The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and there is no new thing under the sun.Ecclesiastes, King James Bible
There are two honest answers to this question and they are eighteen months apart, on different labels, in different countries, made by people who did not know each other. Which one you take depends entirely on whether you think a genre begins when it is named or when it is played.
The question also has a long tail of wrong answers, most of them records that got one element right in advance and nothing else. Testing them properly means fixing the criteria before looking at the candidates, because the reverse procedure is how every argument about this has been conducted and it is why none of them ends.
The criteria, set before the candidates
Six tests, and a record has to pass a stated number of them rather than merely feel right. Satanic or anti-Christian content as the subject of the whole album, not one track. A vocal outside singing, rasped or shrieked rather than sung. Rhythm guitar played as a continuous distorted mass rather than as separate struck chords. Drumming that abandons rock time. A recording that refuses the professional finish available at the time. And the intent, meaning some evidence that the people involved understood themselves to be making something other than heavy metal.
Nothing made before 1981 passes more than two, which disposes of the prehistory quickly. Coven's 1969 album has the content, the inverted crosses and the satanic mass and is otherwise psychedelic pop. Black Widow's Sacrifice, out on CBS in March 1970 and up to number 32 in the British chart, has the content and a flute. Black Sabbath's debut of February 1970 has one song about the devil, a great deal of blues, and no interest in blasphemy as a project. All three are ancestors of something. None is an early example of this.
The candidates, tested
Venom arrive first and they arrive twice. Welcome to Hell was recorded in three days at Impulse Studios in Newcastle in August 1981 with Keith Nichol at the desk and released by Neat that December, and Geoff Barton in the British press gave it five stars while describing its sound in terms nobody would have printed as praise. It has the content, the shout, the refusal of finish and no name. Eleven months later the same band, the same room and the same engineer produced Black Metal, released on 1 November 1982, which is the identical record with two words on the front of it.
Then the field opens. Melissa, from Copenhagen in October 1983, has the most serious occult content of any album in this list and fails four musical tests outright, because Mercyful Fate could play and wanted the record to sound like it. Apocalyptic Raids, four tracks from Switzerland in March 1984, passes on the vocal, the refusal of finish and the intent, and fails on the guitars, which are struck chords held rather than a continuous mass.
Bathory, recorded at a converted garage in Stockholm in June 1984 and released on 2 October, is the first album that passes on sound. The content is the whole record. The vocal is not singing by any definition. The guitars are pitched thin and high and nothing at all is put underneath them. The drumming has left rock behind. The recording was made on an eight channel machine run at half speed to fit onto one master tape, in something between thirty two and fifty six hours, and the first pressing of a thousand copies was gone in a fortnight. It fails only on the name, which the Swedes did not use.
| Album | Released | Content | Vocal | Guitars | Drums | Sound | Intent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coven, Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls | June 1969 | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| Black Widow, Sacrifice | March 1970 | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| Venom, Welcome to Hell | December 1981 | Yes | Shout | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Venom, Black Metal | November 1982 | Yes | Shout | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Mercyful Fate, Melissa | October 1983 | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Hellhammer, Apocalyptic Raids | March 1984 | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Bathory, Bathory | October 1984 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sarcofago, I.N.R.I. | August 1987 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
The question moves if you say recording instead of album
Every date above assumes the unit is a full length album, and that assumption is doing more work than it looks. The first Bathory material to reach the public was not the debut LP at all. Two tracks, "Sacrifice" and "The Return of the Darkness and Evil", were cut in January 1984 and appeared that March on a Tyfon compilation called Scandinavian Metal Attack, six months before the album, and the label found that almost every letter it received about the record concerned the band it had added last to fill a gap. If the question is which recording came first, the answer moves to a compilation track in the winter of 1984 and the album ceases to be the founding object.
The same move promotes a series of other releases that are usually excluded on format alone. Hellhammer's Triumph of Death, the second of three demos, was made in 1983 for seventy dollars and posted to anyone who enclosed a stamp. Sodom's In the Sign of Evil, nineteen minutes recorded almost live in 1985, was treated by Norwegian teenagers as a founding document and is an EP. Mayhem's Deathcrush from 1987 is an EP. Tormentor's Anno Domini was recorded in Budapest in 1988 and could not be released for seven years, so it circulated as a copied tape and reached its listeners in a format with no catalogue number at all.
Excluding all of those because of their length or their packaging is a decision about record shops, not about music. It is defensible, since a question phrased as first album has to be answered with an album. It is worth naming, because the standard list of candidates is shaped by the accident of what happened to get pressed onto twelve inches of vinyl.
The two answers
If a genre begins when it is named, the first black metal album is Black Metal, released on 1 November 1982, and the fact that it is a fast rock record with almost nothing in common with the music that took the name is beside the point. Names attach to things and then the things arrive to fit them. This is the answer where the name came from is really about, and it is the answer most reference works give.
If a genre begins when it is played, the first black metal album is the Bathory debut of 2 October 1984, which passes every musical test with nothing borrowed from anybody. That is the answer a musician gives, and it is the one supported by what the second wave actually copied, since no Norwegian band in 1991 was trying to sound like Newcastle.
A foundation stone that nobody laid, found later under a building that was already standing.
The answer nobody likes and cannot be dismissed
There is a third position, and it is stricter than either of the above. If the first black metal album has to be an album that a listener with no historical interest would identify as black metal, then it is not a 1984 record at all. It is Under the Sign of the Black Mark, recorded in Stockholm in September 1986 and released on 11 May 1987, which adds the keyboard drone, the reverb and the opened out tempos that the 1984 record does not have, and which Fenriz has called the quintessential album in the form.
The strictest version of that position pushes the date to February 1992 and to Norway, on the grounds that black metal is a second wave phenomenon and everything before it is prehistory. That view has the merit of consistency and the defect of leaving the genre named ten years before it exists, which is a strange thing to ask a reader to accept.
The most useful way to hold all three at once is to stop treating the question as having one answer and start treating it as three separate questions with three correct answers: the name in 1982, the music in 1984, the finished form in 1987. That is how the credit divides too, which is the subject of who Invented Black Metal, and it is how the shape of the thing is set out across black metal, chapter by chapter.
