Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Several hundred projects have been filed under this heading and most of them are one person, one guitar and an afternoon. The sorting matters more here than in any other corner of the music, because the barrier to entry is a laptop and there has never been anything standing between a bad idea and a release. What follows are the ones that survive a second listen, with the dates, the labels and the reasons.
The style itself, its conventions and the argument about what it is doing are set out separately, as is its position among every branch of black metal. This is the roll call.
The ancestors
Two Norwegians and a German band did the groundwork before anybody had a name for it. Forgotten Woods, formed in 1991 with Rune Vedaa on bass and Olav Berland on guitar and drums, released As the Wolves Gather on the German label No Colours in 1994 and The Curse of Mankind on the same label in 1996, and did it with a guitar sound that had none of the polished frost of their countrymen and a vocal that sounded like somebody being ignored. The band then went quiet for eleven years. When they returned with Race of Cain in 2007, No Colours refused to put it out over the lyrics, Vedaa left the label after explaining them in detail to its owner, and the record came out through the Italian label ATMF instead.
Bethlehem arrived from the other direction, out of Grevenbroich and out of death metal, and their third album S.U.i.Z.i.D. in 1998 put a third singer, Marco Kehren, on a third distinct method of delivering a vocal. Very few bands have changed the front of the music that often on purpose. Nobody in this style has been imitated more and nobody has been imitated less successfully.
Shining, and what a written song looks like here
Whatever else is true about the Swedish band Shining, and a great deal is true about them that has nothing to do with music, they are the only project in this style whose catalogue improves with almost every release. The fifth album, released by Osmose Productions in April 2007, is where it lands: clean guitar sections that are sections rather than decoration, an acoustic passage that arrives because the arrangement wanted it, piano, saxophone, and songs that go somewhere and come back. Niklas Kvarforth has put out eleven studio albums since 2000 across Spinefarm, Osmose, Season of Mist and Napalm, and has sung for Skitliv, Den Saakaldte and Bethlehem along the way. He also stopped calling any of it black metal, which on the evidence of the records is a fair reading.
Xasthur and the American bedroom
Scott Conner started Xasthur alone in Alhambra in December 1995 and spent fifteen years proving how far one person can push a recording before it stops being music and becomes an environment. Nocturnal Poisoning in 2002 and The Funeral of Being in 2003 came out through Blood Fire Death, the pair of 2004 albums through Moribund, and by 2006 he was on Hydra Head, which had no other band remotely like him. He announced the end of the project on 26 March 2010, released Portal of Sorrow that year, and has spent the time since making acoustic music under the same name. The catalogue is uneven and the best of it is untouchable.
Lifelover and the Swedish records that are not really black metal
Lifelover formed in Stockholm in June 2005 around Jonas Bergqvist and Kim Carlsson and made four albums in six years, Pulver in 2006, Erotik in 2007, Konkurs in 2008 and Sjukdom in 2011, none of which obey a single convention of the style they are filed under. The guitars are post punk. The drum machine is unhidden and frequently comically thin. There are piano interludes that would not embarrass a chanson record, and then a vocal comes in from a different genre entirely. Bergqvist died on 9 September 2011 of an accidental overdose of prescription medication and the band ended because the songwriter was gone. Carlsson's other project, Hypothermia, went the opposite way: Rakbladsvalsen in 2007 is instrumental, opens with a piece of thirty four minutes and has no vocal on it at all.
The second generation, and where it actually lived
By the middle of the 2000s the music had left Scandinavia entirely, which is the clearest evidence that it had become a method rather than a scene.
- Nocturnal Depression, formed in Grenoble in 2004, debut Nostalgia - Fragments of a Broken Past in 2006, eight albums by 2024, and the most consistent European name in the second wave of the style.
- ColdWorld, the solo project of Georg Börner, whose Melancholie² appeared through Cold Dimensions on 24 March 2008 and did more with keyboards than anyone else has managed in this idiom without turning symphonic.
- Austere, formed in New South Wales in 2005 by Mitchell Keepin and the drummer Tim Yatras, two albums and then a stop in 2010, reunited in 2021 and back with Corrosion of Hearts on 28 April 2023.
- Woods of Desolation, another Australian project, begun by a musician credited as D. in 2005, whose Torn Beyond Reason came out through Northern Silence on 25 February 2011 with Yatras again behind the kit.
France and Italy, which get left off the lists
Two names go missing from almost every roundup of this music and both of them belong near the front of it. Mütiilation was started in Grabels in 1991 by William Roussel, who records as Meyhna'ch, and was the first band of Les Légions Noires, the French collective whose entire method was raw tape, no production and no interest in being heard by anyone outside it. Vampires of Black Imperial Blood in 1995 is the record that matters, and the later run through Black Millenium (Grimly Reborn) on Drakkar Productions in 2001, Majestas Leprosus in 2003 and Rattenkönig in 2005 is the closest thing the style has to a discography with an arc. The project has started and stopped four times since 1991.
Forgotten Tomb came out of Piacenza in 1999, built by Ferdinando Marchisio alone until 2003, when a bass player and a drummer arrived and the music stopped being a bedroom recording. Songs to Leave in 2002 is the debut, ten albums have followed across Adipocere, Avantgarde Music and Selbstmord Services, and the subject matter moved from despair towards plain nihilism somewhere around Negative Megalomania in 2007. They also do something almost nobody else in this style does, which is tour.
What separates the ones worth keeping
Three things, and none of them is sincerity, which the whole scene has always insisted on and which cannot be heard on a recording anyway.
The first is arrangement. A twelve minute piece needs a reason to be twelve minutes, and the good records give the guitar somewhere to arrive: a second melody, a key change, a drop to nothing. The weak ones keep circling the same four bars like somebody pacing a corridor, and after the fourth pass the listener stops noticing them at all.
Repetition is a technique. It is not a substitute for having written anything.
The second is tone. The thin, direct, unroomed guitar sound is the signature of the style and it is also its trap, because a bad tone recorded badly sounds exactly like a deliberate one, and half the discography is hiding behind that. The third is restraint about the biography. The projects that hold up are the ones whose records can be played by somebody who knows nothing about the person who made them.
Where this music stops and its calmer neighbour begins is not obvious from a track listing, and the two are constantly confused, which is why the border is worth walking properly in DSBM vs Atmospheric. The full account of where all of it came from is in the black metal overview.
