One hundred thousand copies, in the United States alone, of an album with a Prague orchestra on it and a title about the end of a religion. That is what Death Cult Armageddon had shifted in America by itself, the first record on Nuclear Blast ever to reach the figure, and it is the number that explains why this article exists and why it is not the same list as the good one. Popularity in black metal is measured in shirts, chart entries and festival billing, and almost none of those things track the quality of the riffs. What follows is who people name first, with the receipts, and the gap between this and any ranking made on merit is the most interesting thing about it.
Famous for the records
The Norwegians who put an orchestra where the second wave had put a four track are the commercial ceiling of the genre and have been for twenty five years. Dimmu Borgir cut Death Cult Armageddon at Fredman in Gothenburg between March and May 2003 with the Prague Philharmonic on most of it, Nuclear Blast released it on 9 September, it entered the Billboard 200 at 169 and then kept selling for years. Four years later In Sorte Diaboli went to number one in Norway, which no black metal band had managed at home before. The verdict on the music is given elsewhere and it is not generous. The reach is a separate fact and it is enormous.
Poland supplies the second name and it arrived late. Behemoth spent twenty years as an underground blackened death metal band and then released The Satanist on 3 February 2014, written after Nergal's treatment for leukaemia; it went to number one in Poland, entered the Billboard 200 at 34 and the British chart at 57, and by the end of the decade both Loudwire and Consequence of Sound had voted it the best metal album of the 2010s. Nobody in this genre has crossed over that far on the strength of the songs rather than on the strength of a scandal.
Cradle of Filth are the English answer and their reach was built on merchandise as much as on albums. Nymphetamine entered the Billboard 200 at 89 in 2004 on just under fourteen thousand copies, Thornography at 66 in 2006 on nearly thirteen thousand, Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder at 48 in 2008 on eleven thousand. The band also produced the single most widely worn garment extreme metal has ever made, a shirt with a slogan that cannot be printed here, banned in New Zealand, and worn in public by people who have subsequently been fined for it. More teenagers met this genre through that shirt than through any record on it.
Famous for what happened
Three names are known to people who have never played a note of the music, and in each case the reason is a court file. Mayhem are the band a documentary crew reaches for, because a singer took his own life in April 1991, a guitarist was stabbed to death in August 1993 and the man who did it went to prison for twenty one years; a feature film about it reached cinemas in 2018. Burzum is one man who has spent thirty years publishing far right material under his own name, and the notoriety keeps that name in circulation far beyond anything four albums would carry on their own. Gorgoroth arrived third through a concert in Krakow on 1 February 2004, filmed for a DVD, which put sheep heads on stakes, eighty litres of sheep's blood and four crucified models on the stage and drew a police investigation into religious offence and animal cruelty; no band member was charged, and the promoter was fined ten thousand zloty in 2007. A court then spent from October 2007 to March 2009 deciding who owned the name, and ruled for the founding guitarist.
None of that is a musical judgement in either direction. Two of those three made records worth owning and one of them did not, and the fame is distributed with no reference to which is which. Anybody arriving at the genre through a documentary is arriving at the noisiest quarter of it, which is why the more useful map is the bands that matter and why almost nobody on it appears in the film.
Famous outside the genre entirely
The best reviewed record this genre has produced has a pink sleeve and a shoegaze guitarist on it. Deafheaven's Sunbather came out on Deathwish on 11 June 2013, sold three thousand seven hundred and twenty copies in its first week, reached 130 on the Billboard 200, and scored 92 on Metacritic, which made it the best reviewed major album of that year in any genre. It went on to sell more than thirty thousand copies in America inside ten months, and the argument about whether it counts as black metal at all has run ever since. Immortal's fame outside the music is stranger and entirely visual: a set of photographs from the mid nineties, corpse painted men posing in an inconvenient forest, has been reproduced as a joke online more often than any of their albums has been played. And the band most often mistaken for a black metal band is not one at all, which is a question worth its own answer, so here is is Ghost Black Metal.
Famous inside it and nowhere else
Then there is the other kind of fame, which is total inside a small room and zero outside it. Darkthrone are the most respected name in the genre and have not played a concert since 1996; there is no live circuit, no festival slot, no shirt with their logo in a high street shop. Emperor stopped making albums in 2001 and have headlined festivals three separate times since on reputation alone. Watain occupy the odd middle: Lawless Darkness won a Swedish Grammis for best hard rock album in 2010, The Wild Hunt went to number one in Sweden in 2013, and outside Sweden they remain a band you have to be told about. Satyricon got themselves onto daytime radio in Norway and were treated as national property, which nobody in Britain or America noticed at all.
| Band | Record | Year | The figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dimmu Borgir | Death Cult Armageddon | 2003 | Billboard 200 at 169, over 100,000 US copies |
| Dimmu Borgir | In Sorte Diaboli | 2007 | Number one in Norway, a genre first |
| Behemoth | The Satanist | 2014 | Number one in Poland, 34 US, 57 UK |
| Cradle of Filth | Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder | 2008 | Billboard 200 at 48, 11,000 in week one |
| Deafheaven | Sunbather | 2013 | Metacritic 92, best reviewed album of the year |
| Watain | The Wild Hunt | 2013 | Number one in Sweden |
What a popularity list is actually for
Not as a shopping order. Four of the six bands in that table would not appear on any ranking this magazine would publish on merit, and two of the three most respected names in the genre have no numbers next to them at all because they never sold anything, never toured and in one case never played live. Fame here is a measure of how far a band got from the basement, and the basement is where most of the good records were made. What the list is good for is the reverse look. If you have arrived at this music through a documentary, a pink album sleeve or a shirt, everybody above is a legitimate door and there is no snobbery in walking through it. The rules of the room you are walking into are set out in what Is Black Metal, and the second thing you will discover is that the four bands you have never heard of are better than the two you have.
