Trondheim, some time before the record was finished. A man buys a disposable camera, walks to the east end of Nidaros Cathedral, moves one or two things in the frame and takes a photograph. No lighting, no assistant, no fee, no second visit. That photograph, printed in monochrome, became the front of De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, and it is still the most reproduced sleeve the genre has.
The canon of black metal covers is usually described as a style, which is the wrong word for it. There is no single style. There are five or six distinct solutions to one problem, arrived at separately between 1988 and 1996 by people who mostly disliked each other, and the problem in every case is how to make a square of cardboard refuse the person holding it. Set out that way, the look of black metal stops being a mood and becomes a set of engineering decisions.
Solution one: photograph a building
Cut across three days at the Grieg Hall in Bergen between late 1992 and early 1993 and finally released by Deathlike Silence on 24 May 1994, with Attila Csihar brought in for the vocals and a bass part that went uncredited, Mayhem's first album carries no band, no face, no instrument and no drawn ornament. It carries a national monument, shot from the side, in black and white, by an amateur with a throwaway camera.
Everything the picture does comes from what it withholds. A cathedral photographed from the front is a postcard. Photographed from the east end in flat light it reads as a survey: somebody has been standing outside that building for a while, looking at it, and has not gone in. The image makes a threat without depicting one, which is a harder trick than any amount of drawn fire, and it is the reason the sleeve survived a decade in which everything around it dated badly.
Solution two: use a painting nobody has to pay for
Recorded in September 1992 and held back until April 1994, Hvis lyset tar oss puts Kittelsen's Fattigmannen on the front, and the choice is sharper than it looks. The figure is small, it is turned away, and it is leaving. Almost every other record in any genre shows you something arriving: a band, a face, a monster, a title in a treatment designed to catch a passing eye. This one shows you a back, receding, in a drawing made in the 1890s. It is the visual equivalent of a locked door with a light on behind it.
Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse, out through Candlelight in 1994, works the opposite way with the same raw material: a full colour painted scene, a fortress, a sky, everything the eye could want, executed by a painter who was himself a guitarist in the same scene. And Ulver, on Bergtatt - Et eeventyr i 5 capitler, cut at Endless Lydstudio in Oslo in November and December 1994 and released by Head Not Found in February 1995, did the thing almost nobody else bothered to do and commissioned original artwork from Tania Stene rather than lifting a picture from a dead man. The difference in outcome is instructive: the commissioned picture looks like folklore, the borrowed ones look like evidence. Where each image came from and who drew it is laid out in black Metal Album Art and the Artists Behind It.
Solution three: put a face on it and remove everything else
The portrait sleeves are the ones most often parodied and least often examined. Darkthrone put a single band member in high contrast on A Blaze in the Northern Sky in 1992 and did it again with a candelabrum on Transilvanian Hunger in 1994. Immortal made it a group portrait on Pure Holocaust in 1993 and pushed it further on Battles in the North two years later.
What is worth noticing is the list of things missing from all four. No instruments. No stage. No audience. No colour. No title lockup competing with the image. No attempt to indicate what the music sounds like. A conventional metal sleeve of 1993 tells a browser in a shop what they are buying, and these tell them nothing at all except that the people on the front are not interested in the transaction. That is a commercial position taken deliberately, at cost, by bands who had no other way of saying it.
Solution four: build the thing and photograph it
The last of the four solutions arrives late and from a different tradition altogether. Recorded at Waterfall Studios in Oslo in January and February 1996 and released by Moonfog on 22 April, Satyricon's Nemesis Divina carries a lit wooden shadow box holding a pinned bird of prey mounted on an inverted, rusted crucifix, designed by Halvor Bodin and Stein Løken.
The standard, back then, was dodgy amateur photos and miserable looking fonts.
Satyricon, on the twentieth anniversary reissue of Nemesis Divina, 2016
That is a museum vitrine, not a painting and not a snapshot. The reference is natural history display, the specimen pinned and labelled behind glass, and it imports a whole register of institutional authority that black metal had never previously reached for. Gorgoroth went in the exact opposite direction on Pentagram, out through Embassy in September 1994, with a crude drawn figure and no craft on display anywhere, which is its own argument and an equally deliberate one. Between those two sleeves, made eighteen months apart in the same country, sits the whole range the genre was working with.
The ten that did the work
| Year | Record | Label | Where the image came from |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1988 | Bathory, Blood Fire Death | Black Mark | Peter Nicolai Arbo's painting of 1872 |
| 1992 | Darkthrone, A Blaze in the Northern Sky | Peaceville | Photograph of one band member |
| 1993 | Immortal, Pure Holocaust | Osmose | Group portrait, no background |
| 1994 | Burzum, Hvis lyset tar oss | Misanthropy and Cymophane | Theodor Kittelsen drawing of the 1890s |
| 1994 | Emperor, In the Nightside Eclipse | Candlelight | Painting by Kristian Wahlin |
| 1994 | Mayhem, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas | Deathlike Silence | Photograph taken by the band's guitarist |
| 1994 | Darkthrone, Transilvanian Hunger | Peaceville | Photograph, high contrast, candelabrum |
| 1995 | Dissection, Storm of the Light's Bane | Nuclear Blast | Painting by Kristian Wahlin |
| 1995 | Ulver, Bergtatt | Head Not Found | Original artwork commissioned from Tania Stene |
| 1996 | Satyricon, Nemesis Divina | Moonfog | Constructed shadow box, photographed |
What the ten have in common
Not one of these covers tells a buyer what the record sounds like. All ten tell them whether they are welcome.
Set the ten side by side and the shared element is not frost, not paint and not lettering. It is refusal, executed by four completely different technical means, by bands who were competing with each other and in several cases not speaking. A photograph of a cathedral, a hundred year old drawing of a pauper, three men in white paint against nothing, and a stuffed bird in a box. Those have no visual vocabulary in common at all. They have an identical function, and thirty years of imitation has copied the surfaces while getting the function wrong about half the time.
The one setting that recurs across the photographic half of the canon deserves separating out, because it has become the single most parodied convention in metal and there are practical reasons for it that nobody bothers to state. That is the subject of why Black Metal Bands Pose in Forests.
