In 2005 a musician working alone in the south of France issued a four track EP called Le secret, kept the tremolo picking and the blast beats of the music he had grown up inside, and aimed the whole apparatus at a major chord. Nothing on it shrieks for the first six minutes.
That EP is where the branch begins. Blackgaze is black metal technique carried into shoegaze harmony and, more decisively, onto a shoegaze mixing desk, and the two decades since have given it its own labels, its own festival slots and a permanent quarrel attached to the back of it. The quarrel gets its own page. This one is about the sound, which is the part that actually gets argued about least.
What the word describes
Shoegaze was the British guitar music of the late 1980s and early 1990s that buried the voice inside the guitars and left the melody to be inferred, and the reference record is My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, released in November 1991 after two years of studio time that nearly finished the label paying for it. Black metal in those same years was pulling in the opposite direction on purpose: cheap rooms, thin treble, cold, small, hostile to anyone who wanted comfort out of it. Blackgaze is where those two methods meet, and the meeting is far more exact than the portmanteau makes it sound. Whoever first typed the word onto a forum in the early 2010s was describing a technique, not a mood.
Four things cross over from black metal and only four. The tremolo picked guitar line, a melody delivered as a continuous rattle rather than as separate notes. The blast beat, which holds the drums at a speed no other guitar music uses. The high strangled vocal. And the refusal to resolve a phrase at the point where a rock song would resolve it. Everything else arrives from the other side. The chord voicings are consonant, often plainly major. The guitars are layered four and six deep instead of one thin track panned wide. The reverb is long, the delay is longer, and the voice is pushed so far back in the mix that it stops being the front line and becomes another instrument holding a note.
Black metal was recorded to sound small, cold and cheap. Blackgaze is recorded to sound enormous, and that single reversal is most of the fight.
The demo tape, the EP and the record that turned
Begun in 2000 as an ordinary black metal project by Stéphane Paut, who has worked under the name Neige throughout, Alcest gives no warning at all in its first release: the 2001 demo Tristesse hivernale, issued through Drakkar Productions, is raw second wave work by a teenager with the correct records on his shelf and nothing yet of his own. Four years later Le secret arrived with the same picking hand attached to a completely different harmonic sense, and Souvenirs d'un autre monde, released by Prophecy Productions in August 2007, dropped the harsh vocal almost entirely and left a black metal guitarist singing cleanly over blast beats for the length of an album. The same lacerating tremolo, the same blast beat, and a pyre photographed at dawn rather than at midnight.
The catalogue after that keeps testing how far the two halves can be pulled apart. Écailles de lune in 2010 put the screaming back and made the contrast the subject. Les voyages de l'âme in 2012 balanced them. Shelter in 2014 removed the metal completely and was received by a section of the audience as a defection rather than a record. Kodama in 2016 restored it, Spiritual Instinct moved the band to Nuclear Blast in 2019, and Les chants de l'aurore in 2024 arrived with the argument long settled in the band's favour and the tremolo still in place. Whatever else the project is, it is not a man who found one trick in 2005 and sat on it.
The trick is underneath, not on top
A listener meeting this music for the first time hears the guitars and the reverb and assumes the guitars are the argument. They are not. The argument is in the drums, and it is the reason the branch belongs inside the genre rather than beside it. Take the blast beat out of a blackgaze record and what remains is a loud post rock band with a hoarse singer. Leave it in and the harmony sits on top of an engine running at a speed that has meant one thing and one thing only since 1991, so a major chord over it does not read as a pop chorus. It reads as a black metal record that has decided to stop threatening the listener without slowing down for a second.
The second inheritance is structural and comes from post rock rather than from either parent. Pieces run eight, ten and twelve minutes, built as a long approach to a single peak, with the payoff withheld far past the point at which a verse and chorus band would have delivered it. That is why so much of the branch is written in the same shape, and why its weaker end collapses into a formula anyone can predict from the first ninety seconds. Grey weather and a slow crescendo is not a composition. It is a setting.
The bands who understood blackgaze kept the drummer honest. The ones who only understood the reverb wrote weather.
Eirik Solvang
What the map looks like now
The branch went international faster than any other part of the genre, because a guitar, a laptop and a reverb plugin will get most of the way there and no scene infrastructure is required at all. Ghost Bath made Moonlover in 2015 out of North Dakota while a good deal of the press believed the band to be Chinese. Møl, out of Aarhus, took Jord to Holy Roar in 2018 and Diorama to Nuclear Blast on 5 November 2021, and became the branch's most convincing live proposition on the way. Violet Cold is one man in Azerbaijan whose Anomie in 2017 folded synthesisers and Middle Eastern melody into it. An Autumn for Crippled Children have worked out of Friesland since 2008 without ever showing their faces, and Astronoid, formed at Lowell in 2012, went further into the light than anybody with Air in 2016. Readers arriving here from cascadian black metal should note that the two branches grew in the same decade and share almost nothing beyond a fondness for length, one of them turning its back on the far north and the other walking straight into it.
| Band | Country | Record | Year | What it settled |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alcest | France | Le secret | 2005 | The method exists |
| Alcest | France | Souvenirs d'un autre monde | 2007 | It can carry a full length |
| Lantlôs | Germany | .neon | 2010 | It travels without its inventor |
| Deafheaven | United States | Sunbather | 2013 | It sells outside metal |
| Ghost Bath | United States | Moonlover | 2015 | Anyone anywhere can make one |
| Møl | Denmark | Jord | 2018 | It works in a room, loud |
What it is not
It is not the whole of the wider category. post Black Metal covers every band that took the genre's machinery somewhere it was not built to go, including the ones who went toward dissonance and industrial rhythm rather than toward light, and blackgaze is one branch of that rather than a synonym for it. It is not an American invention either, whatever the sales figures suggest. Deafheaven's Sunbather, cut in six days in January 2013 at Atomic Garden in East Palo Alto with Jack Shirley and released by Deathwish on 11 June, entered the Billboard 200 at 130 on 3,720 copies in its first week and had passed thirty thousand in the United States by April 2014, and every one of those figures arrived eight years after the method had been finished in France.
Nor is it the forest wing. The bands filed under cascadian Black Metal also write long, also use consonant harmony and also came out of the same decade, and they got there from ecology, folk music and a deliberate rural retreat rather than from a Creation Records back catalogue. The two are confused constantly, mostly by people who have heard one record from each. The full taxonomy, including where the line falls between atmosphere and orchestration, sits in black metal subgenres.
Where it fails, and where to start
It fails in exactly one way and the way is easy to hear. The wall replaces the writing. A band buys the reverb, layers six guitars, sets the drummer to a blast and lets a crescendo do the work a riff should have done, and the result is forty minutes of pleasant weather with somebody shouting a long way behind it. There is a great deal of this, most of it uploaded rather than released, and the branch's reputation has suffered more from its own imitators than from any of its critics.
Start with Souvenirs d'un autre monde for the method in its first complete form, then Sunbather for what happened when that method met a rhythm section with something to prove, then Jord for proof that the apparatus still works at volume in front of people. Anyone who wants the ground underneath all of it will find it in the complete history of black metal, where the tremolo riff and the blast beat are doing considerably less pleasant work. Play the records first. The category can wait.
