Almost none of the names in this article were invented by the bands they describe. They came from record shops, distribution lists, fanzines and message boards, and about half of them name a production decision rather than a kind of music. A reader who arrives here expecting clean borders will not get them. What the map is good for is something else. Every one of these labels marks an argument somebody had with the second wave and won, and knowing which argument it was tells you more about a record than the label ever will.
The template all of them were arguing with is easy to state. Tremolo picked guitar set high and thin in the mix, blast beats, a shrieked vocal placed behind the instruments rather than in front of them, distortion that sounds cold rather than heavy, songs built out of repetition instead of riff to riff movement, and atmosphere valued above competence. That is the second wave in one sentence, and everything below is that sentence with one element pushed until it breaks.
Three questions sort almost every band into place. How is the record produced, raw or full? What has been added to the template, keyboards, folk instruments, machines, shoegaze reverb, an orchestra? And what are the lyrics for, God, the self, the land or the nation? Answer those three and you have named the subgenre without needing anybody's permission. The order in which these branches appeared, and the decade each one came out of, is set out in the complete history of black metal. The genre broke the way ice breaks on a river, along lines that were already in it.
Atmospheric black metal
The oldest of the branches and the one that swallowed the most territory. Songs run from eight to twenty minutes, the guitars are washed in reverb until the individual notes stop mattering, keyboards or a second guitar hold a drone under everything, and the drums keep a pulse rather than an attack. Burzum's Filosofem, recorded in 1993 and released in 1996, is the ancestor: a riff repeated until it stops being a riff and becomes weather. Wolves in the Throne Room gave it a second life with Two Hunters on Southern Lord in 2007, Paysage d'Hiver in Switzerland spent twenty years releasing hour long tapes of blizzard, and Saor in Scotland and Spectral Lore in Greece have carried it since. The subject is almost always a place rather than a person, usually one with no people in it.
The line with its neighbours is drawn by what the drums are doing. When the percussion stops carrying the piece and the synthesiser takes over, the record has crossed into ambient black metal. When the tremolo turns consonant and the chords start resolving, it has crossed into post black metal. Atmospheric black metal keeps both the menace and the drummer.
Depressive black metal and DSBM
The largest branch by search demand and the one most often written about badly, in both directions. Musically it is specific and easy to recognise. Tempos fall toward doom, the tremolo lines are minor key and frequently arpeggiated rather than chorded, the blast beat disappears for long stretches, the recording is thin by choice, songs pass ten minutes without apology, and the vocal sits higher and further back than in orthodox black metal, closer to a wail than a snarl. Bethlehem's Dictius Te Necare, released in 1996, is the record usually named as the groundwork. The Swedish project Silencer made Death - Pierce Me in 2001 and it is still the reference point. Niklas Kvarforth founded Shining in Halmstad in 1996 at the age of twelve, coined the phrase suicidal black metal, and dropped the term around 2001 on the grounds that other bands had misunderstood it. Xasthur, Nortt, Lifelover and Forgotten Tomb each took a different route through the same material.
The subject matter is where an honest article has to slow down. A branch of music about depression, self harm and suicide is not irresponsible by definition, and a good deal of it is documentary: people describing an illness from the inside, which music has done for as long as there has been any. Part of this scene, though, has treated suicide as an aesthetic rather than as an event, and Kvarforth has said in public that he regards cases of listeners acting on his records as a good outcome. That is a stated position and it belongs on the record as one. It is also worth knowing that the stories which circulate about the singer of Silencer, the ones involving a hospital and an axe, are unverified and traceable to no named source, and have been repeated often enough that they now read as history. They are not history. The music in this branch can be heard, argued about and admired without any of that being adopted along with it.
Atmospheric black metal is about a place. Depressive black metal is about a person. Where the two overlap, the vocal gives it away.
Symphonic black metal
The Norwegians who took the keyboards seriously did it first and did it best. Emperor recorded In the Nightside Eclipse in Grieghallen in Bergen and released it in 1994 with a synthesiser buried inside the guitars rather than laid on top of them, which is the whole difference between this branch and the version of it that sells. Dimmu Borgir took the idea to its commercial conclusion: Death Cult Armageddon, released by Nuclear Blast on 9 September 2003, was recorded with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra on most of its tracks, orchestrated by Gaute Storas and conducted by Adam Klemens, and it entered the Billboard 200 at number 169. An orchestra hired by the hour to play what a keyboard preset had been approximating since 1994. Cradle of Filth came at the same territory from English gothic horror with Dusk and Her Embrace in 1996 and were never forgiven for it by the underground.
