A basement at Schweigaards gate 56 in Oslo, some time in May or June 1991. The walls are painted black, the window displays medieval weaponry and a few sleeves, the opening hours suit the owner rather than the customer, and the stock turns over so slowly that the rent is effectively a donation. Euronymous ran Helvete as a record shop, a label office and a clubhouse for perhaps two dozen people, and he shut it early in 1993 when the police and the newspapers began taking an interest. Almost nothing about that arrangement was designed to sell a record to a stranger.
Which is the difficulty with the phrase black metal for beginners. This is a music whose founding gesture was to make itself unpleasant, unavailable and unwelcoming on purpose, and any guide to it has to admit that the barrier is not a side effect but the product. The good news is that the barrier is made of habits rather than intelligence. Four decades of it are laid out in the full story, but you do not need the history to start. You need the right five records and about three hours.
Why the first record matters more here than anywhere else
In most genres the entry point barely matters, because a bad first choice sounds like a weak version of something you will later hear done well. Here a bad first choice sounds like a fault in your speakers. Put on Transilvanian Hunger cold and the honest reaction is that the tape is broken: no bass, drums like a distant photocopier, a guitar hissing at one volume for eight songs. Nothing in the previous twenty years of listening prepares anyone for a mix in which the loudest thing is the treble. So the sequence below runs from the records that meet you halfway to the ones that meet you nowhere, and there is no shame in the order. Everybody who now argues about the merits of French orthodoxy started somewhere legible.
Start with the four teenagers who booked a municipal concert hall and came out with the most ambitious record of the second wave. Emperor cut In the Nightside Eclipse at the Grieg Hall in July 1993 and Candlelight released it on 21 February 1994, by which point two of the four were facing prison, the drummer for a murder and the rhythm guitarist for arson, and Faust had to send his notes on the mix in by letter. None of that is why it works as a first listen. It works because Ihsahn's keyboards sit under the guitars as atmosphere rather than over them as tune, so a newcomer's ear has something to hold while the rest of the sound stays hostile.
Five records, in this order
| # | Band and record | Year | Label | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Emperor, In the Nightside Eclipse | 1994 | Candlelight | Atmosphere and melody inside a hostile mix |
| 2 | Immortal, At the Heart of Winter | 1999 | Osmose | Riffs, clean production, no theology to argue with |
| 3 | Dissection, Storm of the Light's Bane | 1995 | Nuclear Blast | Harmonised guitar lines that stay cold |
| 4 | Darkthrone, A Blaze in the Northern Sky | 1992 | Peaceville | The doctrine, with the old death metal weight still on it |
| 5 | Mgla, Exercises in Futility | 2015 | Northern Heritage | That none of this stopped in 1994 |
Two of those need a word. Immortal made the second one without their main guitarist: Demonaz had tendinitis severe enough to end his playing, so Abbath recorded the guitars, the bass and the keyboards himself with Horgh on drums, at the Abyss in Sweden in November 1998 with Peter Tagtgren producing, and Demonaz wrote all the words. It is the most straightforwardly enjoyable record in the genre and purists hold that against it. And Darkthrone's entry is deliberately not the famous one. A Blaze in the Northern Sky was recorded in August 1991 while the band still knew how to make a conventionally good sounding album, so it carries both grammars at once, which makes it audible in a way its two successors are not.
A shop with the windows painted over is not really a shop. It is a door with a rule written on it.
How to listen, which is most of the work
The single biggest mistake is treating these records as riff delivery systems and skipping when nothing changes. Repetition is the mechanism, not a shortage of ideas: a figure held for ninety seconds stops being heard as a phrase and starts being heard as a texture, and that shift is the entire experience the music is built to deliver. Give a song four minutes before deciding. Play the album in order and in one sitting, because side one of most of these things is an argument and the last track is the conclusion. Use speakers rather than earbuds if you have them, since a thin mix collapses into hiss on small drivers and opens out on anything with air behind it. And play it louder than feels sensible: at low volume a treble weighted record is literally missing, and at proper volume the same record turns out to have a bottom end made of nothing but massed guitar.
What to leave for month three
Not because these are worse. Because each of them assumes you already speak the language, and starting there produces the standard beginner verdict, which is that it all sounds the same. Transilvanian Hunger and Filosofem are the two most influential records in the genre and both are close to unlistenable as first exposures. The French tape circle of the mid nineties, Mutiilation and Vlad Tepes and the rest, recorded so badly that the misery is structural, and that only reads as intentional once you know what a competent version sounds like. Deathspell Omega and Blut aus Nord write dissonance that needs the consonant version in your ear first. Finland's Beherit sounds like occult ambient music with a drum machine. Dungeon synth has no guitars in it at all. All of that is waiting, and the map of who plays what is in the bands you need to know.
The crimes, which you will read about within the hour
Better to have it straight from the start than from a documentary. By 1996 at least fifty arson attacks on Norwegian churches had been counted, several of the buildings medieval; Mayhem's singer Per Yngve Ohlin killed himself on 8 April 1991; and on 10 August 1993 Varg Vikernes stabbed Euronymous to death in an Oslo flat and was sentenced in May 1994 to twenty one years, the Norwegian maximum, for that killing, for four church fires and for possession of a hundred and fifty kilograms of explosives. Some of the people who made the records in the table above went to prison. A wing of the wider genre went further and turned the misanthropy into open racism, and that wing still exists and is worth avoiding on the merits as well as everything else. Two things are true at once: the biography is genuinely part of why the music sounds the way it does, and it is also the least interesting thing anybody can tell you about a guitar tone. If you want the sound explained without the true crime, that is what Is Black Metal.
Three hours, five records, played loud and played whole. If at the end of it the thin mixes still sound like a mistake, then this genre is not for you and there is no argument to be had, because nobody involved in making it ever wanted to persuade you. If instead the fourth record starts sounding warm, you have crossed over, and the forty years of material behind the door will keep you busy for a decade.
