The Essential Black Metal Albums

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

A canon is an argument, not an inventory. The ranked lists that dominate this subject answer the wrong question, because nobody has ever changed their listening because a record placed fourth rather than eleventh, and the only question with any weight in it is what a given album made possible that had not been possible the week before. So the shelf below is organised by what each record did. Every entry carries a year, a label, and the studio or the equipment where the equipment is the reason it sounds that way. Where the received canon is wrong, and it is wrong in at least three places, this piece says where and gives the reason.

Two things follow from that method. The first is that a badly recorded album can be a better record than a well recorded one, which in most genres is a paradox and here is close to a rule. The second is that several of the albums everyone names are named because of what happened around them rather than because of what is on them. Those get their year and their facts here like everything else, and then they get judged on the music. The chronology, the arrests, the shop in Oslo and the way a scene of about forty people convinced the world it was a movement, all of that is the black metal story told in order.

One thing this list does not do is treat 1994 as the finishing line. More than half of what follows was made after the second wave ended, because a genre that produced nothing worth hearing in three decades would be a museum, and this one is not.

The record that had the sound before anyone had the word

Everything the Norwegians are credited with inventing is audible on a Swedish album from 1987. Bathory's third record was made by one man in the same converted garage that had produced his 1984 debut, on equipment nobody would choose, and what it establishes is not a riff or a lyric but a set of proportions: guitar treated as a single sheet of treble rather than as an instrument playing chords, vocals pushed back into the reverb until the words stop being the point, drums that keep time and take up no space. "Woman of Dark Desires" and "Enter the Eternal Fire" between them contain the two speeds the genre has used ever since. What it gets wrong is the sequencing, which is haphazard, and the fact that Quorthon was already looking past the style he had just finished building. Its historical position is not in dispute. Its position on shelves is, and it should not be.

The other founding document is Mayhem's Deathcrush EP, pressed in a thousand copies in 1987 and sold by post, which matters less for the music, which is a mess, than for the fact that it proved a record could exist entirely outside the distribution system and still reach everybody who needed it. Both of those releases were made before the visual language existed. The corpse paint, the unreadable logos, the forest photographs and the rest of the apparatus arrived later and hardened fast, and that whole story is the aesthetics considered on their own terms.

1992 and 1993, when the rules were written

Two Darkthrone albums did the actual legislating. Darkthrone recorded A Blaze in the Northern Sky at Creative Studios in Kolbotn in August 1991 and Peaceville released it in February 1992, and it is a transitional record in the most literal sense: half of it is still the death metal band that had made Soulside Journey a year earlier, and half of it is something with no bass, no dynamics and a guitar sound that had been thinned deliberately. The label was reportedly unhappy. What arrived a year later removed the doubt. Under a Funeral Moon (Peaceville, 1993) has no death metal left in it at all, and it is the better album by a distance, because the riffs are stronger, the pacing varies, and it is not carried by an idea about production. This is the first place the received canon is wrong, and the section below says so at length.

The same two years produced the records that fixed the northern sound in the ears of everybody outside Norway. Immortal made Pure Holocaust at Grieghallen in Bergen and Osmose released it in 1993, forty minutes at a tempo that barely moves and lyrics about a country that does not exist, and it has aged better than its neighbours for exactly that reason: there is nothing in it to be embarrassed by later. Enslaved's Vikingligr Veldi came out on Deathlike Silence in 1994, five long pieces in Old Norse, and it invented the idea that this music could carry a subject other than blasphemy. Beherit's Drawing Down the Moon (Spinefarm, 1993) went in the opposite direction, slow, muddy, closer to ritual ambient music than to metal, and it took two decades and a generation of French and Icelandic bands before the rest of the world understood what it had been doing.

Emperor recorded In the Nightside Eclipse at Grieghallen in July 1993 with Pytten engineering, and Candlelight released it on 21 February 1994. Ihsahn was seventeen when he wrote the keyboard parts, and the mixing was done while two members of the band were facing sentences, one for a murder and one for arson, with the drummer contributing his opinions by letter. The keyboards are the whole argument: they are mixed as a wash rather than as a melody line, which is the distinction that every symphonic band of the following decade failed to grasp. The record is also badly paced in its second half. Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk (Candlelight, 1997) is the more accomplished album and the less influential one, and both statements can be true at once.

