Creative Studios, Kolbotn, August 1991. A three piece who had put out a competent death metal album on an English label six months earlier were in the room recording something their label did not want and had not been warned about. Peaceville heard the tapes, called the sound too weak and asked for another record like the last one. The band said they would take it elsewhere. Peaceville gave way, and A Blaze in the Northern Sky came out on 26 February 1992.
That argument is the whole subject of this article. Everything before it belongs to first wave black metal and everything after it belongs to what a later vocabulary calls the second, and the distance between the two is much larger than the family tree suggests. The first wave dressed up for an evening. The second moved in and changed the locks.
The five things that actually changed
Take the guitars first, because everything else follows from them. First wave rhythm playing is built on power chords struck one at a time, which is heavy metal technique played faster and dirtier. Second wave rhythm playing is built on tremolo picking, a single note or interval repeated at speed until the individual attacks stop being audible and what remains is a sheet of tone with a melody buried inside it. That is not a variation on the earlier method. It is a different instrument doing a different job: the first fills a bar with blows and the second fills a room with weather.
The drums went the same way. Rock drumming played fast, which is what Venom and Bathory had, gave way to the blast beat, which is not a groove at all and does not want to be. The vocal moved up rather than down, away from the shout and the low rasp towards a shriek pitched at the top of the register and held there. And the production inverted: the first wave sounded raw because studios cost money, while the second wave sounded raw on purpose, cutting the bass out of the mix and leaving the treble to do the work, which is why a 1993 Norwegian album can sound thinner than a 1984 Swedish one made for a fraction of the money.
| Element | First wave, 1981 to 1990 | Second wave, 1991 onwards |
|---|---|---|
| Rhythm guitar | Power chords, struck | Tremolo picking, continuous |
| Drums | Rock beats at speed | Blast beats, no groove intended |
| Vocal | Shout, low rasp | High shriek, held at the top |
| Production | Raw because of the budget | Raw as a stated position |
| Melody | Riff hooks, choruses | Long melodic lines inside the tremolo |
| Satanism | Presented as theatre | Presented, by a minority, as belief |
| The band | A career with a label behind it | A cell with a scene behind it |
What carried over unchanged
Almost the entire surface. The pseudonyms are first wave, taken from Newcastle. The inverted crosses and the refusal to admit any of it is a performance are Copenhagen, 1983. The white face paint is on the front of a Brazilian album from 1987 and on a Danish stage before that. The small label with nobody in the office to ask for a chorus is Neat, Tyfon, Noise and Cogumelo before it is Deathlike Silence. The subject matter did not change at all.
What that means in practice is that the visible identity of black metal was finished before the music existed, and the second wave inherited a complete wardrobe and then went looking for something to wear it for. Anyone working through the First Wave Bands, One by One will notice that every element a listener now treats as definitive is already present somewhere on that list, in a different country, attached to a band that sounds nothing like the result.
One organisational thing did not carry over, and it is the least discussed difference of the lot. The first wave had no scene. Six bands in five countries on five labels, out of contact for most of the decade, with one Berlin studio appearing twice only because Noise Records was cheap. The second wave had a shop in Oslo, a label run out of its basement, a small circle of musicians who played in each other's bands, a shared correspondence and, by 1993, a shared set of criminal proceedings. That is why the second wave produced a movement and the first produced a heap of records that had to be sorted into one afterwards.
The first wave invented the costume and the second wave invented the music. Every argument about who founded this genre is really an argument about which of those two counts as founding it.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
Bathory sits on both sides of the line
Any clean division has one record that will not sit on either side of it, and here there are three, all made by the same man. Under the Sign of the Black Mark, recorded at Heavenshore in Stockholm in September 1986 and released on 11 May 1987, already has the treble guitar, the shriek, the keyboard drone under the riffs and the reverb doing the work of a room the studio did not have. Fenriz of Darkthrone has called it the quintessential black metal album and named it as the model for a record his own band made in 1995. By any musical test it belongs to the second wave, and it precedes the second wave by four years.
Set Morbid Tales next to it and the problem is obvious in the other direction. Celtic Frost in November 1984 are strange, deliberate and slow, with female voices and a timpani on the record, and they are first wave beyond dispute while sounding nothing like the rest of the first wave either. The waves are periods, not styles, and the moment you treat them as styles the exceptions outnumber the rule.
The first wave dressed up for an evening. The second moved in and changed the locks.
The one change that was not musical
The difference that matters outside the music is the one the earlier bands never had to answer for. Venom, Mercyful Fate, Hellhammer and Bathory presented Satanism as material. Quorthon said plainly that he regarded Satanism and Christianity alike as religious hocus pocus and that the point was to attack the church rather than to join anything, and Conrad Lant of Venom has spent four decades explaining that the words described the lyrics.
A small number of people in Norway between 1991 and 1994 did not treat it as material. Church buildings were destroyed by arson across the country in that period and several musicians were convicted of it. Mayhem's guitarist Oystein Aarseth was killed on the night of 10 August 1993. Varg Vikernes of Burzum was tried from 2 May 1994, convicted on 16 May of the murder and of the arson or attempted arson of four churches, acquitted on a fifth charge, and sentenced to twenty one years, which is the maximum penalty in Norwegian law. He served fifteen and was released on probation in 2009. Those are the facts and they are the reason the second wave is discussed differently from the first, in court reporting as well as in record reviews.
Why the terminology is disliked by the people it describes
Nobody in either wave chose these names. Fenriz, whose band made three of the albums the second wave rests on, has said the term arrived from outside around 1994 and that at the time they simply called what they were doing black metal, with no number attached. Emperor, Immortal, Satyricon and the rest were not aware of belonging to a numbered movement while they were making the records.
Part of the objection is that the numbering flattens ten years into a single block. A listener told that the first wave is one thing has no way of guessing that Melissa and I.N.R.I. are four years and one entire aesthetic apart, or that the Swiss records of 1984 already contradict the Swedish records of the same year. The same flattening happens on the other side, where a Norwegian album from 1992 and a Norwegian album from 1997 get filed together despite one being cut in a few days on a budget that would not cover a week and the other arriving with keyboards, session players and a proper mix.
The numbering survives because it is useful and because nothing better has been proposed. It tells a reader that a 1984 record and a 1994 record will not sound alike even though both are filed in the same place, and it holds the shape of the genre from 1981 to today in a form that can be explained in a sentence. The question of which of the two waves actually founded the thing is a separate argument, and it starts with what Was the First Black Metal Album.