The border is a question of function. In atmospheric black metal the keyboard is texture and could be removed without wrecking the song. In symphonic black metal it is orchestration, it carries the melody, and taking it out leaves a hole where the piece used to be.
Raw black metal
Not a sound so much as a refusal, and it cuts across every other branch on this page. Darkthrone set the terms with Transilvanian Hunger on Peaceville in February 1994, an album that treats fidelity itself as a compromise and puts the drums somewhere behind the wall to prove the point. Ildjarn took the argument further into pure noise, and the modern tape underground, from Bone Awl to Lamp of Murmuur, has kept it running on cassette and short vinyl runs for twenty years. The recording is deliberately degraded: one guitar track, no bass audible, cymbals reduced to hiss, vocals recorded in a room with no treatment.
The distinction that matters is between poor recordings and raw ones. A raw black metal record is mixed with intent, and the proof is that everything essential survives the murk. A record that is merely badly made loses the riff along with the fidelity, and no amount of tape hiss will disguise that a band had nothing to say.
Blackgaze and post black metal
The most argued about branch and the one that brought the most new listeners. Neige built Alcest out of black metal technique and shoegaze harmony, and Souvenirs d'un autre monde, released by Prophecy in 2007, kept the tremolo picking while removing almost everything it had previously been used to threaten people with. Deafheaven made the commercial breakthrough with Sunbather on Deathwish in 2013, a pink sleeve on a record full of blast beats, and were treated by a large part of the underground as an invasion rather than an addition. Lantlos, Amesoeurs and Oathbreaker worked the same seam from different sides.
The test is harmonic. Black metal builds on dissonance and unresolved intervals; blackgaze resolves. Once the chords land where the ear expects them to land, the music has changed category no matter how fast the drummer is playing. Whether that still counts as black metal is a question the genre has been arguing about since 2007 and shows no sign of settling.
Pagan and viking black metal
Quorthon got there before the second wave existed. Bathory turned from Satanism to Norse material on Blood Fire Death in 1988 and completed the change on Hammerheart in 1990, slowing the tempos, adding choral vocals and building songs around a marching pulse rather than a blast. Enslaved made Vikingligr Veldi in 1994 with lyrics in Old Norse, Falkenbach turned the same material into something closer to folk song, and Primordial in Ireland applied the method to Irish history with a vocal that owes more to traditional singing than to any metal band.
One caution belongs here because it is a fact about the branch rather than an opinion about it. Heathen and national imagery sits close to nationalist politics, and a small number of bands in this area have made that connection explicit in their lyrics and their interviews while the large majority have not. The music does not sort itself, and anyone buying in this area is better off knowing which is which before the record arrives.
Melodic black metal
The Swedish answer to a genre that had made melody suspect. Dissection released Storm of the Light's Bane in 1995, built on twin guitar harmonies borrowed from the heavy metal of 1984 and played with black metal's speed and vocal, and it became the most copied template in the country. Sacramentum, Unanimated and Naglfar worked the same ground; Watain and Marduk carried different parts of the inheritance into the 2000s; Rotting Christ in Greece arrived at a comparable place by a completely different route.
The border with melodic death metal, its noisy neighbour from Gothenburg, is drawn by the voice and the treble. Melodic black metal keeps the shriek and the thin cold guitar tone and uses harmony to make the cold worse. Melodic death metal takes a growl and a thick mid range and uses harmony to make the riff catchy. Same intervals, opposite intentions.
Ambient black metal and dungeon synth
What is left when the guitars are taken away and the fog is left running. Havard Ellefsen, once the bassist in Emperor, began recording as Mortiis in 1993 and called the result dark dungeon music, which is where the modern name comes from. Satyr recorded Fjelltronen in 1995 under the name Wongraven, and Summoning in Austria built a whole catalogue out of Tolkien, drum machines and layered keyboards. The branch produced a genuine revival in the 2010s, when a generation with cheap software and a Bandcamp account rebuilt it from scratch and turned it into one of the most active corners of the underground.
