Academy Music Studios in West Yorkshire, between November 1990 and January 1991, with Peaceville Records paying for the time. In the room were five men from a local death metal band, a guest singer named Sarah Marrion, and an orchestral section credited to the Raptured Symphony Orchestra, which was an unusual thing to find on an underground metal session in that year and on that budget. The record they made was Gothic, released on 19 March 1991, and although it was filed as death doom at the time, it is now the album everyone points at when they want to say where gothic metal begins.
That is the same label, in the same period, that would shortly be issuing the records which defined the opposite end of this comparison. We think the shared address is worth noticing, because the border between black metal and gothic metal is not a wall between distant countries. It is a line drawn through a single small scene, and it was drawn over what to do with beauty.
What gothic metal put back
The simplest way to describe gothic metal is as a list of the things black metal had deliberately removed, restored one at a time. Melody that resolves, so that a phrase arrives somewhere and the listener is rewarded rather than refused. Clean singing, in a range a human being can reach without damage. Choruses that repeat, which means songs organised for memory instead of against it. Mid tempos with the beat where a body expects it. Warm production with the low end left in and the instruments separated. And, most consequentially for the genre's later history, a woman's voice used as a lead instrument rather than as an ornament.
Every one of those is a decision to be legible, and legibility is precisely what black metal spent the same decade attacking. Two genres working from an almost identical set of images ended up at opposite ends of the question of whether the listener should be let in.
Two genres working from an almost identical set of images, at opposite ends of the question of whether the listener should be let in.
One wardrobe, two intentions
The confusion between the two is entirely a matter of surface, and the surface really is shared: the nineteenth century, the funerary, the nocturnal, the ruined building, the Romantic poets and the whole apparatus of European literary melancholy. A gothic metal sleeve and a black metal sleeve from 1996 can be almost indistinguishable, and a great deal of the argument about which band belongs where is conducted on that basis alone, which is a poor way to proceed. The imagery tells you what a band has read. It tells you nothing about what they have written.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
The difference in intention is audible within thirty seconds of any record from either camp. Gothic metal wants to be moving, and it is built to produce a specific emotional response in a listener who is being cared for. Black metal wants to be inhospitable, and where it produces an emotional response it does so by refusing to accommodate anybody. Those are opposite jobs. A band can do one of them well and the other badly, and most of the bands that tried both did exactly that.
The bands that crossed in public
The clearest case is Portuguese. Moonspell formed in 1989 in Brandoa under the name Morbid God, kept it until 1992, and issued the demo Anno Satanæ in 1993 as a straightforward black metal band; then Wolfheart arrived on 1 April 1995 through Century Media, recorded in Germany with Waldemar Sorychta producing, and the band walked away from the first identity and into the second over the course of a single record. They became the best known metal band their country has produced, and in 2006 Memorial was certified gold at home on ten thousand copies, which is a figure worth stating plainly because it shows what the scale of these careers actually is.
The Norwegian case is Theatre of Tragedy, formed at Stavanger on 2 October 1993 around Raymond István Rohonyi and, from the start, the singer Liv Kristine, whose soprano against a male grunt gave the gothic genre the vocal arrangement it has never entirely escaped. Their lyrics were written in Early Modern English, which is either the most committed decision in the subgenre or the most exposed, depending on the record. In 2000 they replaced the heavy guitars and the archaic language with electropop on Musique, lost a large part of their audience, and carried on until they dissolved on 2 October 2010, seventeen years to the day after they started.
The band that was never on either side
Type O Negative are worth a paragraph precisely because they are so regularly dragged into this argument and belong nowhere near it. The Brooklyn band came out of hardcore and heavy rock rather than out of any extreme metal lineage, they were led by a bass player singing in a low baritone with an entirely deliberate streak of dry humour, and their subject matter was sex, religion and self image handled with irony. What they share with black metal is a colour scheme. What they do not share is anything at all about the writing, the tempo, the production or the intent, and the frequency with which their name appears in these discussions is a useful reminder of how much of genre argument is conducted on the strength of a sleeve.
Where the border actually runs
- Paradise Lost, Gothic (Peaceville, 1991). Where the name comes from, and still the clearest statement of it.
- Moonspell, Wolfheart (Century Media, 1995). A black metal band changing its mind on record.
- Theatre of Tragedy, the mid nineties albums. The vocal arrangement that defined a decade of imitators.
- Type O Negative, Bloody Kisses (Roadrunner, 1993). The outlier that keeps getting misfiled.
Our test for any record that claims both territories is whether removing the beauty would leave anything standing. In gothic metal the beauty is the structure, so the answer is no, and that is not a criticism: the genre is honest about what it is doing. In black metal, beauty when it appears is a by-product of processes chosen for other reasons, and a record that reaches for it directly usually stops being black metal at the moment it succeeds. That is where the border runs, and it runs through individual songs more often than it runs between bands. The wider account of how these divisions came about is set out in the wider story.
We would add one caution, having heard a great many records that sit on this line. Judge them whole. The gothic influenced black metal album that opens with a female vocal and a piano frequently has nothing behind it, and the one that opens with eight minutes of tremolo sometimes turns into the most affecting record of the year in its second half. The branch where those two impulses meet most painfully is covered in suicidal Black Metal Bands.
