The voice is the thing people cannot get past, and it is also the only element of this music that has never been up for negotiation. Guitar tones have gone from thin to enormous and back, drums have been programmed and then played and then programmed again, whole records have been made without distortion at all, and through every one of those changes the singing has stayed where it was put in about 1991. That is not conservatism. It is the recognition that the voice is doing a specific job here, and that no other job was ever on offer.
Working out what that job is explains a great deal of the chapter this belongs to, because the decision made about the voice is the same decision made about the photographs, the logos and the pressings.
The line it came down
The ancestry is short and it is audible. Venom's singing on the first two albums is a rasp rather than a roar, Quorthon's on the early Bathory records is thinner and higher than anything its contemporaries were doing, Tom G. Warrior's delivery in Hellhammer and Celtic Frost is closer to a bark than to a melody, and Sarcófago in Brazil pushed all of it further and faster in 1987. Every one of those is a voice that refuses to sound healthy.
Then comes the fork that decides everything. Death metal, developing at the same time and often in the same rooms, took the voice downward into the lowest register a human being can produce. Black metal took it up. The shriek is a high sound, and pitching it into the same frequency band as the guitars rather than underneath them is the single most consequential decision anybody in this genre has made about recording. The voice stops behaving like a person standing in front of a band and starts behaving like wind forced through a gap in a wall.
The earliest recording of the Norwegian version in front of an audience is a bootleg quality tape of a concert played at the Eiskeller in Leipzig on 26 November 1990, with Dead singing, which Obscure Plasma did not release until 1993. It sounds like nothing that came before it and like almost everything that came after.
What it does to the record
Three consequences follow, and they are structural rather than decorative.
The first is that the words go. Consonants do not survive this delivery, and on most black metal records the lyrics are not merely hard to follow but functionally absent as language, which is why so many bands print them and why so many others do not bother. Whatever the singing is communicating, it is not communicating it by being understood.
Whatever the singing is communicating, it is not communicating it by being understood.
The second is that the melody has to move somewhere else. In almost every other form of popular music the voice carries the tune and the instruments support it. Here the voice carries no tune at all, so the melodic work is handed entirely to the guitar, and that is the real reason this genre writes long tremolo lines instead of riffs with gaps in them. The guitar is singing. It has to, because nothing else is going to.
The third is that the song loses its contract with the listener. A verse and a chorus are a promise that something recognisable will come back, and that promise is made by a voice. Remove it and the form is free to run for eleven minutes without arriving anywhere, which is exactly what a great deal of this music does. People who find black metal shapeless are usually reacting to the absence of that contract rather than to anything about the guitars.
The frontman, removed from the front
There is an argument underneath all of this and it is the same argument the rest of the genre makes. A rock singer is a personality addressing you directly, and the entire apparatus of popular music, the photograph on the sleeve, the interview, the chorus the crowd shouts back, is built on that address. The black metal voice refuses it at the level of physics: you cannot sing along with something you cannot pronounce, and you cannot identify with a sound that is not trying to be a person.
That refusal is not separable from the small pressings and the absent photographs described in anti Commercialism and the Limited Press. A band that will not print its line up and will not repress its record is not going to hand you a chorus. All three decisions come from the same place, which is a conviction that the listener should be dealing with the work rather than with the people who made it.
The variants, and what they are for
Within that narrow specification the genre has produced more variety than its critics allow. Attila Csihar sang the Mayhem album recorded at the Grieg Hall in Bergen across late 1992 and early 1993 and released by Deathlike Silence on 24 May 1994, and what he did on it is not a scream at all: it is declamation, delivered like a rite being performed rather than an attack being made, and it divided the audience so sharply that people are still arguing about it. Ulver went the opposite way. Bergtatt, recorded at Endless Lydstudio in Oslo across November and December 1994 and released by Head Not Found in February 1995, sets clean folk singing and low choir against the harsh voice, sung in an archaic form of Dano Norwegian that most of its own audience could not follow either.
| Model | Documented on | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| The high rasp | Early Bathory, early Darkthrone | Sits inside the guitar band rather than in front of it |
| The concert shriek | Mayhem, Live in Leipzig (recorded 1990) | The earliest recording of the Norwegian model in a room |
| The declamation | Mayhem, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas (1994) | Delivered as a ceremony rather than as an assault |
| The clean voice | Ulver, Bergtatt (1995) | Folk singing used as contrast, not as relief |
| The distant voice | Burzum, Filosofem (1996) | Mixed so far back it becomes part of the room |
| The modern shriek | Mgła, Gaerea and most of the current underground | Unchanged in thirty years, and deliberately so |
Why it is now the border
The most useful evidence for all of this comes from the bands that changed everything else. When American groups in the 2010s brought in shoegaze guitars, major key melody and production values that would not embarrass a rock record, the one component they did not touch was the voice, and the arguments about whether those records counted as black metal were conducted almost entirely on other grounds because on this ground there was nothing to dispute. The shriek is what marks a record as belonging here. Take it off and put an ordinary singer on top of the same guitars and the result stops being black metal in about four seconds, which cannot be said of any other element.
That is a strange position for the most human component of a piece of music to occupy. It is also, on any honest reading of black metal history, the correct one: a genre built on refusing to be addressed by a personality found the one part of a band that cannot help being a person and made it the least personal thing in the mix. The face was dealt with separately and just as deliberately, which is the subject of corpse Paint.