A badly recorded album can be a better record than a well recorded one. In most genres that is a paradox. Here it is close to a rule.

Then there is Transilvanian Hunger, recorded in November and December 1993 on a four track machine in Fenriz's bedroom, a room he called Necrohell, and released by Peaceville on 17 February 1994. Fenriz played everything and Nocturno Culto sang; four of the eight lyrics were written by Varg Vikernes. The achievement is real: tape hiss laid over the songs like frost over a field, until the frost stops being a defect and becomes the arrangement. Nothing before it had used bad recording as a compositional decision rather than as a limitation. Its original back cover also carried a slogan the band later apologised for and the label removed after distributors objected, and Fenriz has since called his own statements from that period disgusting. The record and that fact both stand.

Melody was never actually banned

The idea that the second wave forbade melody is a story told after the fact by people who only heard four albums. Dissection recorded Storm of the Light's Bane between 17 and 30 March 1995 at the Hellspawn and Unisound studios with Dan Swano engineering, and Nuclear Blast released it that November. Its harmonies come directly out of heavy metal, its structures come out of death metal, and none of it sounds soft, because the tempos never relax and Jon Nodtveidt sang as though the melodies were an accusation. It is the most imitated black metal record of the last thirty years and the imitations are almost uniformly worse, because the melody was never the difficult part.

Ulver made the other Swedish-facing argument from inside Norway. Bergtatt (Head Not Found, 1995) uses clean singing, folk melody and actual dynamics across five movements, and it is the first record to demonstrate that the genre's atmosphere did not depend on distortion. Two years later the same band made Nattens Madrigal, which is nothing but distortion, and then left the style altogether, and the pair together is the strongest evidence anyone has produced that the aesthetic was a choice rather than a limitation. Satyricon's Nemesis Divina (Moonfog, 1996) belongs beside them: eight songs, a real production budget, and riffs written by someone who had been listening to heavy metal without apologising for it.

The records that widened the walls

Burzum's Filosofem is the widening record with the strangest production history. It was recorded in March 1993 at Breidablik and not released until 31 January 1996, and it was made by plugging the guitar into a domestic stereo amplifier and asking the studio for the worst microphone available, which turned out to be an old helicopter headset. The result is two long metal pieces, an ambient piece of twenty five minutes and a guitar tone that sounds like a signal arriving from another room. It has to be said, because it keeps not being said, that Varg Vikernes is a convicted murderer and arsonist who has published far right and antisemitic material under his own name for three decades. That is a fact about a person and it does not edit the tape. Both belong in the entry.

What Deathspell Omega did in 2004 changed the ceiling rather than the floor. Si monvmentvm reqvires, circvmspice came out on Norma Evangelium Diaboli in February 2004 and runs to seventy seven minutes on a single disc, with organ, choral passages and guitars tuned until the chords stop resolving and the songs have to be finished on nerve. It is built on an actual reading of theology rather than on a pose, and the band has never given an interview with a face attached. Blut Aus Nord had reached comparable territory a year earlier from the other side, using detuned guitars and mechanical percussion on The Work Which Transforms God (Appease Me, March 2003) to make a record that is structurally wrong on purpose and unpleasant in a way that repays repetition.

Weakling's Dead as Dreams is the widening record that came from nowhere. Recorded in 1998 by a band that then broke up, released by tUMULt in 2000, five songs, the title track past twenty minutes in second place, and a guitar sound that is thick where the genre's was thin, it is the origin of nearly everything American in the style. Wolves in the Throne Room took its length and its density and pointed them at the forest instead of at hell, and Two Hunters (Southern Lord, 2007) made that case convincingly enough to spawn a subgenre and a great deal of bad imitation.