Industrial black metal
The Norwegians who bolted a machine to the front of the template did it in a city rather than a forest. Mysticum, formed in 1992 and widely described as the first band in this branch, released In the Streams of Inferno in 1996 with a drum machine set to a tempo no human arm can hold for six minutes. Thorns, Dodheimsgard on 666 International in 1999 and Aborym in Italy each pulled the idea somewhere different, and Blut aus Nord in France has spent two decades making records where the rhythm section sounds welded rather than played.
The test is whether the machine is doing something a drummer could not. A drum machine used because there is nobody in the band to play the drums is a budget decision. A drum machine used because the part is physically impossible is the subgenre.
Medieval and folk black metal
Two related branches that share an instrument cupboard. The medieval strand takes its melodies from actual early music: Ulver recorded Kveldssanger in 1996 entirely on acoustic guitars and voices, Empyrium in Germany worked the same seam, and Obsequiae in the United States has built a career on melodic lines lifted from thirteenth century sources and played on a distorted guitar. The folk strand keeps the electricity and adds regional instruments and song forms, which is how Kampfar in Norway and a long line of eastern European bands have worked.
The border with folk metal proper is worth stating plainly, because the two get confused constantly. In folk black metal the traditional material supplies the melody and the harmony, and the black metal supplies the delivery. In folk metal the folk instruments are an addition to a metal song that would survive without them, and the tone is usually celebratory rather than desolate. One is built on the old music. The other is wearing it.
The border with death metal
At the far edge black metal stops being a separate thing. Blackened death metal takes the tremolo, the shriek and the blasphemy and welds them onto death metal's low tuning, growl and rhythmic precision, and it has been a genre in its own right since the early nineties rather than a wing of this one. The giveaway is the bottom of the mix: black metal wants the guitars thin and the low end absent, and the moment a record starts to feel physically heavy it has crossed over.
Beyond that lies the most extreme corner of either music, the one that arrives as a single continuous collapse with no riff anybody could hum. That is war metal, assembled by Blasphemy, Beherit, Archgoat and Revenge out of the crudest records the first wave produced, and it is deliberately unlistenable in a way that the branches above only pretend to be. Both of these are covered on the death metal side of the site, where they belong. They are named here so that this map has an edge.
Where the map fails
It fails at the death metal border too, where one album can put a group on both maps at once and the bands on that border end up counted twice, which is the correct answer rather than a filing error. Inside black metal proper it fails just as often, and the bands are the reason. Ulver released a folk album, a raw black metal album recorded on purpose to sound like a broken radio and an electronic record based on the poetry of William Blake inside four years, between 1995 and 1998, and every one of those would be filed in a different section of this article. Enslaved began as a viking black metal band and became a progressive rock group without ever announcing the change. Blut aus Nord has made ambient, industrial and dissonant records under one name.
Without Contraries is no progression.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Subgenre names describe records, not bands. A group that made a raw album in 1994 and a symphonic one in 1999 belongs in both places, and pretending otherwise is how a map turns into a cage.
Use the categories the way a record shop uses them, as a way of getting to the next record you will like rather than as a ruling on what a band is permitted to do. If you would rather start with the groups than with the branches, the list of black metal bands worth hearing first is the shorter road in, and every name in the table below is a door into one of them.
| Branch | A record that defines it | The line that separates it |
|---|---|---|
| Atmospheric | Wolves in the Throne Room, Two Hunters (2007) | The drums still carry the song |
| Depressive and DSBM | Silencer, Death - Pierce Me (2001) | The subject is a person, not a place |
| Symphonic | Emperor, In the Nightside Eclipse (1994) | Remove the keyboard and the song collapses |
| Raw | Darkthrone, Transilvanian Hunger (1994) | Degraded on purpose, and the riff survives it |
| Blackgaze and post | Alcest, Souvenirs d'un autre monde (2007) | The chords resolve |
| Pagan and viking | Bathory, Hammerheart (1990) | A march instead of a blast, the north instead of Satan |
| Melodic | Dissection, Storm of the Light's Bane (1995) | Harmony with the shriek kept intact |
| Ambient and dungeon synth | Burzum, Daudi Baldrs (1997) | No guitars, no drummer, the atmosphere alone |
| Industrial | Mysticum, In the Streams of Inferno (1996) | The machine plays what an arm cannot |
| Medieval and folk | Ulver, Kveldssanger (1996) | The old music supplies the melody |
