The line between these two does not run along tempo, volume, production quality or the amount of reverb on the guitar, which is where almost everyone looks for it. It runs along the direction the microphone is pointing. One of them turns it inward at a room and shuts the door. The other points it at a valley and waits.
That sounds like a critic's distinction until you try to sort a record collection with it, at which point it does all the work and the usual criteria do none. Both styles are slow. Both repeat. Both are made by one person more often than not, both were built out of the same two Burzum albums, and both sound thin on a phone speaker. The neighbouring branches, and how many of them there really are, are set out in the subgenres explained.
What they genuinely share
More than either side likes to admit. The common ancestor is one man with a four track: Hvis lyset tar oss, recorded at Grieg Hall in Bergen in September 1992 and held back until April 1994, and Filosofem, recorded in March 1993 at Breidablik and not released until 31 January 1996, both through Misanthropy Records. Between them those two albums establish the whole toolkit that the later styles divided up: the mid tempo that refuses to accelerate, the riff repeated past the point of politeness, the vocal placed at a distance, the long keyboard piece at the end that is not metal at all.
The inheritance splits cleanly. One side took the claustrophobia and the vocal. The other took the length and the keyboards. Everybody kept the repetition, which is why the tags get swapped so freely on streaming services and why a listener who liked one thing gets served the other and cannot work out why it does not land.
Where the line falls
| Element | Depressive and suicidal | Atmospheric |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | One person, in the first person | Terrain, myth, season, history |
| Function of repetition | Exhaustion; the loop wears the listener down | Accumulation; the loop builds a scale |
| The vocal | A presence, mixed forward or intimate, often the loudest thing | Texture, buried in the mix, sometimes almost absent |
| Keyboards | Fog behind the guitars, rarely melodic | Frequently the lead melody, carrying whole passages |
| Why the production is raw | To close the space in | To open it up and put distance in it |
| What a long song is for | To not end | To get somewhere by a slow route |
The keyboard test is the most reliable single check. In the depressive style the synthesiser sits behind the guitars as weather, and if it were removed the song would still be the song. In the atmospheric style it frequently carries the tune outright, to the point where the Austrian duo Summoning, working since 1993 with programmed drums played in from a keyboard, write music in which the guitar is the accompaniment. Take the keyboards off a Summoning record and there is nothing left standing.
One music is about a person. The other is about a place. Nearly everything else is production.
The border cases, which are the interesting part
Plenty of records refuse to sit on either side, and they are not failures of classification so much as evidence that the border is a working area rather than a wall. ColdWorld uses keyboards the atmospheric way and vocals the depressive way on the same track. Woods of Desolation writes melodies that would be at home on a Scandinavian folk influenced record and then buries them under a production that belongs to the other camp entirely. Alcest, started by the French musician Neige in 2000, began inside black metal and left it altogether by Souvenirs d'un autre monde in 2007, taking the shoegaze end of the atmospheric wing with him and inventing a third tag in the process.
Then there is Ghost Bath, formed in Minot in 2012 around Dennis Mikula, whose debut Funeral came out in 2014 on the Chinese label Pest Productions while the band was widely believed to be from Chongqing. Moonlover followed on Northern Silence in 2015 and got reviewed in places that do not normally review this music at all. The record is filed under depressive black metal by half the internet and under blackgaze by the other half, and both readings are defensible, which tells you the tags are describing surfaces.
What the first person does to a song
The lyric sheet separates the two long before the guitar tone does. The depressive style is written in the first person almost without exception, frequently in the musician's own language rather than in English, and the songs are addressed either to the singer or to one other person. Swedish, French, German and Czech titles are the norm rather than an affectation, because the words are not there to be understood by a foreign audience. They are there to be produced.
The atmospheric wing writes about things that were already there before the band existed. Summoning have taken most of their words directly from Tolkien since 1995. Drudkh, working in Kharkiv since 2002 and giving no interviews at all, set verses by Ukrainian poets. Wolves in the Throne Room, formed in Olympia in 2002 by the brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver, have said in as many words that they play black metal on their own terms and for their own reasons, and what those reasons are is a place rather than a person. A first person song can be sung by a shrieking voice buried in tape hiss and still be a diary entry. A song about a river cannot.
The two scenes behave differently in public
The depressive wing is largely a recording culture and always has been. Silencer never played a concert. A great many of the most cited projects in the style have never assembled a line up capable of performing, because the point of the format is that nobody else is involved, and the ones that do play tend to do it rarely and to a few hundred people.
The atmospheric wing went the other way from about 2007 onwards. Wolves in the Throne Room have toured internationally for the better part of two decades, the style is programmed at festivals that also book post rock and drone, and a whole audience arrived that had come for the sound rather than for the ideology. Summoning are the standing exception, an Austrian duo of thirty years who consider themselves composers rather than musicians and have never performed once. Two styles built out of the same records ended up with completely different relationships to a room full of people.
Why the sorting is worth doing
Because the two do opposite things to a listener, and recommending one to somebody who wanted the other is not a small error of taxonomy. A record designed to close a room in around you and a record designed to put four kilometres of empty ground in front of you are not interchangeable, whatever the tempo says.
The practical rule takes about ten seconds. Play the first four minutes and ask whether the music is describing something outside the person who made it. If it is, you are in the atmospheric wing. If everything in the arrangement points back at the singer, you are not. If the keyboards are carrying the melody rather than the mood, that settles it on its own, and if they have swelled into an orchestra and a choir you have left both styles for symphonic Black Metal, which took the same instrument in a third direction entirely.
The remaining confusion is mostly a streaming artefact. Tags are applied by whoever uploads the record, corrected by nobody, and inherited by every playlist downstream. The bands themselves have generally been clear about which one they are doing, and when they have not been, the mix tells you.
