The first wave of black metal is not a sound. It is a period, and a label fastened on backwards by people who were not in the room.
Between 1982 and 1991 something close to forty groups in a dozen countries made records that a later generation filed under one heading. Almost none of them knew the others existed, almost none would have accepted the description, and the phrase first wave black metal was not in circulation while any of the music was being made. It arrived afterwards, because a second wave needs a first one to be second to, and it was drawn across a decade of unrelated activity the way a border gets drawn on a map long after the war it describes has stopped.
What the phrase actually covers
The dates are the least contested part of it. The era opens on 1 November 1982, when Venom put an album called Black Metal into British shops on Neat Records, and it closes at the other end of the decade, when a few dozen Norwegian teenagers who had grown up on those sleeves began making something that no longer resembled them. Standard reference works put the span at 1982 to 1991. Between those two dates there is no scene in any sense a historian would recognise: no venue where these bands played to one another, no fanzine that covered all of them, no producer who worked with more than a couple.
What holds the period together is content and presentation rather than technique. Recognised for satanic and anti-Christian subject matter carried at full seriousness rather than borrowed for a single song, staffed by musicians working under invented names, dressed in inverted crosses and leather and, by the end of the decade, in white face paint, and released by small labels with nobody in the office to ask for a chorus, the first wave records agree on their subject and disagree about everything else. The founding acts are the ones every account names: Venom in the north east of England, Bathory in Sweden, Hellhammer and then Celtic Frost in Switzerland, Mercyful Fate in Denmark, Sarcofago in Brazil. Behind those six stand thirty more in Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Colombia, Japan and Greece, and the full roll is worked through in the First Wave Bands, One by One.
Hellhammer are the clean illustration of how loose the category has to be. Formed in Nurensdorf in May 1982 under the name Hammerhead, rejected by every label they wrote to, they made three demos in 1983 and one commercial release, the four track Apocalyptic Raids, recorded and issued in March 1984 by Noise Records. They broke up on 11 May 1984. That is the entire career, under twenty minutes of it on general sale, and a year later Kerrang! was still writing the band off in print. It is now cited as one of the two or three most consequential things anyone did in the period.
It seems like one day in 1994 I woke up and BOOM, every journalist and punter was using that term.
Fenriz of Darkthrone on the wave terminology, Last Rites interview, 29 September 2011
The boundary problem
Because the test is subject matter and not playing, the edges of the first wave will not hold still. Every list you find carries a set of bands that another genre also claims, and the reason is always the same. A thrash or death metal group that happened to write about the devil in earnest gets pulled in, while a group playing something close to the eventual black metal guitar style with no occult content stays out.
| Band | Country | Normally filed as | Why it turns up on first wave lists |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slayer | United States | Thrash | The presentation on the 1983 debut, and what German bands took from it |
| Sodom | West Germany | Thrash | In the Sign of Evil, 1985, treated in Norway as a founding document |
| Possessed | United States | Death metal | Seven Churches, 1985, and subject matter identical to Venom's |
| Sepultura | Brazil | Thrash and death | The 1985 Cogumelo split, and the company they kept in Belo Horizonte |
| Onslaught | England | Thrash and hardcore | Power from Hell, 1985, title and content both |
| Kat | Poland | Thrash | Blasphemous lyrics written and pressed behind the Iron Curtain |
None of those six sound like black metal as the phrase came to be used, and four of them are more usually claimed by another genre outright. They are on the lists because the first wave is a period label, and a period label cannot throw a band out for playing the wrong way when the period had no right way.
Why almost nobody heard any of it at the time
The commercial record of the era is worth putting down plainly, because it explains why the canon had to be assembled by a later generation rather than by the market. Venom were the largest act in this history by a distance, with a major distributor behind them and a British weekly press that at least knew their name, and their singles chart placings run 156 for "Die Hard" in 1983, 134 for "Warhead" and 128 for "Manitou" in 1984, and 123 for "Nightmare" in 1985. Those are the numbers of the most successful band in the period.
Everybody else operated below that. Hellhammer sent their demos out by post to magazines and to anyone who enclosed a stamp. Cogumelo Records in Brazil ran out of a shop on pressing figures a British independent would have found comic. Tyfon Grammofon in Sweden was a family business with a part-time employee who happened to be the label owner's son. There was no radio, no television, no chart and, for most of these records, no distribution outside one country.
What it sounded like, which is several things at once
A reader arriving at the term expects a sound, and the honest answer is that there is no single one. Bathory's debut has no bottom register and no warmth anywhere in it. Venom have almost nothing but bottom register. Mercyful Fate had two trained guitarists writing harmony lines and a singer working in falsetto. Hellhammer pared everything back to two chords and held them until they turned oppressive. Sarcofago play faster than any of the others and treat the drum kit as an emergency.
The Danish album is the one that finishes off every attempt at a musical definition. Cut at Easy Sound in Copenhagen in a May 1984 session with Henrik Lund producing and released that September, Don't Break the Oath is a well made record by five musicians who could play, arranged with an act structure, and it belongs to the first wave by common consent. Whatever binds the era together, competence is not disqualifying and incompetence is not required.
A period label cannot throw a band out for playing the wrong way when the period had no right way.
Where the era ends, and why the date is arguable
Three closing dates are defensible and each one says something different. 1987 is the year the founders stop: Hellhammer had been gone for three years, Mercyful Fate had split in April 1985, Celtic Frost were about to leave this history altogether, and Venom lost Mantas in 1986. 1988 is the year Bathory turned towards Norse myth and slow tempos on Blood Fire Death and stopped making the kind of record the wave is named for. 1991 is the date the reference works use, because it holds the door open until the Norwegian albums arrive and there is finally a second wave for the first one to precede.
The choice of date matters less than the shape it describes. What the first wave was is a set of scattered experiments on the same raw material, conducted in isolation, most of them commercially negligible at the time, and then picked over by a later generation with complete disrespect for what any of the originals intended. That is the position the era occupies in the whole history of the genre, and it is why the label is worth keeping even though it names no sound at all.
