One album. That is the whole recorded legacy of the most quietly consequential Norwegian band of the decade, released in October 1995 on a small English label and then followed by nothing at all. Every ranking of the genre is built out of about fifteen names, and the nineties produced perhaps two hundred bands worth an evening. The gap is where this article lives. What follows is the material that the influential list, the popular list and the Best Black Metal Bands of All Time all leave on the floor, and in several cases it is better than what they picked up.
These records went out in runs of a few hundred and then stopped being mentioned, which is not the same as being forgotten. Forgetting requires having known.
Norway had a second rank and it beat most countries' first
Ved Buens Ende were three men from the same Oslo circle as everybody else and they built something none of the others would have recognised: clean vocals sung slightly wrong, guitar chords that refuse to resolve, drums that swing where a blast beat should be. Written in Waters came out on Misanthropy in October 1995, recorded at Endless that May by Carl-Michael Eide on drums and clean voice, Vicotnik on guitar and Skoll on bass, and then the band stopped. AllMusic's review of it, written years afterwards, still says it sounds like nothing else, and the dissonant wing that runs through Deathspell Omega and Dodheimsgard and half of Iceland is holding a conversation with that album whether it knows it or not.
Two more from the same label and the same eighteen months belong beside it. In the Woods... recorded HEart of the Ages at Star Studio between November 1994 and January 1995 and released it that March, an hour of slow atmospheric writing with a bass guitar you can actually hear, which in 1995 counted as heresy. Fleurety, two men from Ytre Enebakk, put the Norwegian pop singer Marian Aas Hansen on Min tid skal komme in 1995, alongside atonal harmony and folk melody, before anybody had thought of the phrase avant garde metal. Neither band sold anything. Both are on more record collectors' shelves now than they were then, which is the usual pattern and no comfort to anyone who had to eat in 1996.
Borknagar's first album is the other Norwegian record from those years that nobody reaches for. Cut at Grieghallen between October 1995 and January 1996 and released by Malicious on 3 August that year, it put Kristoffer Rygg from Ulver on vocals, Roger Tiegs from Gorgoroth on bass, Ivar Bjornson from Enslaved on keyboards and Erik Brodreskift on drums behind Oystein Brun's guitar, which is a line-up nobody would assemble twice. The folk melody that the whole pagan wing has been chasing since is already fully formed on it.
Then the smaller ones. Kvist made one album, For kunsten maa vi evig vandre, and disappeared. Manes spent most of the decade recording an album that did not come out until 1999. Strid released a handful of songs of enormous slow misery that the entire depressive wing has been rewriting since. And Taake, who arrive right at the end of the decade, are the exception that proves how thin the coverage was: Hoest wrote Nattestid ser porten vid alone, hired a session musician for the bass and drums, cut it at Grieghallen between 1997 and 1998 with Pytten producing, printed the entire booklet in runes and put it out on 7 January 1999. It is the best Norwegian black metal debut of the second half of the decade and it went almost unreviewed.
Sweden, past the two names everybody knows
Sacramentum made the record people reach for when they want more Dissection and cannot have it. Far Away from the Sun was cut at Unisound in Finspang across June and July 1995 and released by the French label Adipocere on 15 May 1996, and the melodic writing is less aggressive than Dissection's and more complicated, with drumming that carries the songs rather than following them. It is now the standard example in any argument about Swedish melodic black metal and it sold in the hundreds on first release. Arckanum went in the opposite direction, one man writing in an archaic Swedish nobody outside the country could read, and Fran Marder in 1995 is closer to folklore than to Satanism. Sorhin and Setherial filled the orthodox positions in the same years and neither has ever appeared on a list like this one.
The continent, which was never listening to Norway anyway
Austria's Abigor formed in 1993 and put out five albums before the decade ended, of which Nachthymnen in 1995 and Opus IV the following year are the ones to own. The writing is denser than the Norwegian model and the guitar parts are genuinely difficult to play, which was unfashionable at the time and is the reason the band has aged so well. Germany produced Nagelfar, whose late nineties records are long, cold and structurally ambitious, and Lunar Aurora, who went further into atmosphere than anybody outside Finland. France ran two separate operations at once: the closed tape circle of Les Legions Noires, whose members traded cassettes in runs of dozens and refused distribution as a matter of principle, and a single musician in Mondeville who founded Blut aus Nord in 1994 and made two frozen melodic albums, Ultima Thulée in 1995 and Memoria Vetusta I a year later, before anybody had the faintest idea what he would do next.
America, before anyone was watching
The United States had black metal before Norway noticed and spent the whole decade being ignored for it. Profanatica came out of Incantation in 1990 and made blasphemy that is genuinely unpleasant rather than theatrical, with a guitar sound like something scraping the underside of a floor; the material recorded across the early nineties circulated for years before it was properly collected. Krieg began in 1994 and Rise of the Imperial Hordes arrived in 1998 as the opening statement of the American misanthropic wing, which for the next ten years operated entirely on small labels, hand numbered pressings and no press coverage of any kind. Judas Iscariot, one man in the American Midwest with a dozen releases in six years, and Demoncy, whose late nineties albums are among the ugliest sounding records the genre owns, are the other two names worth chasing.
Almost none of this generation had a second act. Labels folded, tapes were never repressed, and by the time the reissue market arrived in the 2010s several of the musicians had left music entirely. That is the practical reason these bands are underrated rather than any conspiracy of taste: a band with no back catalogue in print in 2004 was invisible to everybody who arrived through the internet, and the canon closed without them. Norway's second rank, Sweden's melodic wing outside Gothenburg, Austria, Germany and the American basements make up a decade of material that the standard survey of the bands you need to know can only gesture at.
Where to start with all of it depends on where you already are. If the second wave is still new, none of this is the place to begin, and black Metal for Beginners exists for exactly that reason. If you have worn out the famous fifteen, take Written in Waters, Far Away from the Sun and Nattestid ser porten vid in that order, three records made within four years of each other by people who never met, and notice how little any of them has in common with the thing they were all supposedly copying.
