns, recorded so badly that the misery is structural rather than lyrical. Vlad Tepes made most of the rest worth hearing from that circle. Nobody in it wanted a career and almost all of them got their wish.

The second contribution was intellect. Deathspell Omega released Si monvmentvm reqvires, circvmspice on Norma Evangelium Diaboli in February 2004: two hours of dissonant writing built on a serious reading of theology, by a band that has never given an interview with a face attached and has played almost no concerts. Blut Aus Nord had got somewhere similar a year earlier by different means, using detuned guitars and mechanical percussion on The Work Which Transforms God (2003) to make a record that sounds structurally wrong on purpose. Alcest then took the tremolo picking and the blast beat and pointed them at something bright: Souvenirs d'un autre monde (Prophecy, 2007) carries no harsh vocals at all and started an argument about what counts that has now run for two decades. Antaeus and Aosoth held the orthodox French position throughout. No honest account of the genre after 2000 can leave out at least two of those four.

Poland, Greece and Iceland

Poland produced the genre's most successful export and its most disciplined underground act inside the same generation. Behemoth started as a raw black metal band, moved towards blackened death metal around Satanica (1999), and then made its best album fifteen years later: The Satanist (Nuclear Blast, 2014) was written after Nergal's treatment for leukaemia and has an urgency the earlier records were too busy to find. Mgla are the opposite of all that. Two men, no interviews, song titles replaced by Roman numerals, and Exercises in Futility (Northern Heritage, 4 September 2015) is six tracks of melodic writing so tightly built that the refusal to explain anything reads as confidence rather than as a pose. Batushka's Litourgiya (Witching Hour, 2015) set Orthodox liturgical chant against tremolo guitar and then collapsed into a naming dispute that left two bands touring under the same word.

Greece got there before either of them. Rotting Christ, Varathron and Necromantia all released defining albums in 1993 and all three sound like each other and like nothing in Norway: mid paced, heavy on keyboards, built from minor key melodies with an obvious debt to local folk music. Start with Rotting Christ's Thy Mighty Contract (Osmose, 1993), which has the riffs, then Varathron's His Majesty at the Swamp (Cyber Music, 1993), which has the atmosphere. Thirty years on, Rotting Christ are one of the very few original bands still writing material that would justify the ticket on its own, which is the only practical test of whether a band still matters.

Iceland arrived last and arrived complete. A scene of a few dozen musicians, most of them playing in each other's bands, produced Svartidaudi's Flesh Cathedral (Terratur Possessions, 2012) and Misthyrming's Songvar elds og oreidu (Terratur Possessions, 7 February 2015), two records that took the French dissonance and handed it back its physical force. Sinmara share members with most of the others. It is the only national scene since the Norwegian one to arrive with a recognisable sound of its own rather than a local accent, and it managed it without a single crime attached. Whether the Polish blackened death wing still belongs under the same heading is an argument nobody has won.

The American wing

The United States had black metal before Norway noticed, and it was uglier. Profanatica, formed out of Incantation in 1990, made blasphemy that is genuinely unpleasant rather than theatrical, and has never stopped doing it. Absu built a Texan version out of Celtic mythology and thrash technique, and Tara (Osmose, 2001) is the one where the drumming and the concept fit each other. Krieg and Leviathan ran the misanthropic solo wing through the 2000s on small labels and smaller pressings. None of that is what most people now mean by American black metal, and the reason is a single album.

Weakling recorded Dead as Dreams in 1998, broke up, and let tUMULt release it in 2000. Five songs, an opening track past twenty minutes, and a guitar sound that is dense rather than thin: the entire American wing descends from it. Wolves in the Throne Room took the length and the density and attached them to a farm in Washington state, and Two Hunters (Southern Lord, 2007) made the case that the genre's real subject was the land rather than Satan. Agalloch's The Mantle (2002) had already made a quieter version of the same argument. Panopticon, one man in Kentucky, put banjo and Appalachian mining history into Kentucky (2012) and produced the least likely successful record the genre has.

Every national scene that mattered began by getting the Norwegian records slightly wrong. The ones that copied them correctly are forgotten.

Eirik Solvang

Krallice brought conservatory technique to it in 2008 and were treated as an intrusion. Deafheaven's Sunbather (Deathwish, 2013) arrived with a pink sleeve and a debt to shoegaze and started the loudest boundary fight since Alcest, which is a healthy sign rather than a bad one. Canada's Spectral Wound answered all of it with A Diabolic Thirst (Profound Lore, 2021), a record with no concept, no atmosphere and nothing on it but riffs. Where the boundary falls, and which bands stand outside it wearing the costume, is the question each of those four records asks in its own way.

One man and a room

The one man project is not a modern development. It is the genre's founding format: Quorthon alone in a garage in 1984, Vikernes alone with a stereo amplifier in 1993. What changed is that the equipment stopped being an obstacle. From roughly 2005 onwards a single musician with an audio interface and a drum machine could make a record that sounded the way the second wave had only managed by accident, and a great many did.

The ones that justify the format are the ones with something specific to say. Saor, one Scottish musician, writes real Highland melody into it rather than gesturing at heritage. Afsky, one Dane, makes grief records that are slower and plainer than the depressive tradition they come from. Blut Aus Nord has been one Frenchman for thirty years and has never made the same album twice. Panopticon plays every instrument on the record including the banjo. Against those stands the great weight of the format, a thousand bedroom projects with a forest photograph and an unreadable logo, and the honest thing to say is that most of them are the same record. The ones worth the hours are on the shelf of the essential black metal albums.

The famous names that stopped

This is the section beginner lists leave out, and leaving it out is why they are useless. Dimmu Borgir have sold more records than every band above except Behemoth, and Enthrone Darkness Triumphant (Nuclear Blast, 1997) is a well made symphonic album by any standard. Death Cult Armageddon (2003), recorded with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, is the last one with a reason to exist. Everything since has been the same production budget spent on smaller ideas, and the band has not written a song anyone argues about in over twenty years. That is a verdict on the records rather than on the musicians, and it is given once.

Cradle of Filth are the same story on a different schedule. The Principle of Evil Made Flesh (Cacophonous, 1994) and Dusk... and Her Embrace (1996) are strange, ambitious, thoroughly English and genuinely black metal. Midian (2000) is where the band became a merchandise line with a catalogue attached, and the two decades after it are exactly that. Satyricon stopped making black metal deliberately after 1999 and have been open about it, which is more honest than most. Gorgoroth have spent longer in court over the ownership of their own name than in a studio. And Mayhem, whose members are the reason anybody is reading this at all, have released five studio albums since 1994 and none of them is the one people mean.

A band that stopped in 1998 and admits it is worth more than a band that has been releasing the same record since 2004.

The use of a map is that it lets you go somewhere specific. Take one band from each heading above, play the record named beside it rather than the one with the best cover, and the genre stops being a photograph of a forest and becomes what it has always been: four decades of argument about whether music this restricted can keep finding new things to do, conducted almost entirely by people who refuse to explain themselves. It keeps finding them, and the bands doing the finding are almost never the ones on the poster.

Sources and notes

• Wikipedia: Black metal
• Wikipedia: Bathory (album)
• Wikipedia: De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
• Wikipedia: Transilvanian Hunger
• Wikipedia: Storm of the Light's Bane
• Wikipedia: Dead as Dreams