Here is the verdict, and the rest of this piece is the defence of it: the most influential black metal bands are not the best ones, the overlap is smaller than anybody wants it to be, and at least two of the names below made records that are difficult to sit through and impossible to remove from the story. Influence is measured by subtraction. Take a band out of the history, look at what falls over, and count what is left standing. On that test Venom outrank almost everybody and Immortal, who wrote better songs than most of this list, barely register at all, because nothing much descends from them beyond a lyrical idea about an invented frozen kingdom. The chronology behind all of it sits in our black metal pillar.
The word, the sound and the uniform arrive separately
The three men from Newcastle supplied the name and almost none of the music. Black Metal came out through Neat Records on 1 November 1982, cut at Impulse Studios in Wallsend with Keith Nichol at the desk, and it is a speed metal record with a filthy mix and a blasphemous vocabulary. Not one of its riffs is a black metal riff by the definition anyone uses now. It still sits at the head of the genealogy, because a genre that had no word for itself acquired one, and every teenager in Scandinavia who bought the record in 1983 took the word with them into something the band never played.
The sound itself belongs to one Swede working almost alone. Quorthon had the shriek, the guitar tone and the drowned reverb on Bathory's debut in October 1984, refined all three at Heavenshore in September 1986 for Under the Sign of the Black Mark, and then walked out of the genre he had just built by putting choirs, acoustic guitars and Norse mythology on Blood Fire Death and Hammerheart. The consequence is that a single musician is responsible for the template of the second wave and for the template of viking metal, two things that share nothing except an author. Fenriz has said plainly and often that the 1987 record was where he learned what the genre was, and Darkthrone's whole method is an argument with it.
Switzerland and Denmark and Brazil supplied the rest of the equipment. Hellhammer's Apocalyptic Raids (Noise, April 1984) made deliberate primitivism into a legitimate method rather than an accident, and Celtic Frost's To Mega Therion a year later proved the same men could add horns and a Giger sleeve without softening. Mercyful Fate put a Satanic concept, twin harmonised guitars and a falsetto onto Melissa in 1983, and the corpse paint the Norwegians made compulsory was on King Diamond's face first. Sarcofago finished the job in Brazil: the photograph on the sleeve of I.N.R.I. (Cogumelo, 1987) shows corpse paint, bullet belts and inverted crosses, and it was taken well before anyone in Norway had thought to make that image a dress code.
The two the whole second wave descends from
Everything Norway did between 1991 and 1994 was organisation rather than invention, and two bands did the organising. Darkthrone wrote the rulebook nobody signed and everybody obeyed. Three albums in twenty five months, from A Blaze in the Northern Sky on 26 February 1992 through Under a Funeral Moon to Transilvanian Hunger in February 1994, established the whole grammar: no audible bass, no solos, no groove, no studio polish, chords held far past the point where a rock band would change something. Subtract Darkthrone and roughly two thirds of every list of black metal bands published since has no reference point at all.
Influence is measured by subtraction. Pull one name out of the history and see which wing of the genre falls over.
Burzum supplied the other half, and the separation of the music from the man has to be made with a knife. Varg Vikernes is a convicted murderer and arsonist who has published far right material under his own name for thirty years, and nothing here is an argument with that record. What the recordings established is the format: one person, no band, no studio, equipment chosen for how badly it performs. Filosofem was tracked in March 1993 through a domestic stereo amplifier and the worst microphone in the building, and released only on 31 January 1996. Several thousand bedroom projects have been rebuilding that signal chain ever since, most of them badly. Mayhem belong here for a different reason: Euronymous ran Helvete and Deathlike Silence Productions out of the same basement between 1991 and early 1993, and turned a handful of teenagers with tape decks into something with a membership, a doctrine and an enemies list.
The branches, and who grew them
After 1994 the interesting influence stops being about how to make a black metal record and starts being about how to leave one. Emperor built the symphonic template at the Grieg Hall in July 1993, with the keyboards buried beneath the guitars where they work as pressure rather than as tune, and every band that has since put an orchestra on a black metal album is either copying that balance or getting it wrong. Dissection reintroduced melody: the harmonised guitar lines on Storm of the Light's Bane (Nuclear Blast, 1995) are lifted from heavy metal and nothing about the result is soft, and the entire Swedish melodic wing plus half of Poland follows from it. Ulver established that walking out is a legitimate move, with Bergtatt in 1995, an album of nothing but treble in 1997 and then a permanent departure.
Four names carry almost all of the influence dated after 2000, and none of them is Norwegian. Deathspell Omega released Si monvmentvm reqvires, circvmspice in February 2004 and made dissonance and theology into a school with strict entry requirements; the orthodox wing that runs from Poland to Iceland is downstream of that record. Blut aus Nord got somewhere similar by mechanical means with The Work Which Transforms God in 2003. Weakling recorded Dead as Dreams in 1998, broke up, let tUMULt release it in 2000, and the whole American long form wing descends from five songs by a band that no longer existed. Alcest pointed the tremolo picking at something bright on Souvenirs d'un autre monde (Prophecy, 2007) and started a boundary argument that has run for nearly twenty years.
What each one is actually responsible for
| Band | Record | Year | What exists because of it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Venom | Black Metal | 1982 | The name, and nothing else |
| Bathory | Under the Sign of the Black Mark | 1987 | The second wave sound, and later viking metal |
| Hellhammer | Apocalyptic Raids | 1984 | Primitivism as a method rather than a failure |
| Mercyful Fate | Melissa | 1983 | Corpse paint, Satanic concept, twin harmonies |
| Sarcofago | I.N.R.I. | 1987 | The visual uniform, four years early |
| Darkthrone | Transilvanian Hunger | 1994 | The rulebook the whole second wave used |
| Burzum | Filosofem | 1996 | The one man project and deliberate bad sound |
| Emperor | In the Nightside Eclipse | 1994 | Symphonic black metal, done right once |
| Dissection | Storm of the Light's Bane | 1995 | Melodic black metal and its Swedish wing |
| Deathspell Omega | Si monvmentvm reqvires, circvmspice | 2004 | The orthodox and dissonant school |
| Weakling | Dead as Dreams | 2000 | The American long form wing |
| Alcest | Souvenirs d'un autre monde | 2007 | Blackgaze and twenty years of argument |
The names people expect and will not find here are the commercially large ones, and the reason is the test rather than any grudge. Dimmu Borgir sold more records than most of the table and produced almost no imitators worth naming, because what they did well was budget and arrangement rather than method. Cradle of Filth are the same case in England. Watain and Mgla are better bands than several entries above and are still too recent for the subtraction test to say anything: pull them out and nothing has fallen over yet, which is a statement about the clock rather than about the records. If the question you actually wanted answered is which of these are worth your evenings rather than which of them changed the paperwork, that is a different list, and it is the Best Black Metal Bands of All Time.
