Sort these bands by country and the list tells you nothing. Sort them by what the second guitar is doing and the whole branch falls into place, which is how this one is arranged: the founders who wrote the harmony parts out, the ones who inherited the method and moved it, and the ones who made a single record and stopped. Sixteen bands, each with the album to start on. The scenes they came out of are covered in the chapter on the other Nordic scenes.
The founders, and the six that came with them
Dissection wrote the method and Storm of the Light's Bane from 1995 remains the entry point for the entire branch, with The Somberlain from 1993 behind it as the record where the writing is still being worked out in public. Around them, inside one country and inside five years, came Sacramentum with Far Away from the Sun in 1996, Unanimated with Ancient God of Evil in 1995, Naglfar with Diabolical in 1998, Dawn with Slaughtersun (Crown of the Triarchy) in 1998 and Vinterland with Welcome My Last Chapter in 1996. Six bands, one method, no imitation charges worth answering: they were all working it out at the same time.
What matters for a listener starting here is the order. Take Dissection first, Dawn last, and the four in between in any order at all, because the difference between them is temperature rather than technique.
Norway did it too, and nobody says so
The Norwegian melodic bands are written out of the story because the country's reputation was made by the ones who refused melody, and it is a bad edit. Windir, formed in Sogndal in 1994 by Terje Bakken, wrote in a regional dialect and pulled folk melody straight into harmonised guitar parts across four albums; 1184, released in 2001, is where the method and the material meet properly. Founded in Bergen in 1995 by Øystein Garnes Brun, a guitarist out of the death metal band Molested, and staffed at the start by four men who between them were already running half the Norwegian underground, Borknagar reached The Olden Domain on Century Black in 1997, which is the one to hear before the band turned progressive.
Ancient started as Aphazel's solo project in Bergen in 1992 and put out Svartalvheim through Listenable in 1994, raw and melodic at once, then moved to Metal Blade and made The Cainian Chronicle in 1996 with a cleaner sound and more atmosphere. Take the first for the tunes and the second for the production.
The Norwegian melodic bands are written out of the story because the country's reputation was made by the ones who refused melody, and it is a bad edit.
One album, one year, three countries
Three records from 1996, made in three different countries by bands that never followed them up in the decade that produced them. Three records made in one year by men who then put the instrument down and left the room:
- Kvist, from Norway, formed in 1993 by Tom Hagen, Hallvard Wennersberg Hagen and Endre Bjotveit, recorded For kunsten maa vi evig vike at Endless Sound Studio in Oslo in 1995 and put it out through Avantgarde Music the following year. A debut that arrived complete and left nothing for a second one.
- Sacrilegium, from Poland, released Wicher on Pagan Records on 11 April 1996, recorded at Warrior Studio in Gdynia, after a demo and a split, and it is still the record the Polish melodic strand is measured against.
- Vinterland, from Sweden, gave No Fashion Welcome My Last Chapter on 4 March 1996 and came apart immediately afterwards.
One album. One year. Three countries. Anyone assembling a picture of this branch from the bands that lasted is missing a third of the good material.
The method travelled
Rotting Christ arrived at comparable ground in Greece by a completely different road, out of grindcore and into Thy Mighty Contract in 1993, and have carried a harmonised, chant driven version of the idea across thirty years and a dozen albums. Thulcandra, built in Landshut from 2003 by Steffen Kummerer, reconstructed the Swedish method deliberately and well, and Fallen Angel's Dominion from 2010 is the place to start. Uada, formed in Portland, Oregon on 1 October 2014 by Jake Superchi and signed to Eisenwald, took the same inheritance and made it long, hooded and enormous; Cult of a Dying Sun from 2018 is the record that carried it furthest.
Havukruunu, from Hausjärvi, brought the harmonised line into the Finnish tradition, which had never used it, and Uinuos syömein sota from 2020 is the result. In Aphelion closes the circle: Sebastian Ramstedt of Necrophobic started it in 2020 with Johan Bergebäck and Tobias Cristiansson from the same band, put out the Luciferian Age release through Edged Circle in 2021 and Reaperdawn through Century Media on 9 August 2024. The technique travelled better than the scene that invented it.
Three that get put on this list and should not be
A roster is only as good as what it keeps out, and three kinds of band turn up on melodic black metal lists every time without belonging on one.
Dimmu Borgir and Cradle Of Filth put their harmony in a keyboard rather than in a second guitar, which changes the timbre, the register and the whole effect: what comes out is orchestration sitting on top of a riff rather than two guitar parts fusing into one. That is symphonic black metal and it has its own history. Alcest and the bands after it write chords that resolve, which is the one thing this branch never does; the harmony there is there to comfort, and calling it melodic black metal flattens a real difference. And the Finnish and Swedish melodic death bands, whatever the sleeve says, growl rather than shriek and build towards choruses.
The nearest genuine border case is Gehenna, formed in Stavanger in January 1993 by Sanrabb, Dolgar and Sir Vereda, whose Seen Through the Veils of Darkness went out on Cacophonous in 1995. The band has described its early writing as coming out of classical music and straightforward heavy metal rather than out of the genre around it, and the early records sit exactly on the line between harmonised guitar writing and keyboard arrangement. Take it as the place where one branch turns into the other, and listen to what the keyboard is doing before deciding which side it lands on.
If only one
Take Storm of the Light's Bane. Everything else on this list is either a road towards it or a road away from it, and a harmony line carried like a lit torch through a corridor with no doors off it is a thing that record does better than any of its descendants. After that, go to Kvist for what the method sounds like in the hands of somebody who only used it once, and then to Uada for what it sounds like twenty years later in a country with no snow. The northern outlier that came last, and sounds least like any of this, is icelandic Black Metal.
