The man who invented the phrase stopped using it after three years. Niklas Kvarforth attached the words suicidal black metal to a seven inch called Submit to Self-Destruction in 1998, two years after starting the Swedish band Shining, and by 2001 he had abandoned the term on the grounds that other bands had picked it up and were treating the music as therapy when he had intended something aimed at the listener rather than offered to them. He has since called the whole idea foolish and has declined to describe his own band as black metal at all.
The trade kept the phrase anyway, because it sold records. What follows is who actually carried it, what they made, and what the name was doing.
The tag and the sound are not the same thing
Almost everything filed under this heading is musically identical to what gets filed as depressive black metal, and the separation is a matter of self description rather than of tempo, tone or arrangement. A project that called itself suicidal black metal in 2004 was announcing an allegiance, not a technique. That is worth stating plainly at the top, because a reader arriving at the phrase from a search engine is usually looking for the music and gets handed the folklore instead. The full account of how this branch grew out of the second wave is this part of the history.
Who carried it
Shining are the origin, and the fourth album is where the phrase stops fitting them. Recorded in 2004, released through Avantgarde Music in 2005, pressed to five hundred copies on black vinyl and intended at the time to be the last thing the band did, it is also the final record with Hellhammer of Mayhem behind the drums, and its clean guitar and structural discipline point straight at what came after rather than back at the seven inch. Silencer, the Swedish two piece whose only album appeared through Prophecy Productions in 2001, are the opposite case: one record, no concerts, no interviews, and a reputation resting on a performance nobody has ever managed to imitate and a story nobody has ever confirmed.
Beyond those two the roll is short and almost entirely made of one person working alone.
| Project | Country | Formed | The record | Year and label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shining | Sweden | 1996 | The Eerie Cold | 2005, Avantgarde Music |
| Abyssic Hate | Australia | 1993 | Suicidal Emotions | 2000, No Colours |
| Silencer | Sweden | 1995 | Death - Pierce Me | 2001, Prophecy Productions |
| Trist | Czech Republic | 2003 | Zrcadlení melancholie | 2007 |
| Make a Change... Kill Yourself | Denmark | 2004 | Self titled | 2005, Total Holocaust |
| Thy Light | Brazil | 2005 | No Morrow Shall Dawn | 2013, Pest Productions |
Abyssic Hate is Shane Rout, a drummer by trade working alone in Melbourne since 1993 and keeping a lower profile than almost anybody in this music, and Suicidal Emotions, released through No Colours in 2000, is the record most often named as the first to make the whole approach cohere: long, slow, hostile and entirely without the keyboard prettiness that arrived later. Make a Change... Kill Yourself was started in Denmark in 2004 by a musician credited as Ynleborgaz, and the self titled album that Total Holocaust put out in 2005 is a better piece of writing than the name suggests, with piano running through most of it. Thy Light is one man in Brazil, a demo in 2007 that circulated for six years before an album followed through the Chinese label Pest Productions in 2013, which is an unusually literal illustration of how this music travelled.
One band is missing from that table on purpose. Bethlehem, whose 1996 and 1998 albums are the closest thing this whole area has to a source, never used the phrase and never claimed the territory; they called what they did dark metal and left it there. The circle closed anyway. Kvarforth, who coined the term the German band declined to use, later sang for Bethlehem himself, alongside spells in Skitliv and Den Saakaldte. A scene of perhaps forty projects worldwide ends up recycling the same dozen musicians, which is worth remembering whenever the underground is described as a movement.
What the names were doing
Look at that column of titles again. A large part of what this corner of the scene produced was not music at all but naming, and the names were chosen to be repeated. A band called Make a Change... Kill Yourself is asking to be mentioned, and being mentioned was most of the distribution strategy available to a project with no label, no press and no live show.
The name was the marketing budget. That is the least romantic and most accurate description of it.
It also had a cost that the scene has never fully accounted for. Kvarforth handed razor blades to an audience in 2007 and has performed self harm on stage; he was accused of assaulting and threatening audience members in 2017. Those are documented incidents. Whatever the intention behind them, the practical effect of an underground that competed on transgression was that a teenager arriving at it found the provocation before the records, and the provocation was easier to copy.
Tbilisi, and what the format turned into
Psychonaut 4 formed in Tbilisi in 2010 and by 2020 had played in twenty four countries with a line up of seven, singing in Georgian, Russian and English across six albums between Have a Nice Trip in 2012 and ...of Mourning in 2024. Everything about that contradicts the format. This was a style built on isolation, on nobody else being in the room, on a recording that could not be performed; and the band that has taken it furthest in the last fifteen years is a full ensemble with a tour schedule and a crowd that sings along.
That is not a betrayal of anything. It is what happens to every underground idea that turns out to have an audience, and the audience was always the part the original slogan pretended not to want.
The phrase is mostly gone, and that is the right outcome
Ask a project working today what it plays and the answer will almost always be depressive black metal, or post black metal, or nothing at all. The suicidal half of the phrase has quietly fallen off the labels, the distro lists and the band biographies over the last decade, and the music has not changed a note in the process, which tells you exactly how much work the word was doing.
What survives is a small number of genuinely good records made by people who were, in most cases, in real difficulty, and a much larger number made by people who had worked out what the tag was worth. The first group deserve the same treatment any record gets: the writing, the tone, the arrangement, the question of whether the twelve minutes are used. The second group deserve to be forgotten, and mostly have been. Nothing in this music is improved by knowing what happened to the person who made it.
The branch that took the same tools and pointed them outward at terrain rather than inward at a room is atmospheric Black Metal, and the other border this style shares, with the slower and more theatrical end of the music, is walked in black Metal and Gothic Metal.
