The answer is that it depends entirely on the band, and that the difference between them is documented well enough that nobody has to guess. A small number of black metal musicians are practising Satanists who belong to organisations, publish doctrine and treat their records as its delivery system. A much larger number use the vocabulary as a literary register, the way a horror writer uses a graveyard. A third group, including some of the most influential names in the genre, has never had any interest in it at all and says so in print. One inverted cross does duty as a creed, a logo and a shrug, and which of the three you are holding depends on whose sleeve it is printed on.
What follows is the evidence, band by band, with the dates. It is not an argument about whether anybody is right. It is the answer to a question that gets asked constantly and usually gets answered with a photograph instead of a source, which is roughly how the genre came to be covered the way what actually happened in Norway was covered in the first place.
Where the word came from, and what it meant in 1981
The three from Newcastle who put the name on a sleeve took their stage aliases out of Anton LaVey's book and their subject matter out of the same place the tabloids had been getting theirs for a decade. Venom released Welcome to Hell in 1981 and Black Metal in 1982, and their singer has spent forty years explaining, without embarrassment, that the point was the noise and the theatre. Conrad Lant told Blasting-Zone.com in an interview reprinted in March 2006 that Satanism in his hands meant self-direction and nothing more sinister, a position he has never moved from.
The whole point of Satanism is to have your own head.
Conrad Lant of Venom, Blasting-Zone.com, March 2006
Denmark supplied the first musician the scene took seriously on the subject. King Diamond, in Mercyful Fate from 1981 and under his own name from 1985, has held to LaVeyan Satanism for four decades and describes it as a philosophy rather than a faith, a set of positions he says he held before he ever opened the book. Michael Moynihan, no friend to poseurs, singled him out as one of the very few performers of eighties Satanic metal who was more than a costume. Sweden's Bathory used the imagery hard on its first three albums and then dropped it entirely, trading damnation for Norse history from Blood Fire Death in 1988 onward and never going back.
The bands for whom it is a religion
Then there is the wing where the word is meant exactly as written. The Swedish organisation variously called the Misanthropic Luciferian Order and the Temple of the Black Light is a theistic Satanic body with published material, and its reach into the music is a matter of record rather than rumour. Jon Nodtveidt of Dissection joined it in 1995, and when he restarted the band after his release from prison in 2004 he described it in plain terms as the sonic propaganda unit of the order, with its formulae written into the lyrics of Reinkaos.
Watain, from the same country and the same orbit, has been equally direct. Erik Danielsson has said the band's records are based on Satanism, or devil worship where the shorter word invites confusion, and that a belief system shared by every member is a requirement rather than a preference, on the grounds that music is too intimate a thing to make with somebody who does not mean it. Whatever a reader makes of that, it is not a marketing posture assembled after the fact. It has been the same answer since the band's first record.
One inverted cross does duty as a creed, a logo and a shrug, and which of the three you are holding depends on whose sleeve it is printed on.
The most demanding case is French. Deathspell Omega abandoned straightforward black metal after 2002 and spent the following decade on a theological project: Si monumentum requires, circumspice in 2004, Fas in 2007 and Paracletus in 2010, issued through Norma Evangelium Diaboli and Season of Mist, with Bataille and Hegel audible in the texts and Orthodox chant on the recordings. The band has never confirmed a single member, gave its last interview through the label in 2004 and has never played a concert. There is no personality to inspect, which is the whole method. The doctrine is the product, and everything else has been removed from the frame.
The bands who dropped it, or never had it
The best known name in the genre is also the clearest rejection. Varg Vikernes told Bergens Tidende in January 1993 that the intention was to spread fear and devilry, and spent the following thirty years insisting that the arson had never been Satanic at all but a settling of accounts on behalf of a pre-Christian heritage, and that his own position was heathen. That shift, from the vocabulary of the church-burning years toward blood and soil, is one of the roots of NSBM, a corner of the music that is frequently hostile to Satanism on exactly those grounds.
Immortal is the flat counter-example. Four decades of records, corpse paint as thick as anyone's, and no attack on any religion anywhere in the catalogue: the lyrics describe Blashyrkh, an invented frozen kingdom of demons and battles, and the band has never claimed otherwise. Enslaved went to Norse material at the start and stayed there. Darkthrone has spent twenty years making records about heavy metal itself. A genre that is supposedly defined by devil worship contains several of its most respected catalogues with no devil in them at all.
| Band | Position | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Venom | Theatre, stated openly | Cronos, repeated interviews from the 1980s onward |
| Mercyful Fate | LaVeyan, held as philosophy | King Diamond, consistent since 1981 |
| Dissection | Theistic, organised | MLO membership from 1995, stated on the 2004 return |
| Watain | Theistic, a condition of membership | Danielsson, repeated interviews |
| Deathspell Omega | Theological, anonymous | The 2004 to 2010 albums and their texts |
| Burzum | Rejected, replaced by heathen politics | Vikernes, from the mid 1990s onward |
| Immortal | Never present | The Blashyrkh lyrics, all albums |
| Horde, Antestor | Christian, deliberately inverted | Hellig Usvart, 1994 |
The Christian answer, which annoyed everybody
In 1994 Nuclear Blast released Hellig Usvart by an Australian project called Horde, one man working under the name Anonymous, and the sleeve announced holy unblack metal as a direct reversal of the unholy black metal that Darkthrone had been printing on its own covers. The label received death threats demanding that the musician be named. Norway had already produced Antestor, formed in 1990, whose first demo in 1991 was titled The Defeat of Satan and whose Martyrium was recorded in 1994 and held back until 2000 by label trouble. Crimson Moonlight and a dozen others followed in the early 2000s.
The reaction that greeted them is the most useful evidence in the whole argument. If the Satanism were only decoration, a Christian band playing identical music would be a curiosity and nothing more. It was not treated as a curiosity. A large part of the audience regarded the content as the point and the form as merely the delivery, which tells you what the word is worth to them even when their own favourite bands are singing about frozen kingdoms.
So what is the answer
Black metal is Satanic in the way that any body of work with a recurring subject is about that subject, which is to say unevenly, and with the meaning fixed by the person holding the pen rather than by the genre. The practising minority is small, articulate, organised and entirely serious. The middle is enormous and treats the imagery as inherited furniture, the same way a folk singer inherits a murder ballad without wanting anybody dead. The rejectionists are numerous and include several of the names any newcomer meets first. Ask the question of the genre and you get noise. Ask it of a band, with a date and a source attached, and you get an answer nearly every time, which is also the only sane way to read the rest of the history.
