A rehearsal room in the western suburbs of Paris, some time in 1995. A side project started two years earlier has just acquired a drummer and a bass player and stopped being a side project. Nobody in the room is going to make a living from this, and thirty years later most of them still have not, but the singer standing in it will front two of the four or five most important French bands in this genre and will still be doing it in the 2020s. That is the shape of the French roster: small, stubborn, extremely well connected, and almost entirely uninterested in whether anybody is watching.
The chapter that places all of this beside the other scenes is on France, Poland and Greece. What follows is the roster itself, sorted by what the bands are actually trying to do rather than by chronology, because in France the chronology explains very little.
The anonymous school
Deathspell Omega is the reference point and has been for twenty years, and the method is as important as the music. No photographs, no interviews, no concerts, no promotional cycle, records delivered when they are finished. What arrives is theology set to music: hour long arguments with a Christian God, Latin and French text, and a guitar sound that curls back on itself instead of opening out. The trilogy that ran from 2004 to 2010 is the body of work everybody means when they use the phrase orthodox black metal, and the band has kept the silence intact through every record since.
Blut Aus Nord works the same territory with a different problem to solve, which is boredom. The musician who signs himself Vindsval has now made three Memoria Vetusta records across eighteen years, a trilogy called 777 across seventeen months in 2011 and 2012, and a run of albums since that have included industrial rhythm programming, clean guitar and, on Hallucinogen in September 2019, something close to psychedelic rock played at black metal tempo. The catalogue has no through line and that is the through line. It is the least predictable discography in European black metal and it is very nearly the longest.
The violent school
Antaeus is the band from the room described at the top of this page, formed in 1993 and taken seriously from 1995, and it plays the least atmospheric black metal any French band has made: Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan in 2000, De Principii Evangelikum in 2002, Blood Libels in 2006 and then a ten year silence before Condemnation in 2016. Its singer, who works as MkM, also runs Aosoth, which takes the same aggression and puts nineties death metal harmony under it; IV: An Arrow in Heart arrived in 2013 through Agonia Records and V: The Inside Scriptures in 2017 closed the project's decade.
Merrimack has been going since 1994 and has released six albums in thirty years, which tells you most of what you need to know about the pace of this scene. Grey Rigorism came out on 28 August 2009, Omegaphilia on 9 June 2017 and Of Grace and Gravity on 8 March 2024, the last two through Season of Mist. The band writes in long unbroken stretches with almost no repetition, which makes it hard work and makes the records last.
Six albums in thirty years is not a lack of ambition. It is the French rate.
The other half of the same family
Alcest began in 2000 as a solo project of Stéphane Paut, who signs as Neige, and started out playing raw black metal before the shoegaze guitar arrived around 2005. Souvenirs d'un autre monde in 2007 and Écailles de lune in 2010 came out through Prophecy Productions, Shelter in 2014 dropped the metal entirely, Kodama in 2016 put it back, and the band moved to Nuclear Blast for Spiritual Instinct in 2019 and Les Chants de l'aurore in 2024. Neige also ran Amesoeurs and Les Discrets, and the whole blackgaze argument descends from one man's decision to keep two incompatible things in the same song.
Celeste reached similar ground from hardcore rather than from black metal, and its records are heavier than anything else in this section: slow, saturated, played live under red light with the band facing away from the audience. Whether any of this is black metal is an argument that has been running for fifteen years and is not going to be settled by a list.
The literary school
The Great Old Ones formed in Bordeaux in 2009 and has built its entire catalogue out of H. P. Lovecraft, one book at a time: Al Azif, then Tekeli-li in April 2014 out of At the Mountains of Madness, then EOD: A Tale of Dark Legacy in 2017 as a sequel to The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and Kadath in January 2025. Five or six guitar parts at a time, long crescendos, and a willingness to let a passage be beautiful that the violent school would consider a failure of nerve.
Seth has been running since the mid nineties and made the loudest French record of the last decade, La morsure du Christ, released by Season of Mist on 7 May 2021 with Notre-Dame de Paris burning on the sleeve. Written entirely in French, promoted with no apology, it took the genre into newspapers that had never covered it.
Where to start
- Deathspell Omega, the 2004 to 2010 trilogy. Difficult, and the reason the rest of this list exists.
- Blut Aus Nord, The Work Which Transforms God (2003). Where the unresolved chord came from.
- Alcest, Souvenirs d'un autre monde (Prophecy, 2007). The door, and still the best version of it.
- Merrimack, Omegaphilia (Season of Mist, 2017). The violent school at its most controlled.
- The Great Old Ones, EOD: A Tale of Dark Legacy (Season of Mist, 2017). Lovecraft done properly.
- Seth, La morsure du Christ (Season of Mist, 2021). French, unrepentant, and it worked.
French black metal has produced more ideas per band than any scene in Europe, and fewer records per band than any of them. Those two facts are the same fact.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
One name that is not ranked here
Peste Noire is frequently included in lists of this kind and it is not included in this one. The band's 2011 album carries antisemitic, anti feminist and anti immigration caricature in its artwork and presentation, it has been removed from festival bills in Germany and Norway on those grounds, and its sole permanent member was convicted on 25 May 2021 over an assault committed in a bar in 2018 and given a suspended sentence and a fine. Those facts are recorded and that is all they get. No verdict on the music, no starting point, no place in the ranking above. The wider subject is handled in its own article elsewhere on this site.
Take the roster as a whole and the pattern is consistent. Almost nobody in it tours much, almost nobody gives interviews, several of the most important members have been in the same three or four bands for twenty five years, and the country still manages to set the direction the rest of the genre follows. The nearest thing to an opposite case, a scene built on melody, warmth and a completely different set of influences, is the Greek one, and it is covered in greek Black Metal and the Hellenic Sound.
