Mark how one string, sweet husband to another, strikes each in each by mutual ordering.William Shakespeare, Sonnet VIII
Melodic black metal is a technique. It is not a compliment.
The word gets used for three different things and only one of them is a method. It gets used for any record with a tune in it, which describes half the genre. It gets used for any record with consonant chords, which describes the wrong half. And it gets used, correctly, for a specific harmonic procedure: two guitars playing different notes at the same time, in parallel, at speed, over a blast beat. That procedure is the subject here, and the wider map of how the genre divided is in black metal subgenres.
What actually happens on the fretboard
Tremolo picking, the technique that carries almost all of this music, means striking one note repeatedly and very fast so that a single pitch becomes a continuous tone. Put a second guitar on a parallel line a third or a sixth away and something specific happens: because both parts are continuous rather than rhythmic, the ear stops hearing two players and starts hearing one instrument with a thicker voice. Two lines picked so fast that they stop being two and set into one thickened voice, the way ice sets over moving water. That is the whole mechanism, and everything else in this branch follows from it.
It works because of the drums. A blast beat is a wall of snare and cymbal in the mid and upper mid, and once the kit is doing that, the low end is occupied and the high end is not. The harmony lives in the space the drummer has just cleared: a drum part that clears the upper air and then leaves it empty on purpose. This is why the same harmonic idea sounds cluttered over a mid tempo double bass part and clean over a blast, and why the melodic records almost never slow down when the harmony arrives.
Why the harmony sounds cold
Parallel motion is only half the answer. The other half is which scale the two lines are moving through, and it is not the one heavy metal usually reaches for. Harmonise a line in thirds inside a natural minor scale and the interval does not stay the same size from note to note: some of those thirds come out minor and some come out major, and the pair keeps flickering between the two without the music ever changing key. That flicker is the sound. It is why a harmonised black metal figure never settles into the confident, stable sweetness of a British twin lead from 1982, even when the picking pattern is identical.
Bands working this ground also lean on the harmonic minor, whose raised seventh degree opens a gap of an augmented second between the sixth and the seventh, an interval no folk song in the north uses casually. Put that gap into a line moving at tremolo speed and the melody acquires an edge that has nothing to do with distortion or with the vocal. Take the shriek off a Dissection record and the harmony would still not sound friendly.
Three lineages, and they do not sound alike
The Swedish line is the one everyone means. Dissection's The Somberlain in 1993 set it out and it ran through Sacramentum, Unanimated, Naglfar, Dawn and Vinterland over the following five years, all of them working with two guitars, written harmony parts and songs that return to their material. The inheritance is heavy metal: Iron Maiden and Mercyful Fate, run through a shriek and a thin treble tone.
The Norwegian line is not the same thing and is usually mislabelled. When Dimmu Borgir and the bands around them made their music melodic, they mostly did it with a keyboard rather than a second guitar, which puts the harmony in a different timbre and a different register and produces a symphonic record rather than a melodic one. A synthesiser playing a third above a guitar does not fuse with it. It sits on top of it, and the result is orchestration.
The Finnish line is melodic with no harmony at all. Horna and the bands around it write single lines, minor, narrow, circling, with nothing underneath them but the rhythm guitar, and the effect is grief rather than grandeur. It is worth having a name for, because a listener who goes looking for melodic black metal on the strength of a Dissection record and lands in Finland will not recognise what they have found. The scene histories behind both are in the chapter on Sweden and Finland.
A synthesiser playing a third above a guitar does not fuse with it. It sits on top of it, and the result is orchestration.
The border with Gothenburg
The nearest neighbour is melodic death metal, built in the same country in the same years by At The Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquillity, with Slaughter of the Soul in 1995, The Gallery in 1995 and The Jester Race in 1996 as the founding documents. It uses the same harmonised guitar writing out of the same British sources. The intervals are identical. Everything around them is not.
| Melodic black metal | Melodic death metal | |
|---|---|---|
| Voice | shriek, placed across the bar | growl, placed on the beat |
| Guitar tone | thin, treble, low end cut | thick, mid range, low end kept |
| Phrasing of the melody | continuous, legato, no gaps | rhythmic, syncopated, riff shaped |
| Song form | sections that return, rarely a chorus | verse and chorus, built to be sung back |
| What the melody is for | to make the cold worse | to make the riff easier to carry home |
Read the last row twice, because it is the one that decides everything above it. Both branches harmonise; only one of them wants you to leave humming. Melody used to make the cold worse rather than to make the riff easier to carry home is not a lesser ambition, it is the opposite ambition, and the bands on either side of that line have almost never crossed it in either direction.
When the melody takes over
Assembled in Landshut from 2003 onward by the guitarist Steffen Kummerer, who went to Kristian Wåhlin for the early sleeves and eventually to Dan Swanö for the production, the same illustrator and the same engineer the Swedish records had used, Thulcandra is the clearest proof that this is a technique rather than a national accident. Five albums on Napalm between 2010 and 2023, made a thousand kilometres south of Strömstad by people with no connection to the original scene, and they work.
Windir, formed in Sogndal in 1994 by Terje Bakken, took the harmonised line somewhere else again, into regional folk melody and a local dialect, across four albums between 1997 and 2003. Bakken died of hypothermia in January 2004 after being caught by weather on the way to a family cabin, and the band ended two months later. The line he opened has been worked by other Norwegian bands ever since.
What all of them share is the procedure, not the mood, not the country and not the decade. Anyone who wants the records rather than the theory will find them in melodic Black Metal Bands, and the argument this branch belongs to is set out in the parent article.
