Athens, September 1995. Four musicians in a rehearsal room have a name, Lloth, a session drummer borrowed from another band and no label, and the bassist has decided she will also play guitar and keyboards because there is nobody else to do it. Within three years the name has changed to Astarte, Black Lotus is paying for the records, and Maria Kolokouri, who signed herself Tristessa, has taken over lead vocals as well. That is a working musician's career, and the rest of this piece is about musicians of that kind.
The records below are discussed on the same terms as any others in the modern chapter: what was played, by whom, in what room, and whether it holds up.
Athens, and a band that did the whole job itself
Astarte released five albums between 1998 and 2007, Doomed Dark Years, Rise from Within and Quod superius sicut inferius for Black Lotus, then Sirens in 2004 and Demonized in 2007 for Avantgarde. The playing is fast, orthodox and Greek in a specific way, tremolo lines laid over the sort of melodic movement that Hellenic bands had been writing since the early nineties, and Kolokouri's bass is audible in the mix, which in this genre is close to a political act on its own. Her voice arrived later and it is the harshest thing on the later records.
The clearest example of what the band could do is Sirens, recorded across August and September 2003 at Praxis Studios in Athens and produced by Ahti Kortelainen, with Kolokouri on vocals and guitars, Hybris on rhythm guitar, Katharsis on keyboards and Ivar behind the kit. Sakis Tolis of Rotting Christ and Shagrath of Dimmu Borgir each sang on a track, which is the sort of thing that happens when a band has spent six years earning it rather than asking for it. Avantgarde put it out on 28 June 2004.
She was treated for leukaemia from the end of 2013 and died in August 2014, at thirty two. The band did not continue. That is the fact, stated once.
San Francisco, and a band with two voices in it
Ludicra ran in San Francisco from 1998 to 2011 and made four albums, ending with The Tenant on Profound Lore in 2010. Laurie Sue Shanaman and Christy Cather shared the vocals, and Cather also played one half of a guitar pair with John Cobbett that wrote in a way almost nothing else in American black metal was doing at the time: long pieces built out of overlapping melodic lines rather than out of riffs stacked end to end, with punk, doom and folk phrasing let in wherever it served the song. Aesop Dekker played the drums with a swing that the orthodox wing would have called a fault.
The subject of the last record is rent. It is about being priced out of a city, which is a plainer and more corrosive theme than anything the genre usually manages, and the two voices arguing across the top of it are what make it work. The band stopped in 2011 and came back for shows in 2022.
Everybody in that band was working elsewhere at the same time, which is part of why it sounds the way it does. Cobbett was also writing for Hammers of Misfortune, Dekker went on to drum for Agalloch, and the material arrived in rehearsal already carrying the habits of three other kinds of band. Very little of the American underground was assembling itself that way in 2006.
Long pieces built out of overlapping melodic lines rather than riffs stacked end to end. Almost nothing else in America was writing that way.
Tokyo, Copenhagen, Oslo
Gallhammer formed in Tokyo in 2003 and played black metal through a crust punk filter, with Vivian Slaughter on bass and lead vocals and Risa Reaper on drums. Peaceville released Ill Innocence in 2007. When the guitarist Mika Penetrator left in 2010 the remaining two did not replace her; The End, in 2011, is a bass and drums record, slower and heavier than anything before it, and the decision to keep going as a duo rather than audition a stranger tells you what kind of band it was.
Amalie Bruun records as Myrkur from Copenhagen and plays vocals, guitars, bass, keyboards, piano, organ, violin, nyckelharpa and percussion, which is a list worth reading twice because it explains the records. M, in 2015, was produced by Kristoffer Rygg of Ulver with Teloch of Mayhem on guitars and Øyvind Myrvoll of Nidingr on drums, and the Norwegian Girls Choir on top of it. Mareridt followed in 2017, Folkesange in 2020 abandoned distortion entirely for Nordic folk song, and Spine in 2023 went back for the guitars. Relapse has released all of it.
Kathrine Shepard began Sylvaine in Oslo in 2013 and writes and plays almost all of it herself, with Neige of Alcest brought in for the drums on the first two records. Wistful arrived in 2016, Atoms Aligned, Coming Undone on 2 November 2018 and Nova in 2022, all through Season of Mist, and the writing sits deliberately between tremolo black metal and something closer to shoegaze, with her own clean singing carrying the melody and the harsh voice used as an instrument underneath it.
The orthodox line
Nothing above is a departure from doctrine and the Dutch case makes that obvious. Asagraum was started in 2015 by the guitarist and vocalist who calls herself Obscura, and Potestas Magicum Diaboli was issued by KVLT Records in September 2017: second wave orthodoxy played straight, riffs built from several guitar parts running against each other, no concessions of any sort to anybody. The line up that took it on tour, with A. Morthaemer on drums and the Norwegian bassist Makhashanah, plays the material the way the records demand and no differently.
| Musician | Band | Plays | Start with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maria Kolokouri | Astarte | Bass, guitar, keyboards, later lead vocals | Sirens (2004) |
| Laurie Sue Shanaman | Ludicra | Vocals | The Tenant (2010) |
| Christy Cather | Ludicra | Guitars, vocals | Fex Urbis Lex Orbis (2006) |
| Vivian Slaughter | Gallhammer | Bass, lead vocals | Ill Innocence (2007) |
| Risa Reaper | Gallhammer | Drums, backing vocals | The End (2011) |
| Amalie Bruun | Myrkur | Vocals, guitars, piano, violin, nyckelharpa | Mareridt (2017) |
| Kathrine Shepard | Sylvaine | Vocals, guitars, bass, keyboards | Atoms Aligned, Coming Undone (2018) |
| Obscura | Asagraum | Guitars, vocals | Potestas Magicum Diaboli (2017) |
What the discographies actually show
Two things, and neither of them is the one usually offered. The first is that these are not fronted bands with a singer out at the front and men doing the work behind her. Kolokouri wrote and played the instruments before she ever took a microphone, Cather wrote half of Ludicra's guitar parts, Slaughter carried an entire album on bass after the guitarist left, and Bruun and Shepard are multi instrumentalists whose records exist because they can play everything on them. The credit lists are the argument, and they are all publicly available.
The second is that the work spreads across every wing of the genre rather than clustering in the soft end of it, which is what most people assume. Asagraum is as orthodox as anything from Scandinavia, Gallhammer came out of crust punk, Ludicra wrote in a way nobody was copying, and Myrkur left the distortion off an entire album and then went back for it. There is no shared aesthetic here because there is no reason there should be one.
The catalogue is not large, which is a fact about the genre's social history rather than about anybody's playing, and it is one of the few places where the genre from 1981 to today looks obviously narrower than the music would justify. The pattern is changing slowly and it is changing through the small formats, the shared releases and the tapes described in the Split Album Tradition, which is where most first recordings have always appeared. The 2000s, when several of these bands did their strongest work, are covered in black Metal in the 2000s.
