Brothers shall fight and fell each other, and sisters' sons shall kinship stain.Völuspá, The Poetic Edda
Black metal is the only genre in metal whose lyrics are routinely unreadable, unprinted, in a language nobody speaks, or mixed so far down that the words never reach the listener at all. That is not carelessness. It is a position, held consistently for thirty five years, and it means the subject matter has to be reconstructed from sleeves, interviews and the handful of records that did print a lyric sheet. What comes out of that reconstruction is a much narrower set of themes than the reputation suggests, and a much stranger one.
Five subjects account for almost everything: blasphemy, winter, the pre Christian gods, misanthropy and the refusal to be understood. They arrived in that order, they hardened quickly, and each of them has one record where it stopped being a mood and became a template. The pictures that carry the same argument without words are the visual language.
| Theme | The record that fixed it | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Blasphemy as theatre | Venom, Black Metal | 1982 |
| Blasphemy meant literally | Mayhem, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas | 1994 |
| Winter as a place rather than a season | Immortal, Pure Holocaust | 1993 |
| The old gods and their defeat | Bathory, Hammerheart | 1990 |
| A dead language as the lyric | Enslaved, Vikingligr Veldi | 1994 |
| Fantasy literature taken straight | Summoning, Dol Guldur | 1997 |
| Theology argued rather than posed | Deathspell Omega, Si monvmentvm reqvires, circvmspice | 2004 |
| The forest as an argument about people | Wolves in the Throne Room, Two Hunters | 2007 |
| The lyric withheld entirely | Mgła, Exercises in Futility | 2015 |
Blasphemy, and the moment it stopped being a joke
The Newcastle band who gave the genre its name were not serious and never pretended otherwise. Venom recorded Black Metal at Impulse Studios in Wallsend in seven days and Neat Records released it on 1 November 1982, and its Satanism sits alongside witchcraft, horror films and the Countess Báthory as one more thing to write a chorus about. That is the point of it. The record is theatre, it is enormous fun, and every band that followed it into the subject for the next eight years understood the arrangement.
What changed in Norway was not the vocabulary but the register. The same words were used with the theatre taken out, and the removal of the wink is the single most consequential decision in the history of these lyrics, because it turned a stage device into a claim about the world that some of the people involved then acted on. Nothing in the words themselves distinguishes 1982 from 1993. Everything in the delivery does. The clothes that carried the same shift are black Metal Fashion.
The land took over
Within two years the blasphemy had been displaced by weather, and the band that did the displacing never had much interest in Satan to begin with. Immortal formed in 1991 around Abbath and Demonaz, and by Pure Holocaust in 1993 they had invented Blashyrkh, a country that does not exist, filled with demons, battle, glacial valleys, fog and permanent winter, which Demonaz has explained came out of how the two of them felt about the place they actually lived. The lyrics are about cold, and they are about nothing else at all.
This turned out to be the most durable subject the genre found, because it survives translation, it survives the collapse of anybody's belief in anything, and it cannot be embarrassed by the passage of time. Twenty years later the American bands took the same theme and pointed it at ecology instead of at mythology, which is a change of politics and not a change of imagery: the same trees, the same absence of people, the same refusal to put a human figure in the middle of the frame.
Nothing in the words themselves distinguishes 1982 from 1993. Everything in the delivery does.
The old gods, and the language they were sung in
The Swede who abandoned his own invention opened the second subject. Quorthon turned Bathory towards the Norse religion and its defeat by the church on Blood Fire Death in 1988 and completed the argument on Hammerheart in 1990, and everything filed as Viking metal since is a footnote to those two records. Enslaved then took the idea to its logical end. Deathlike Silence released Vikingligr Veldi on 22 February 1994, five pieces recorded at Grieghallen in March and April 1993 with Pytten engineering, the lyrics in Icelandic apart from one track in Old Norwegian, and Thorlak Sigvaldason brought in to do the translating because the band did not speak it. Ivar Bjørnson was fifteen when it was recorded. The album is dedicated to Euronymous, who was killed before it came out.
Writing in a language the singer does not command is a strange decision that turns out to be a sound one. It removes the lyric as a channel of information and leaves it working purely as texture and as a claim of descent, and the same logic explains why Summoning took its words wholesale from Tolkien on Dol Guldur in 1997 and why French, Ukrainian and Icelandic bands stopped writing in English at all. The subject is not what the words say. It is which tradition the record is claiming to come out of.
The lyric that refuses to be read
The final position is the withholding of the text altogether, and it is where the genre's oldest instinct ends up. Mgła released Exercises in Futility through Northern Heritage on 4 September 2015, forty two minutes across six tracks numbered rather than named, made by two Polish musicians who give no interviews, with Marcel Roux's 1908 engraving on the cover. Drudkh had already declined to publish lyrics at all. Deathspell Omega print theirs and credit nobody. The effect in every case is the same: the listener is refused the usual handle, and the record has to be taken as an object rather than as a message.
The subject that discredits the rest
One theme has to be stated plainly and then left where it belongs. A minority of bands have used these lyrics to carry far right and racist politics, the tendency has its own name and its own small network of labels, and it is a real part of the record rather than an invention of hostile journalists. It is also, on the evidence of the music, largely worthless: the records are derivative, the writing is poor, and the position has produced nothing anybody outside it listens to twice. Reporting that accurately is not the same as amplifying it, and pretending it does not exist would be worse than either.
The rest of the genre's misanthropy is a smaller and duller subject than it likes to appear. Take away the blasphemy, the weather and the mythology, and what remains in most of these lyrics is a young man's contempt for other people, expressed with more conviction than craft. It works when it is specific and collapses when it is general, which is the same rule that governs every other kind of writing. Where all of this came from, and what the scene around it looked like, is set out in the parent article.
What the words were actually for
The honest conclusion is that the lyrics were never the payload. They were a boundary marker: the fastest way to signal which tradition a record belonged to and which listeners it did not want, doing exactly the work that an unreadable logo does on a sleeve and a hostile mix does on a master tape. That is why they could move from Satan to snow to Old Norse to nothing at all inside fifteen years without the music changing very much. It is also why the best records in the genre survive a reader discovering that the words are ordinary, and why the worst ones do not improve when the words turn out to be clever. The network that carried all of it before anybody could search for it is tape Trading and Zines Before the Internet.
