Four records inside the twelve months of 1996: Stormblåst in January, Aspera Hiems Symfonia, Moon in the Scorpio and Dusk... and Her Embrace. One calendar year, three countries between them, and no two of the four solving the same problem. That is the year the branch stopped being one band's accident and became a working method, and it is the reason a list of its bands has to be ordered by what each one actually worked out rather than by sales.
Everything below is judged on the records. The ranking is not a popularity table and it does not care what anybody wore.
The two that wrote the template
The quartet who went into the Grieg Hall without a keyboard player and came out with the founding record of the style still own the top of this list on the strength of two albums. Emperor put In the Nightside Eclipse out on Candlelight on 21 February 1994 and then, in 1997, delivered Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, where the orchestration stopped supporting the guitars and started arguing with them. IX Equilibrium followed in 1999 and Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire and Demise in 2001, after which they shut the band down rather than make a fourth record on habit. Nobody in the branch has bettered the second album and few have tried honestly.
The other template was written by a band who refused the format almost as soon as they had built it. Arcturus, an Oslo assembly holding Steinar Sverd Johnsen at the keyboards and Jan Axel Blomberg behind the drums, made Aspera Hiems Symfonia in 1996 as a slow, cold, unmistakably northern symphonic record, then recorded La Masquerade Infernale between December 1996 and May 1997 at Jester Studio and issued it through Misanthropy on 27 October 1997 with the shrieks thrown out, a low speaking voice in their place and Simen Hestnæs brought in to sing operatically across the top. Chronicles of Chaos gave it ten out of ten. It is the record everyone in this article who wanted to be taken seriously has had to answer since.
Nobody in the branch has bettered Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk and few have tried honestly.
The two the genre sold
The two names that took the branch into chain shops came at it from opposite ends of the North Sea and neither of them arrived symphonic. Dimmu Borgir made For All Tid and Stormblåst as a Norwegian language band on small labels, then signed to Nuclear Blast for Enthrone Darkness Triumphant in 1997 and spent the next fifteen years enlarging the arrangement until the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra was on most of Death Cult Armageddon in 2003. Cradle of Filth, formed in Suffolk in 1991, issued The Principle of Evil Made Flesh through Cacophonous in 1994 and then Dusk... and Her Embrace through Music for Nations in 1996, which is the one to own: the arrangements are still lean, the tempo still belongs to black metal, and the vampire library has not yet swallowed the band whole.
What happened next to both is a matter of record rather than of taste. In Sorte Diaboli put a black metal album at number one in Norway in 2007. Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder reached 48 on the Billboard 200 in 2008. Neither number tells you whether the record is any good, and both are the reason the two bands get argued about instead of listened to. How the split between them and the rest of the family happened is set out in how black metal split.
The one man orchestras
Underneath the two big catalogues sits the part of the branch that never saw a session player. Limbonic Art, begun at Sandefjord in 1993 and worked down over the years from a full band to Vidar Jensen alone, built Moon in the Scorpio in 1996 and In Abhorrence Dementia in 1997 out of programmed strings and programmed drums, and the records are colder for it: nothing breathes, which turns out to suit the material. Old Man's Child is the same arrangement with a different temperament, Thomas Rune Andersen writing vocals, guitars, bass and keyboards himself in Oslo from 1993 and running the project through Century Media for seven albums up to Slaves of the World in 2009, all of it while holding a guitar chair in Dimmu Borgir from 2000 until August 2024.
The third of the desk orchestras is the strangest and the most fun. Bal-Sagoth, formed at Sheffield in 1993 out of an idea their singer Byron Roberts had been carrying since 1989, made A Black Moon Broods Over Lemuria for Cacophonous in 1995 and then Starfire Burning Upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule and Battle Magic, before moving to Nuclear Blast for The Power Cosmic in 1999. Jonny Maudling came off the drum stool and onto the keyboard rig at the turn of the decade and the writing turned into film music for a fantasy sequence nobody had filmed, with Roberts narrating over the top and publishing the same stories as prose. Six albums, no seventh since 2006. Nothing else in metal sounds like it.
Outside the north
Sigh got there before almost everybody. Formed in Tokyo in 1989 by Mirai Kawashima, signed by Deathlike Silence Productions on the strength of an EP and released as Scorn Defeat in 1993, they have spent thirty five years refusing to make the same record twice, through Hail Horror Hail on Cacophonous in 1997 and the far stranger Imaginary Sonicscape on Century Media in 2001. In France, Anorexia Nervosa came out of Limoges having spent four years as a different band under a different name, and after the industrial death metal of Exile in 1997 they turned into the fastest and most florid thing the branch has ever produced, with Drudenhaus in 2000 and New Obscurantis Order in 2001 for Osmose Productions. They went on stand-by in 2005 when the singer left and have never come back.
The newest of the significant names came out of the Netherlands with a completely different idea of what the orchestra is for. Carach Angren, started at Landgraaf in 2003 and reduced now to Dennis Droomers and Clemens Wijers, write concept albums about hauntings, in English, French, German and Dutch, with the arrangement doing the narrative work a soundtrack would do. Franckensteina Strataemontanus arrived on Season of Mist in 2020, built around the life of Johann Konrad Dippel. It is closer to horror scoring than to anything from the second wave, and that is the point of them.
An orchestra is not a compliment paid to a band. It is another set of writers in the room, and most bands lose the argument.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
Where to start
- Emperor, Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk (Candlelight, 1997). The high point of the whole branch.
- Arcturus, La Masquerade Infernale (Misanthropy, 1997). The one that broke the format on purpose.
- Cradle of Filth, Dusk... and Her Embrace (Music for Nations, 1996). Before the theatre took over.
- Dimmu Borgir, Death Cult Armageddon (Nuclear Blast, 2003). A real orchestra, on the record, doing real work.
- Sigh, Imaginary Sonicscape (Century Media, 2001). Nothing in the genre is further out.
- Bal-Sagoth, The Power Cosmic (Nuclear Blast, 1999). Absurd, committed and impossible to confuse with anything else.
Six records, five countries, and not one of them replaceable by another. If the orchestration on any of these strikes you as excessive, the correction is in raw Black Metal, where the argument runs the other way and the recording budget is a borrowed four track.
