Black metal is the only style in metal whose visual language is codified as tightly as its music, and that is the claim this chapter exists to defend. Not the most extreme, not the most photographed, not the most argued over. The most codified. A second wave record from 1994 can be identified from across a room with the sound off, by four signals working together: a logo nobody can read, a black and white photograph, a face painted to be read as a skull rather than as a mask, and the studied absence of anything that resembles a product.
The second half of the claim is the part that irritates people, because it removes the mystery. The code did not evolve and it did not emerge. It was specified, quickly, by a small number of people who knew exactly what they were doing, and the essential parts of it were fixed inside seven years.
The specification arrived from Brazil
The components existed long before Norway assembled them. King Diamond had been painting his face since the late seventies, first in Black Rose and afterwards in Mercyful Fate, and Hellhammer and Celtic Frost used something adjacent to it in the early eighties, but in every one of those cases the paint was theatre with a lineage running back through Alice Cooper and Kiss, and everyone involved understood it as theatre. That whole pre-history belongs to first wave black metal, and whatever the surface resemblance suggests, it is not the same object as what followed it.
The record that turned loose components into a specification came out of Belo Horizonte. Recorded in July 1987 at J.G. Studio and released by Cogumelo the following month, Sarcófago's I.N.R.I. stood four musicians in a graveyard in white face paint, leather, spikes, bullet belts and inverted crosses, photographed with none of the wink that had accompanied every previous version of the look, and according to Lords of Chaos Euronymous became obsessed with that image and wanted every black metal band modelled on it. Almost everything else about the Norwegian scene is disputed. That is where the uniform came from.
The irony deserves a sentence of its own. The most insistently Nordic aesthetic in metal was specified off a Brazilian record.
Corpse paint stopped being makeup
The change is one of function rather than of appearance, and it is attributable to one person. Per Ohlin, who sang for Mayhem under the name Dead, was the first to state plainly that the paint was not makeup and was not intended to look like makeup. Mayhem's bass player Jørn Stubberud put the distinction on the record in Lords of Chaos in 1998: it had nothing to do with the way Kiss and Alice Cooper used makeup, and Dead actually wanted to look like a corpse.
That reframing changes what the image does. A mask announces a character and implies a person underneath it. Corpse paint announces that this is what the person looks like now. The first invites the audience in. The second shuts the door and nails a notice to it.
The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death
Darkthrone put the new reading onto a sleeve in February 1992. The cover of A Blaze in the Northern Sky is a black and white photograph of Ivar Enger, the band's rhythm guitarist, and it works as a portrait rather than as advertising: no instruments, no group shot, no attempt to sell anything to anybody. Peaceville had signed a death metal band and were expecting another death metal record, were taken aback by what arrived, called the sound too weak and asked for a remix, at which point the band offered to release it through Euronymous instead. The label backed down and pressed two thousand copies with a white disc.
A mask announces a character and implies a person underneath it. Corpse paint announces that this is what the person looks like now.
The code was strong enough that several of its own authors walked away from it. Emperor and Satyricon both stopped painting once the practice had spread far enough to stop meaning anything, on the grounds that a signal used by everybody has stopped being a signal. That is the clearest available evidence that it had been a signal and not a costume.
The logo as a barricade
A black metal logo is not a name. It is a thicket grown across the name, planted on purpose, and the reader who cannot get through it was never the intended reader.
The man who has drawn more of them than anyone alive treats the job as a craft rather than a mystery. Christophe Szpajdel, born in Belgium in 1970, drew his first commissioned band logo in 1988 for a Belgian death metal group called Morbid Death, produced the Emperor logo in 1992, and has since put his own estimate of the total past ten thousand. He has spent most of that career in retail work, latterly for a convenience chain around Exeter, drawing upwards of thirty hours a week on top of a full time job. A fan called him the Lord of the Logos in 2006 and the name stuck.
The design logic is consistent and it is not decoration. Serifs extend into branches, branches into thorns, the thorns interlock across the horizontal axis until the whole word reads as one symmetrical object, and legibility falls to the point where only somebody who already knows the name can retrieve it from the shape. That is a filter with a graphic method behind it, and it performs the same job as the production on the records. The surface is made hostile deliberately, and getting past it is the entry fee.
