Fewer than twenty three million people lived in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark put together in 1990, a combined population that has still not reached twenty seven million, and inside four years those four countries produced a body of death metal the rest of the world is still working through. That is the fact the word Nordic is doing its best to explain. It explains about half of what happened.
The category is useful up to a point and then it becomes an obstacle, because it invites the reader to expect a shared sound where there was none. There was a shared method, a shared economy and, remarkably, a shared engineer. What there was not, at any moment between 1988 and 1996, was a Nordic style. chapter three shows one country failing to agree with itself across a distance of four hundred and seventy kilometres. Widen the frame to four countries and the disagreement gets worse, not better.
The post office was the distribution network
Start with what was genuinely common. None of the four countries had a domestic industry willing to touch this music, so all four ran the same arrangement: a demo dubbed onto cassette at home, an advertisement in a photocopied fanzine, cash folded into an envelope, and a tape back by post some weeks later if the person at the other end was honest. Distances that would have crushed a scene elsewhere were irrelevant, because nothing moved by van until a record existed. A band in Kuopio and a band in Aarhus were equally close to a buyer in Yorkshire, and equally far from one another.
Two consequences follow and both are visible on the records. The first is that everybody sang in English, because the buyer was foreign. The exceptions are so rare that they are still cited thirty years later: Rippikoulu in Finland, and much later the Copenhagen band Undergang, whose records have carried Danish titles from the first album onward. The second is that the scene organised itself around correspondence rather than clubs, which is why the four countries have so little shared personnel. There were no house bands playing the same circuit every weekend. There were addresses.
One engineer, three countries, three unrelated sounds
Here is the single strongest piece of evidence that the four countries were connected, and the single strongest piece of evidence that connection did not produce a style. Tomas Skogsberg, working out of a small Stockholm room, produced or co-produced the Swedish records that made the country's name, including Grave's Into the Grave in 1991. He also produced Darkthrone's Soulside Journey in September 1990 after the band drove down from Norway to use him. He also produced Amorphis's Tales from the Thousand Lakes in September 1993, the record that took Finnish death metal to more than a hundred thousand copies. One engineer, one room, three countries, and three records with almost nothing in common beyond the man who set up the microphones. Whatever the buzzsaw was, it was not the equipment and it was not the operator. It was a decision that only one of the three countries wanted to make.
Three countries hired the same engineer inside four years and came away with three sounds that do not resemble each other. That is the whole case against treating Nordic as a genre.
Almost every record was paid for abroad
The economics are the second thing all four shared, and they are stark. Look at where the money came from for the records that matter, and the pattern is that the Nordic first wave was underwritten by Britain, Germany and the United States, with a handful of small domestic labels doing the rest. Deathlike Silence in Norway, Black Mark in Sweden, Effigy in Norway, Spinefarm in Finland and Progress in Denmark all existed and all mattered locally, but the catalogue numbers that carried these bands out of the region were foreign almost without exception.
| Record | Country of band | Label | Label's country | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hallucinating Anxiety | Norway | Necrosis | Britain | 1990 |
| Left Hand Path | Sweden | Earache | Britain | 1990 |
| Soulside Journey | Norway | Peaceville | Britain | 1991 |
| Into the Grave | Sweden | Century Media | Germany | 1991 |
| World Without God | Finland | Thrash | France | 1991 |
| Nespithe | Finland | Necropolis | United States | 1993 |
| Tales from the Thousand Lakes | Finland | Relapse | United States | 1994 |
The pictures on the front travelled the same way. Dan Seagrave, an English painter working out of England, produced the sleeves for the two records that fixed the Stockholm sound and then for the record that fixed New York; the German artist Axel Hermann painted Into the Grave; Kristian Wahlin of Gothenburg, signing as Necrolord, ended up drawing for bands in three of the four countries and in two different genres. A region with almost no shared musicians had a shared visual department of about four people, which is one more reason the records look like a movement and sound like four separate arguments.
Where the resemblance stops being useful
Four countries, four different answers to the same question, and the differences are structural rather than a matter of taste. Sweden standardised: one studio chain, one pedal setting, a style any competent band could adopt inside an afternoon, and thirty years of imitators as a result. Finland refused to standardise at all, produced a scene with no central room and no agreed tone, and consequently made records that resemble each other less than any other national set of the period. Norway made five albums worth arguing about and then handed its entire personnel to black metal. Denmark never built a national style in the first place, took its bearings from Florida rather than Stockholm, and has quietly kept a scene running for thirty five continuous years while the other three had their crises.
The melodic branch complicates it further, because it belongs to one country and one city and has no equivalent anywhere else in the region: that is the subject of swedish Melodic Death Metal Bands. Finland's melancholy is not Gothenburg's melody and never was. Denmark produced nothing of the kind.
What the word is actually good for
Use Nordic for the method and never for the sound. It describes an economy in which four small countries with no domestic music industry, no radio interest and no visible commercial future built an export trade out of envelopes and photocopiers, and sold it to labels in three foreign countries who had the pressing plants. It describes a set of scenes that were far more literate about one another's records than about their own local rock establishments. It does not describe a guitar tone, a tempo, a lyrical subject or a way of writing a riff, and every attempt to make it do so ends up either describing Stockholm and calling it Scandinavia, or describing nothing at all.
The modern picture proves the point twice over. Copenhagen now carries a dense cluster of new death metal bands, close enough to one another that Undergang, Phrenelith, Deiquisitor and Taphos shared a four way split record between them, and none of it sounds Swedish. The country that never had a style still does not have one. It has a scene, which was always the more durable thing to own.
