The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Two entirely different things are filed under this heading and the filing is nobody's fault. One of them is a group of musicians who finished with black metal and said so in print. The other is a group of musicians who never left it and simply brought in the furniture of post rock, post hardcore and shoegaze. The first meaning of post is after. The second is next to. A category that carries both is going to produce arguments, and it has produced them without pause for thirty years.
The useful way through is chronological, because the two meanings arrived in that order and the second could not have happened without the first. Norway emptied out between 1995 and 1999. Everything since has been built in the space that emptying left.
The Norwegian exit, 1995 to 1999
By the middle of the decade the second wave had a template, a uniform and a body count, and a small number of the people who had built it wanted out of all three. They did not form side projects and keep the day job. They took the same instruments, the same rehearsal rooms and in several cases the same drummer, and they wrote music that could not be played at a black metal festival without the promoter apologising afterwards.
Ved Buens Ende got there first. Written in Waters, issued by Misanthropy Records in October 1995, is the only album the band made, and it dismantles the rhythm section and reassembles it with the pieces facing the wrong way, so that a riff keeps arriving in a bar it was not invited to. Carl-Michael Eide sings across the beat rather than on it. Thirty years on there is still nothing that sounds much like it, which is the rarest verdict available in this music and one of the few that survives repeated listening.
Ulver went further and were louder about it. Three albums between February 1995 and March 1997 form what the band itself called a trilogy: Bergtatt and Kveldssanger on Head Not Found, the second of them acoustic and without a distorted guitar anywhere on it, then Nattens madrigal on Century Media, recorded to sound like a rehearsal tape found in a ditch. What followed was Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a double album on the band's own Jester Records in 1998 built from electronics, programmed beats and spoken text, with the black metal removed rather than diluted.
Ulver is obviously not a black metal band and does not wish to be stigmatized as such.
Sleeve notes to the Metamorphosis EP, 1999
Then the permafrost lifted and what was underneath turned out to be machinery. Dødheimsgard released 666 International through Moonfog Productions on 11 June 1999, produced by Bjørn Boge, with Aldrahn on vocals, Vicotnik and Apollyon in the band and Svein Egil Hatlevik running keyboards across the whole record, and it replaced the second wave's grey weather with drum programming, dissonance, industrial rhythm and a sense of humour nobody had asked for. AllMusic's William York gave it four stars and called it an album certain to frustrate purists, which was the point rather than a side effect.
The first meaning of post is after. The second is next to. Almost every argument about this category comes from confusing the two.
The other post, and where it came from
The second meaning arrived a decade later and from outside Norway entirely. These bands did not leave black metal. They kept the tremolo picking, the blast beat and the shriek, and imported the architecture of post rock: the long approach, the withheld payoff, pieces of eight and twelve minutes built as one continuous arc rather than as verses. That is a structural borrowing, not a spiritual one, and it explains why so many of these records sound alike even when the bands have nothing else in common.
Altar of Plagues, formed at Cork in 2006 around James Kelly, ran the whole arc in seven years: White Tomb in 2009, Mammal in 2011 and Teethed Glory and Injury in 2013, the last of them abandoning the long crescendo for something percussive and industrial before the band announced its own end on 15 June that year, having decided to stop before the record was written. Amenra built a parallel apparatus in Belgium out of hardcore rather than black metal and reached the same room from the other side. Oathbreaker, from the same country, put a black metal record inside a personal one with Rheia in 2016. Sólstafir left the genre's harmonic language behind almost completely and kept its length. The American wing of this, which arrived through ecology and the Pacific Northwest rather than through European hardcore, is the subject of USBM and Cascadia.
The branch that took the same borrowing toward shoegaze harmony and a wall of layered guitar is dealt with separately, because it developed its own audience, its own labels and its own quarrel. Everything in this section is the wider frame around it. Anyone who wants the frame around the frame, the second wave itself and the conditions that produced the exit of 1995, will find how black metal began considerably grimmer reading.
The wing that came with a manifesto
New York produced the only version of this music that arrived with a written argument attached. Krallice, assembled in 2007 around Colin Marston and Mick Barr, applied conservatory technique to tremolo picking and were treated by a section of the audience as trespassers. Liturgy went considerably further. On 12 December 2009, at a symposium called Hideous Gnosis held at Public Assembly in Brooklyn, the band's founder Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix delivered an essay titled Transcendental Black Metal, later printed in the symposium's proceedings, which proposed that the genre's Scandinavian form was exhausted and that an American successor should replace its blast beat with what she named the burst beat: a blast allowed to accelerate and collapse rather than hold a fixed speed, like something running downhill with the brakes off. Aesthethica, produced by Marston and released by Thrill Jockey on 10 May 2011, is that theory played rather than argued.
The theory was received badly and the record was received well, which is roughly the correct proportion. What the manifesto got right is that the second wave's rhythmic vocabulary had hardened into a fixed set of speeds, and that nobody had questioned it in fifteen years. What it got wrong is the assumption that a genre needs permission from an argument before it is allowed to change. Ved Buens Ende had already done it, on instinct, without publishing a word.
The complication nobody files here
There is a third group that meets every technical definition of post black metal and is almost never described that way, because it went in the direction the term is not used for. Deathspell Omega rebuilt the genre's harmony around dissonance and theological text across Si Monumentum Requires Circumspice in 2004 and Fas in 2007. Blut aus Nord turned the guitar into something closer to sheet metal on The Work Which Transforms God in 2003. Both are as far from the second wave template as anything in this article. Neither gets the label, for the plain reason that the label has quietly come to mean gentler.
- Post as in after: Ved Buens Ende, Ulver, Dødheimsgard, Fleurety. Norway, 1995 to 1999, and mostly a one way door.
- Post as in next to: Altar of Plagues, Amenra, Oathbreaker, Sólstafir, Alcest, Deafheaven. Post rock structure, black metal technique, 2005 onward.
- Post with a thesis: Liturgy, Krallice. New York, an essay, and a rhythmic argument that outlived the essay.
- Post that nobody calls post: Deathspell Omega, Blut aus Nord. Same distance travelled, opposite direction.
What the category is worth
Less than the arguments it generates and more than its critics allow. As a description of a sound it is useless, since the four groups above share no tempo, no harmonic language and no production values. As a description of a relationship it is exact: every band here is defined by what it does to a template that already existed, and none of them would exist without Enslaved and the others proving through the 2000s that a second wave band could keep the name while changing almost everything else. Isa, out on 20 October 2004, won the metal prize at Norway's Spellemann awards and did not cost the band a single member of its audience.
Start with Written in Waters, which is the strangest record in this article and the one with the fewest imitators. Then 666 International for the machinery. Then Teethed Glory and Injury for what happened when the second meaning of post got tired of its own crescendo. The single loudest row the category has produced, about one American band, a pink sleeve and who is entitled to the name, is set out in the Deafheaven Argument. It is worth reading afterwards rather than first, because almost nobody who took part in it had heard the records above.