The Emperor sleeve is also where the borrowing becomes visible to anybody willing to look. In the Nightside Eclipse was recorded in July 1993 at the Grieg Hall in Bergen with Pytten producing and released by Candlelight on 21 February 1994. The painting is by Kristian Wåhlin, who signs his work Necrolord, and it incorporates a section of Gustave Doré's engraving Death on the Pale Horse. The inner sleeve carries a photograph of a fortress in Transylvania. The logo is Belgian. Nothing on the object is Norwegian except the band, which is a useful corrective to the notion that this imagery rose out of the landscape by itself.
The photograph in the trees
The forest photograph is the genre's most reproduced convention and its least examined one. The template is fixed and it is easy to state: bare trunks or dense spruce, no horizon, no sky worth the name, winter light or none at all, the subject small in the frame or absent from it altogether, and the print pushed until the mid tones have gone and only rime white and black are left.
Two separate lines feed it. The first is painting, and specifically Theodor Kittelsen, whose work supplied covers to Burzum, among them Filosofem, recorded in March 1993 and released on 31 January 1996, which uses his Op under Fjeldet toner en Lur. Kittelsen died in 1914 and had nothing whatever to do with any of this, which did not prevent him becoming the genre's house painter. The second line is photographic and closer to documentary. When Peter Beste published True Norwegian Black Metal through Vice in 2008, a hundred and fifty images made over several years inside the scene, the pictures that travelled furthest were the ones shot outdoors in bad weather, because those were the ones that matched what the audience had already been taught to expect.
The most consequential photograph in the genre was taken on a disposable camera. The cover of Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, recorded at the Grieg Hall between June 1992 and May 1993 and issued by Deathlike Silence Productions on 24 May 1994, is a monochrome shot of the east front of Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, taken by Euronymous himself after he had arranged a few objects at the site. A cathedral, photographed at night, on the cheapest camera obtainable, printed so dark that the building survives as a silhouette and nothing else. The desecration is entirely in the framing. Nothing was done to the stone.
The convention hardens into a group portrait on Pure Holocaust, recorded at the Grieg Hall and released by Osmose on 1 November 1993. Three men, corpse paint, spiked gauntlets, hair over the shoulders, nothing behind them and nothing in their hands. Not one element of the picture tells you what the record sounds like. Every element of it tells you what the record refuses to do, which in an ashen, monastic sort of way is a more efficient use of a square of cardboard.
The purest case is the one made with the least equipment. Transilvanian Hunger was cut in Fenriz's bedroom across November and December 1993 on a four track machine and released by Peaceville on 17 February 1994, and its cover is a high contrast black and white photograph of Fenriz holding a candelabrum, close enough to Mayhem's Live in Leipzig sleeve that the resemblance was noticed at the time. The image is badly lit and crudely printed. Both of those are the argument, not an accident of budget.
The clothes were an argument
The wardrobe is easy to list and easy to misread. Leather, studs, spikes worn on the forearms, bullet belts, inverted crosses, black on black, hair long and unstyled. Almost none of it was new in 1992. Most of it is inherited from the first wave and from hardcore before that, and several pieces come straight off the Sarcófago sleeve.
What was new was the thing it was arguing with. Death metal through the same years was drifting towards ordinary clothes, trainers and shorts and a band shirt, the dress of somebody who has come to play rather than to appear, and the drift was a statement of its own about seriousness and craft. Black metal went in the opposite direction deliberately, and the exaggeration is the whole content of the gesture. Nobody strapped spiked gauntlets on for a rehearsal in 1993 because they were comfortable to play in.
| Year | The object | What it fixed |
|---|---|---|
| 1987 | Sarcófago, I.N.R.I. | Paint, spikes, bullet belts and inverted crosses as one uniform, photographed straight |
| 1988 | Szpajdel's first commissioned logo | The start of the career that produced the genre's standard lettering |
| 1991 | Helvete opens in Oslo | An address for the scene and a base for the label that served it |
| 1992 | Darkthrone, A Blaze in the Northern Sky; the Emperor logo | Corpse paint as a cover photograph; the unreadable logo as the norm |
| 1993 | Immortal, Pure Holocaust | The band portrait stripped of instruments and background |
| 1994 | Darkthrone, Transilvanian Hunger; Emperor, In the Nightside Eclipse | Deliberate crudity as a visual position; the borrowed painting and the Belgian logo |
The zines held the register
None of this could have been enforced without a press, and the press was largely one man with a typewriter and a photocopier. Jon Kristiansen, who signs himself Metalion, began the fanzine Slayer in 1984 with his older brother's help and put the first issue out in February 1985. Its tenth issue collects interviews with Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone, Thorns, Emperor, Satyricon, Bathory, Dissection and Enslaved conducted between 1992 and 1994, which makes it the primary document for the period rather than a commentary on it. Speaking to Bardo Methodology in August 2020, Kristiansen described that world as a bunch of guys doing zines, "overly-dedicated weirdos living in the middle of nowhere", which is both affectionate and accurate.