The two records that widened it far enough to start a fight both did so by adding beauty. Alcest's Souvenirs d'un autre monde (Prophecy, 2007) contains no harsh vocals at all, uses the tremolo picking and the blast beat as texture, and is either a black metal album or the end of one depending on who is answering. Deafheaven's Sunbather (Deathwish, 11 June 2013), cut at Atomic Garden with Jack Shirley, went further, arriving in a pink sleeve with a shoegaze debt and finishing the year top of the Metacritic rankings across all genres, the first metal album ever to hold that position. The genre's response was to argue about it for a decade, and an argument that long is a sign of a live subject rather than a dying one.

The modern shelf

Records made after 2010 tend to be excluded from lists like this on the grounds that they arrived too late to have changed anything, which is a circular test. Six of them belong here on the music. Mgla's Exercises in Futility (Northern Heritage, 4 September 2015) is six tracks with no titles beyond Roman numerals, written by two men who give no interviews, and its melodic construction is tighter than anything Norway managed in the 1990s. Svartidaudi's Flesh Cathedral (Terratur Possessions, 2012) took the French dissonance and gave it back the physical weight it had lost. Behemoth's The Satanist (Nuclear Blast, 2014), written after Nergal's treatment for leukaemia, is the only album by a band of that commercial size in thirty years that sounds like it needed to be made.

Panopticon's Kentucky (Pagan Flames, 2012) puts banjo, field recordings and Appalachian mining history into the form and should not work at all. Oranssi Pazuzu's Mestarin kynsi (Nuclear Blast, 2020) drags the tremolo picking into psychedelic rock and krautrock and comes out with something no other band has attempted twice. Spectral Wound's A Diabolic Thirst (Profound Lore, 2021) is the opposite of all of them, a record with no concept, no atmosphere, no ambition beyond riffs, and it is the most purely enjoyable thing the genre has produced this decade. That range, inside a single eleven year window, is the answer to the claim that nothing has happened since 1994.

Where the canon is wrong

The first correction is the important one. Transilvanian Hunger is not Darkthrone's best album and it should not be the entry point. It is the most discussed because it is the purest statement of a theory, and a theory is easier to write about than a set of riffs. Under a Funeral Moon has better songs, better pacing, more variety in the guitar writing and a drum performance that is actually played rather than endured, and it makes the same argument about production without needing the argument explained. The reason it lost the vote is that it has no story attached: no bedroom, no four track, no slogan on the back cover. A record with an anecdote will beat a record without one every time, and that is a fact about journalism rather than about music.

The second correction is that Filosofem is over-canonised beside Hvis lyset tar oss. The 1994 album, recorded in 1992 and released by Misanthropy, is more disciplined, better sequenced, and does the repetition trick without the twenty five minute ambient piece that most listeners skip. Filosofem is the more famous artefact because of the guitar tone and the helicopter headset. Once again the story wins.

The third correction is a set of omissions. Ved Buens Ende's Written in Waters (Misanthropy, 1995) and Thorns' self-titled album (Moonfog, 2001) between them contain most of what the 2000s called avant-garde black metal, and neither appears on the standard list. Drawing Down the Moon is usually filed under curiosity rather than canon. And the entire Greek generation of 1993 is treated as a footnote in English language coverage despite having arrived with a complete and separate sound, which is a failure of geography rather than of the records.

A record with an anecdote will beat a record without one every time, and that is a fact about journalism rather than about music.

How to use this

Twenty eight albums is a shelf, not scripture, and the point of writing one down is to give somebody something specific to disagree with. Three routes through it work better than starting at the top. Chronological, from the Bathory record forward, shows how each decision was made and what it cost. By function, taking one from each heading here, gives the shape of the genre in about six hours. And backwards, starting with A Diabolic Thirst and working towards 1987, has the advantage that the modern production makes the early records legible instead of forbidding.

Whichever route, one instruction holds. Play these on speakers rather than on a phone, loudly enough that the treble stops being a texture and becomes a physical event, because almost every album above was mixed by people who assumed that is what you would do. The genre's founding claim was that music could be made hostile enough to keep out anybody who did not want it. That claim is still true, and it is still the best reason to listen.

Sources and notes

• Wikipedia: Transilvanian Hunger
• Wikipedia: Filosofem
• Wikipedia: In the Nightside Eclipse
• Wikipedia: De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
• Wikipedia: Storm of the Light's Bane
• Wikipedia: Sunbather