Number sixty. That is where At the Dawn of War sat when HM Magazine ranked the hundred best Christian metal albums of all time in 2010, and sixty is roughly the right altitude for the whole category: real records, made by people who could play, that almost never reached the top of anybody's list and were rarely as bad as the audience assumed without listening.
What follows is the working list. It is ordered by what a listener should hear first rather than by year, and it stops at the point where a record has nothing to offer beyond its lyric sheet. The argument about whether any of this is permitted lives in chapter six and its neighbours. This is the shelf.
Antestor, the only one of them with a real history
Everything else in this article is downstream of one band from Jessheim who started in 1990 as Crush Evil and have now been working, on and off, for longer than most of the second wave managed. Antestor matter for a reason that has nothing to do with doctrine: they are the only band in the grouping whose records improve. Martyrium, recorded in 1994 and left unreleased until Endtime Productions put it out in 2000, is death and doom with black metal creeping into the edges of it. The Return of the Black Death, on Cacophonous in 1998, is the one that gets cited, and its virtue is patience: slow, cold, genuinely mournful, with none of the triumphalism a hostile listener expects. The Forsaken, out on Endtime in 2005 with Jan Axel Blomberg on session drums, is the best played record any of these bands have made. Omen followed on Bombworks in 2012 and is the sound of a band with nothing left to prove and nobody left to argue with.
The whole canon fits in one crate, and it was kept alive by post and stubbornness rather than by anybody's argument about theology.
The two records that built the category
Everybody enters through Hellig Usvart. Released by Nuclear Blast in 1994 under the credit Anonymous and made single handed by the Australian drummer Jayson Sherlock, it is a raw, primitive record that inverts the second wave's imagery line by line, and its historical weight is completely out of proportion to its running time. It is also, played today, a document rather than a listening experience: the writing is thin and the sound is thinner. Hear it once for the same reason anybody hears a founding demo, then move on.
The second entry point is far better music. Crimson Moonlight formed at Jönköping in the summer of 1997 with the stated intention of making one primitive demo and then stopping, and instead produced The Covenant Progress on 14 March 2003 through Rivel Records, a record built on John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and arranged with a technical precision nobody else in this grouping was near at the time. Veil of Remembrance followed in 2004, In Depths of Dreams Unconscious on Endtime in 2007, then nine years of silence and Divine Darkness in 2016. Of everything listed here, this is the band a listener with no interest in the subject would most likely keep.
The second generation, and where it got strange
Drottnar are the outright oddity. Four siblings named Lind founded the band at Fredrikstad in 1996 under the name Vitality, changed it two years later, and moved steadily away from anything the label unblack would predict. Spiritual Battle arrived on Plankton in 2000, the Anamorphosis EP on Momentum in 2003, and Welterwerk through Endtime in 2006 with lyrics that had turned political rather than devotional and a rhythm section drilled to the point where the music marches instead of galloping. Stratum in 2012 and Monolith in 2019 pushed further into the avant garde, with violin and trumpet where a solo would go.
Slechtvalk began in 1997 as a solo project by Mark Geertsema, who records as Shamgar, took the current name in 1999 and grew into a full band in the Netherlands. Falconry came in 2000 and The War That Plagues the Lands in 2002, both on Fear Dark, but the one that travelled is At the Dawn of War in 2005, symphonic and folk inflected and closer to Viking metal than to anything Norwegian in the narrow sense. A Forlorn Throne in 2010 and Where Wandering Shadows and Mists Collide in 2016 kept the band going through the years when the category had stopped being controversial and had therefore stopped being discussed at all.
Frost Like Ashes, assembled at Kansas City in 2001, are the American entry and the most direct. Tophet, released through Psycho Acoustix in 2005, has no folk, no symphony and no patience, and it is the only record in this list that would pass unremarked on a bill with bands who would refuse to share a dressing room with it.
The outliers, and why they matter more than the core
The two most interesting bands attached to this subject barely belong to it. Kekal formed in Jakarta on 15 August 1995 with a name meaning eternal, started in black metal and then spent twenty years walking out of it through progressive rock, ambient and jazz until 8 in 2010 had nothing of the original left. 1000 Thoughts of Violence, issued on cassette in February 2003 and on CD by Fear Dark that spring, is the crossing point and the record to hear; the band put its combined physical sales at close to ten thousand copies, which makes it the best selling record anywhere near this subject. Extol, from Norway and formed in 1993, worked in progressive death metal rather than black metal and made Burial in 1998, a record that had a considerable reputation in circles that would not have touched anything called unblack.
Half of this catalogue exists to prove a point. The other half exists because somebody could write, and those are the records still worth playing.
Eirik Solvang
The order to play them in
| # | Band | Record | Year | Label | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Crimson Moonlight | The Covenant Progress | 2003 | Rivel | The best written record in the category |
| 2 | Antestor | The Return of the Black Death | 1998 | Cacophonous | Patient, cold and genuinely mournful |
| 3 | Antestor | The Forsaken | 2005 | Endtime | The best played one |
| 4 | Drottnar | Welterwerk | 2006 | Endtime | Technical, militarised, nothing like the rest |
| 5 | Slechtvalk | At the Dawn of War | 2005 | Fear Dark | Symphonic and folk, and it travelled |
| 6 | Kekal | 1000 Thoughts of Violence | 2003 | Fear Dark | The band leaving the genre in real time |
| 7 | Frost Like Ashes | Tophet | 2005 | Psycho Acoustix | The most aggressive of them |
| 8 | Horde | Hellig Usvart | 1994 | Nuclear Blast | Historically first, musically last |
Eight records, and a listener who works through them in that order will have heard everything the category has to offer inside a long afternoon. That is a small shelf for thirty years of work by bands across five continents, and it is worth being plain about why: this was never a scene with a centre, a label big enough to develop anybody, or a circuit that could keep a band playing. Most of these musicians recorded in the gaps of ordinary jobs and pressed a thousand copies at a time.
The rest of the field is real and thin. Vaakevandring and Lengsel in Norway, Admonish in Sweden, Elgibbor in Poland, Holy Blood in Ukraine, Grave Declaration and a long tail of one man projects with one release each, held together by mail order and a handful of small labels. Anybody who wants to hear what the same conditions produced without the theology should start with USBM, where the isolation is identical and the output is thirty times larger. Play the eight above first. The category deserves eight honest hours before anybody decides what it was worth.
