Sixteen countries at least, and that counts only the ones that got a record into a shop before 1997. The census of second wave black metal bands has been recited for thirty years as a story about thirty people who all drank in the same basement, and correcting it is not an act of charity towards the overlooked. It changes what the words mean.
What follows is the roster inside the edges, country by country, with the debut that puts each band there and the label that paid for it. The definition doing the admitting is set out in second Wave Black Metal Explained, and it has four clauses: rhythm guitar played as continuous tremolo picking, the blast beat used as a floor under whole songs rather than as a climax, a vocal pitched high and torn, and a recorded sound with its bottom register removed on purpose and defended afterwards as a position. Nothing in that list mentions a country.
Norway, and why the number is twelve
The muster roll everybody recites has five names on it. The founding country actually fielded about a dozen bands who cleared all four clauses inside the period, and the seven missing from the short list are missing for reasons that have nothing to do with the records: no court case, no shop, no photograph in a British weekly.
The five are Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, Emperor and Immortal. Behind them, and by any reading of the music not behind them at all, stand Enslaved, who put Vikingligr Veldi out on Deathlike Silence in February 1994 with a subject nobody else in the country was writing about; Satyricon, who released Dark Medieval Times in October 1993 on Moonfog, a label the band owned, which makes them the first in the scene to stop waiting for somebody else's counter; Gorgoroth, whose Pentagram came out on Embassy Productions in 1994 at under half an hour and gives up nothing at all to the famous five; Ulver, whose Bergtatt arrived on Head Not Found in 1995 with folk singing inside the form; Thorns, who released no album at all in the period and whose 1991 and 1992 demos settled how a Norwegian riff of this kind is put together; and Dimmu Borgir and Ved Buens Ende, both of them arriving in 1994 and 1995 already walking away from the rules they had just been handed. The room those bands came out of is the subject of the Oslo years and is not retold here.
A muster roll drawn up thirty years late, with half the names on it written in alphabets nobody behind the counter in Oslo could read.
The rest of the north
Sweden ran a parallel line with a different inheritance. Marduk formed in 1990 and released Dark Endless through No Fashion in 1992, a record still standing half inside the death metal it had come out of. Dissection followed on the same label with The Somberlain in 1993 and did the one thing Oslo had ruled out, which was to write tunes a listener could carry home, harmonised twin guitar lines laid across a blast beat and not one bar of it apologised for. Abruptum went the other way and made records with no riffs, no songs and no titles beyond numbers, which the Norwegian label Deathlike Silence was delighted to release. Nifelheim arrived in 1995 with the spikes and the first wave worship intact.
Finland answered from further north and with less ceremony. Beherit put Drawing Down the Moon out through Spinefarm in November 1993, a record that sounds as though the tape it sits on is corroding while it plays, with synthesiser drifting in where a guitar should be. Impaled Nazarene recorded Tol Cormpt Norz Norz Norz in October 1992 and Osmose released it the following year, faster and blunter than anything cut in Bergen and openly contemptuous of the solemnity the Norwegians were building. Archgoat and Barathrum were working by 1993. The Finnish scene took the northern method and tore the ceremony out of it.
Athens, Prague and the middle of Europe
Three bands in one Greek city released debut albums in 1993, and between them they built the only regional sound of the decade a listener can identify from four bars. Rotting Christ put out Thy Mighty Contract, Varathron His Majesty at the Swamp and Necromantia Crossing the Fiery Path, two of the three paid for by Osmose in France and the third by the Greek label Cyber Music. They belong on the census by every clause except the fourth, because Athens kept the warmth in the guitar tone that Norway had cut away, and any roster that throws them off on that ground has quietly promoted a production preference into a rule of admission.
Czechoslovakia had got there first. Master's Hammer recorded Ritual in December 1990 and Monitor released it in February 1991, timpani and hunting horn and opera house theatrics and all, months ahead of the first Norwegian album in the style. Poland arrived through Behemoth, whose Sventevith (Storming Near the Baltic) came out on Pagan Records in 1995 after three years of demos, and through a nationalist wing whose politics were stated openly and which is the reason a good deal of that country's early catalogue is unplayable in public now. Germany produced Bethlehem, whose Dark Metal went out on Adipocere in 1994 and named a subgenre on its own sleeve, and a tape culture in Saxony that refused to make anything a person could buy.
Off the map entirely
The four clauses travelled by post, and they travelled a long way. Sigh in Japan wrote a letter to a record shop in Oslo and ended up releasing Scorn Defeat on Deathlike Silence in December 1993, a record carrying piano and orchestration at the exact moment both were forbidden. France ran a closed cassette circle from 1993 that withheld its own music from anybody it disapproved of. England produced Cradle of Filth, whose The Principle of Evil Made Flesh arrived on Cacophonous in 1994. In the southern hemisphere Sadistik Exekution and, from 1994, Bestial Warlust built something the northern bands would not have recognised as related to them. America had Profanatica and Von working from the same primary sources at the same time as Norway, and got called derivative for it anyway.
| Country | Band | Debut album | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Czech lands | Master's Hammer | Ritual | Monitor | 1991 |
| Australia | Sadistik Exekution | The Magus | Vampire | 1991 |
| Norway | Darkthrone | A Blaze in the Northern Sky | Peaceville | 1992 |
| Sweden | Marduk | Dark Endless | No Fashion | 1992 |
| Greece | Rotting Christ | Thy Mighty Contract | Osmose | 1993 |
| Finland | Beherit | Drawing Down the Moon | Spinefarm | 1993 |
| Japan | Sigh | Scorn Defeat | Deathlike Silence | 1993 |
| Germany | Bethlehem | Dark Metal | Adipocere | 1994 |
| England | Cradle of Filth | The Principle of Evil Made Flesh | Cacophonous | 1994 |
| Poland | Behemoth | Sventevith (Storming Near the Baltic) | Pagan | 1995 |
| France | Mutiilation | Vampires of Black Imperial Blood | Drakkar | 1995 |
Who fails the test
A census is only worth having if it excludes. Venom, Bathory, Hellhammer and Sarcofago sit outside on the date and inside on the influence, which is the entire reason the phrase second wave had to be coined in the first place. Dark Funeral, 1349, Watain and every band Iceland has produced sit outside on the date at the other end while satisfying all four clauses, which is the clearest available proof that the term names a period and not a style. Cradle of Filth are inside the period and clear perhaps two clauses of four, which is why they turn up on every list ever compiled and why the argument about them never closes.
Nobody on this roll drew it up. The bands wrote to each other, traded tapes, pressed a thousand copies and moved on, and the sorting into waves and rosters was done afterwards by people who were not there. What the census does show, with the dates set out in one column, is that the method was assembled in one place and then reinvented independently in four or five others inside eighteen months, which is not how a scene spreads. It is how a technique spreads. The room where the recorded sound itself was settled, and the one engineer who cut four of the defining albums inside a year and a half, is grieghallen and the Bergen Sound.
