The two genres are not opposites, and the habit of treating them as opposites is the quickest way to misread both of them. They came out of the same handful of records, they share an ancestor almost nobody disputes, and they parted company over a single decision taken at the level of tempo, from which everything else followed: the tuning, the register the guitars occupy, the kind of voice that fits on top, the production values, and in the end the subject matter. We think it is worth setting out that divergence properly, because the comparison is usually made with adjectives when it can be made with mechanics.
What follows is a description rather than a ranking. Both genres have produced records we would defend at length and both have produced a great deal that is not good enough, and neither of those facts follows from the tempo.
The common ancestor, and the band that belongs to both
Everything on both sides of this argument runs back to a Birmingham band who tuned down because their guitarist had lost the tips of two fingers in a factory and needed slacker strings to play at all, and whose first album in 1970 opened with rain, a bell and a tritone. That is not a disputed point. What is more interesting is the second common ancestor, because the Swiss group who called themselves Celtic Frost, formed out of the wreckage of an earlier band by Thomas Gabriel Fischer and Martin Eric Ain, produced records between 1984 and 1987 that both genres later claimed with equal conviction: the slow, granite passages on To Mega Therion belong to one lineage, and the rasp, the atmosphere and the ornamental orchestration belong to the other. Two genres reading the same records and hearing different instructions is the whole story in miniature.
What each one did with tempo
Doom metal made its decision first, and made it in public. The Californian band Saint Vitus and the Chicago band Trouble both issued debut albums in 1984 built on tempos slower than anything in metal at the time, and two years later a Swedish group assembled around the bassist Leif Edling recorded Epicus Doomicus Metallicus in February 1986 at Thunderload Studios in Stockholm with Ragne Wahlquist producing, released by Black Dragon Records on 10 June 1986, whose title is dog Latin for epic doom metal and whose contents named a genre. The record is slow, it is loud, and the vocal on it is a trained baritone singing in long lines rather than shouting, which in 1986 was as much of a provocation as speed was.
Black metal made the opposite decision at almost the same moment and arrived at it from Venom, Bathory and Hellhammer rather than from Birmingham directly. Speed, in that music, is not there for excitement. It is there because a tremolo picked figure played fast enough stops being a series of notes and becomes a single sustained texture, and once the guitar is a texture the harmony underneath can move slowly while the surface stays frantic. Doom achieves stillness by slowing everything down. Black metal achieves stillness by speeding the surface up until it stops registering as movement at all. That is the same destination reached from opposite directions, and it explains why listeners who love one often find their way to the other.
Doom achieves stillness by slowing everything down. Black metal achieves it by speeding the surface up until it stops registering as movement.
Five differences that actually matter
| Doom metal | Black metal | |
|---|---|---|
| Tempo | Slow, and the riff is long enough to be heard as a shape | Fast, and the riff is short enough to become a texture |
| Tuning and register | Detuned, the weight carried in the low mids | Standard or high, the weight carried in the treble |
| Voice | Clean baritone, or a low growl | A high rasp pushed to the edge of the throat |
| Production | Wants low end, air and separation | Frequently removes all three on purpose |
| Subject | The body, mortality, grief, the weight of being alive | The hostility of the world and the sacred turned inside out |
The production line of that table is the one we would emphasise, because it is where the two genres are furthest apart and where the difference is least a matter of taste. A doom record needs air around the instruments and a bottom end that a room can move; take those away and the music has nothing left, since the entire effect depends on physical weight. A black metal record very often removes exactly those properties as a matter of policy, and the effect it is after is the opposite of physical: thin, distant, disembodied, the sound of something happening a long way off. Two engineers given the same band and the same songs would produce two unrelated records.
Where the two genuinely meet
The overlap is real and it is older than the arguments about it. Katatonia, then Jonas Renkse on voice and drums and Anders Nyström on guitars, recorded Dance of December Souls between 4 and 9 April 1993 at Unisound with Dan Swanö producing and playing keyboards, and No Fashion Records released it on 14 December 1993: doom tempos, black metal vocals, songs running past thirteen minutes, and no interest at all in which shelf it belonged on. Bethlehem in Germany, Forgotten Tomb in Italy and Shining in Sweden all built careers in that same overlap through the following decade, and the depressive wing of black metal is largely constructed from doom tempos with black metal production values laid over them.
We would rather hear a band commit to one tempo for a whole record than hedge between two for forty minutes. The hybrid works when it is a decision. It fails when it is an inability to choose.
Ilse Brandt, KaosMetal
That said, we reserve judgement on hybrid records until we have heard the whole of one, because this particular crossing produces more misleading opening tracks than any other in metal. A slow first song followed by thirty five minutes of ordinary tremolo is not a doom influenced black metal album, and a black metal vocal laid over otherwise unchanged doom riffs is a doom album with a different singer. The distinction is not pedantry. It determines whether the record rewards a second listen.
What the comparison is worth
Set side by side, the two genres turn out to be arguing about the same question and answering it differently. Both are trying to make a listener experience duration rather than events, and both regard the ordinary rock apparatus of verse, chorus and climax as an obstacle to that. Doom removes the events by leaving enormous gaps between them. Black metal removes them by making everything simultaneous. Neither is more serious than the other and the frequent claim that doom is the more mature of the two says more about the person making it than about the music. The wider account of how these branches came to exist at all is set out in the wider story.
There is one more border worth walking after this one, and it is the more contested of the two, because it involves a genre that borrowed black metal's imagery wholesale and then abandoned almost everything else about it. That is black Metal and Gothic Metal.
