Four albums in twenty five years. No interviews. Songs numbered rather than titled. Two men, one of whom writes everything and one of whom plays the drums, working out of Krakow under a name that means fog. On any honest count Mgla is the most widely admired black metal band of the last two decades, and almost nothing about how it operates would have been recognisable to anyone standing in a record shop in Oslo in 1992.
That is the condition of the music now. There is no capital city and no committee, only a scattering of small crews with post office boxes, and the good ones are spread across more countries than the second wave ever reached. This is a working list of who is actually worth the time, what each of them does that the others do not, and where to start. It picks up where black metal 2000s leaves off.
The two man standard
Mgla was formed in Krakow in 2000 by Mikolaj Zentara, who signs as M., and has been a duo with the drummer Maciej Kowalski since. Groza came out on the Finnish label Northern Heritage in 2008, With Hearts Toward None in 2012 and Exercises in Futility in 2015, which is the record that made the band an argument rather than a rumour: six pieces, a rhythm section playing far more loosely than the style permits, and melodies that resolve where you do not expect. Age of Excuse followed in 2019 on the band's own No Solace. The whole catalogue fits on a shelf a hand's width across and half the bands in this article are trying to work out how it was done.
Poland's other export of the period came apart in public. Batushka put Orthodox liturgy inside black metal on Litourgiya in 2015 and then split into two bands using the same name, six years of litigation and two competing albums, which is a story about ownership rather than about music and is told in full in the modern chapter.
The bands with no faces
Anonymity is now a working method rather than a pose, and three bands show its range. Deathspell Omega, French, has never confirmed a member, never played a concert and has not given a real interview since 2004, and has produced the most demanding body of writing in the genre. Gaerea, five Portuguese musicians in sigil branded masks, took the opposite decision about the stage: the faces are hidden and the performance is enormous, and Limbo in 2020, Mirage in 2022 and Coma in 2024 on Season of Mist have carried them from small clubs to festival main stages. Uada, from Oregon, works in hoods and plays melodic black metal with the choruses left in.
When they put their cloaked heads down, Gaerea indubitably deliver the goods.
Louder, reviewing Coma, 2024
Iceland, which arrived all at once
A country of fewer than four hundred thousand people produced, inside about five years, a black metal scene with its own sound: dissonant, ceremonial, slower than it first appears, and built on chords that refuse to settle. Misthyrming released Söngvar elds og óreiðu on 7 February 2015 and it travelled further and faster than any debut in the genre since the nineties. Svartidaudi and Sinmara had laid the ground before it, and the players move between all three plus half a dozen more, which is why the scene sounds like one long argument conducted by the same twenty people.
North America stops apologising
The American and Canadian bands worth hearing now have stopped measuring themselves against Norway altogether. Panopticon is one man, a brewer named Austin Lunn, who put Appalachian fiddle and banjo inside black metal on Kentucky in 2012 and has never had to justify it since. Wolves in the Throne Room has been writing about the forest it lives in for over twenty years. Spectral Wound, from Montreal, makes the least fashionable and most effective records of the current crop: A Diabolic Thirst on Profound Lore on 16 April 2021 and Songs of Blood and Mire on 23 August 2024, both of them nothing but riffs, speed and a voice at the edge of failure. Lamp of Murmuur assembles raw black metal in a bedroom in California with a drum machine and a great deal of reverb, and Yellow Eyes and Krallice in New York have spent fifteen years making the form more complicated on purpose.
There is no capital city and no committee, only a scattering of small crews with post office boxes.
The rest of the map, and the ones still standing
Denmark has Afsky, one man, Ole Luk, whose Ofte jeg drømmer mig død came out on Vendetta on 12 May 2020 and set old Danish poetry against some of the saddest melodies anyone is writing. Germany has Der Weg einer Freiheit, which plays long and loud and is one of the few modern bands that works better in a hall than on headphones. The Czech Cult of Fire writes in Sanskrit and Devanagari and means it. Ukraine's White Ward puts a saxophone where the second guitar should be and gets away with it. France still has Blut aus Nord, thirty years of one man producing records that sound like the tape is coming apart.
Norway itself has quietly produced a second generation that owes almost nothing to the first. Vemod spent eleven years between albums and came back in 2023 with a record built on patience and reverb rather than on speed. Mork is one man in Halden making the plainest, most old fashioned black metal anyone is currently making, well enough that Nocturno Culto of Darkthrone sang on the 2021 single Svartmalt. Neither of them trades on the country's reputation, which is the most interesting thing about both.
The wing that does not sound like black metal
Then there is the argument that will not go away. Deafheaven put shoegaze guitars and a pink sleeve on Sunbather in 2013, spent a decade being told it was not a black metal band, and released Lonely People with Power through Roadrunner on 28 March 2025 with the screaming back in place. Zeal and Ardor built Devil Is Fine in 2016 out of American spirituals and tremolo guitar. Liturgy published a manifesto and got treated by much of the underground as an invasion. Alcest left the genre outright after 2007 and has been happier ever since. Whether any of these count is a real question with no settled answer. The records exist either way, and a fair number of people who came in through them have since gone backwards through everything above.
And the old bands are not gone. Darkthrone makes an album every two years and refuses to play any of it live. Mayhem is a working touring company four decades in. Watain, Marduk and Behemoth operate at a professional scale that did not exist for this music in 1996. The difference between them and the bands above is not quality. It is that the newer ones grew up with the whole history available at once and chose which parts of it to use.
| Band | Country | First record to hear |
|---|---|---|
| Mgla | Poland | Exercises in Futility (2015) |
| Deathspell Omega | France | Paracletus (2010) |
| Misthyrming | Iceland | Söngvar elds og óreiðu (2015) |
| Spectral Wound | Canada | A Diabolic Thirst (2021) |
| Gaerea | Portugal | Limbo (2020) |
| Panopticon | United States | Kentucky (2012) |
| Afsky | Denmark | Ofte jeg drømmer mig død (2020) |
| Blut aus Nord | France | The Work Which Transforms God (2003) |
Pick any three of those and the shape of the present becomes obvious. The bands are smaller, the records are better made, the distances are longer and nobody is waiting for permission from a shop counter in one Scandinavian city. Which of these will still be listened to in twenty years is a separate question, and it is answered by the records rather than by the bands, which is why the next stop is the Best Black Metal Albums of the 2000s and, behind it, the whole history of the genre.