The zine did what zines do everywhere and one thing they do almost nowhere else. It carried interviews, reviews and contact addresses, and it also policed the code, because a scene that defines itself by exclusion has to publish the exclusions somewhere. A band that did the wrong thing found out in print, and so did everybody else.
The physical centre was a shop. Euronymous opened Helvete at Schweigaards gate 56 in Oslo in June 1991, ran Deathlike Silence Productions out of it, and its basement became the meeting room for most of the people whose records this chapter is about. He shut it in early 1993, once police and press attention had found the address. The building is still standing, and the record shop that later occupied it burned in 2024.
What the position cost
The anti-commercial stance was real and it was expensive, and the honest way to write about it is to put the invoice next to the sermon.
Darkthrone played their last concert on 6 April 1996 at Rockefeller in Oslo, to a sold out room, and have not performed since. In 2004 Sardonic Wrath was nominated for Norway's Alarm Awards and the entry was withdrawn at the band's own request. Three decades of records with no tour behind them and no award attached to them is not a pose. It is a decision taken again and again, at cost, in a business where the touring is where the money is.
The production choices carry the same logic and are usually misdescribed as incompetence. Filosofem was made with the guitar plugged into a stereo amplifier and the vocals recorded through an old helicopter headset after a specific request for the worst microphone in the building. Call that posturing if you want to. It is also a working method for producing a record that no radio station will ever play, which was the object.
Three decades of records with no tour behind them and no award attached to them is not a pose. It is a decision taken again and again, at cost.
Not all of the costs were financial, and one of them belongs in plain sentences with no rhetoric near it. The back cover of Transilvanian Hunger originally carried the phrase Norsk Arisk Black Metal. The distributor objected and it was removed. Peaceville printed the band's accompanying statement together with its own response, saying that it disagreed with the sentiment and would not censor its artists. Fenriz has since called those statements disgusting and said he regretted the views he held at the time. Recording that is part of writing this history accurately, and it is not the same thing as dwelling on it.
Why it hardened so fast
Set the timescale against anything comparable. Death metal took most of a decade to settle its imagery and never entirely agreed with itself about it. Thrash never agreed at all, which is why its sleeves run from cartoon skeletons to political posters inside the same year. Black metal fixed its visual language between 1987 and 1994, and it managed that because the conditions were unusually favourable to fixing anything: a small number of participants, most of them in one country, several of them in one basement, one shop, one zine of consequence, a handful of labels, and a shared conviction that the exercise existed to keep people out rather than to bring them in. Iconoclasm is easier to organise than a broad church.
The proof that it was a code and not a mood is that it exported without instructions. By the second half of the nineties, bands with no connection to Norway at all, in France, Poland, Greece, the United States and Japan, were making records that carried the whole set of signals correctly assembled: the thorned logo, the monochrome portrait, the winter exterior, the refusal to look professional, the sleeve that gives the buyer nothing. Nobody circulated a manual. The records were the manual, and they were legible enough to be read off and reproduced by people who had never met anybody involved and never would.
Two things follow from that, and the second is the less comfortable one. The first is that the specification was genuinely well made, because a badly built aesthetic does not survive being copied by strangers who cannot ask questions about it. The second is that a code anybody can apply correctly has stopped working as a filter, which is exactly what Emperor and Satyricon noticed when they wiped the paint off their faces. The look outlived the conditions that gave it meaning and has been living on that inheritance ever since.
The verdict is that it worked, and that the code is still legible thirty years later precisely because it cost the people who wrote it something to hold. Everything since has been either a faithful reproduction of the specification or a deliberate argument with it, and both of those positions are only available because somebody wrote the specification down in the first place. The riffs the code was built to protect, and the records that made it worth protecting, are the subject of black metal, from the beginning.
