The most commercially successful band black metal has produced is a band a large part of the black metal audience will not admit to owning. That is not a paradox waiting to be resolved. It is the working condition of symphonic black metal, the branch that dragged a music made in cellars onto a stage with fifty three orchestral players behind it, and the branch its own constituency has spent thirty years apologising for.
The apology is misplaced and so is most of the defence. What follows is the case for treating the orchestra as a compositional decision rather than a marketing one, and for judging the records the way any other records get judged, by what is actually on them.
What the orchestra is actually doing
A keyboard is not a subgenre. Half the second wave had one, and the sustained chord under a tremolo riff, the grey weather that sits behind the guitars and never moves, belongs to atmosphere rather than to orchestration; where that line falls is the argument in DSBM vs Atmospheric, and it holds here. Symphonic black metal starts where a second composition starts. Strings, brass, choir or the samples standing in for them get their own melodic line, their own voice leading and their own answer to the riff, and the whole of it is written out rather than improvised over.
That has consequences the purist objection never gets near. Scoring forces structure. A band with an orchestral part has to decide where the key turns, who holds the melody in the ninth bar and what the horns are doing while the guitar does nothing, and those decisions push songs toward repeats, recapitulations and endings that close. Raw black metal can run one riff for seven minutes because nothing else in the arrangement is asking a question. This branch cannot. It is why the same bands in the same decade produced both the most ambitious writing in black metal and the most inert.
A keyboard is not a subgenre. Symphonic black metal starts where a second composition starts.
Bergen, July 1993, and a keyboard part nobody had written
Recorded in July 1993 at the Grieg Hall in Bergen with Eirik Hundvin, the engineer the entire scene knew as Pytten, kept back from mixing until the following year while the men who made it were occupied with the Norwegian courts, and issued on Candlelight Records on 21 February 1994, In the Nightside Eclipse carries keyboard parts that did not exist when the band walked through the door: Emperor had no permanent keyboard player, so the orchestration was worked out on the studio clock by a group that had booked the room to make a guitar record.
It became the founding document of the branch for a reason that has nothing to do with intent. Those keyboards are not paint over finished songs. They carry weight, they set the harmony the guitars then have to live inside, and they were assembled by a seventeen year old guitarist while the tape was running. AllMusic went to five stars on it. Metal Hammer put it first on a symphonic metal list in 2021. Reissues in 1999, 2004 and 2014 have kept it in print without a gap for three decades. Every band in this article is downstream of a session that went wrong in a useful direction.
The bands the audience is embarrassed by
The two names that carried the branch out of the specialist shops are the two names the audience reaches for when it wants to say what black metal is not. Dimmu Borgir, formed at Jessheim in 1993, spent the back half of the nineties turning from a Norwegian language band on small labels into the largest asset Nuclear Blast had. Cradle of Filth, formed in Suffolk in 1991, pulled the same manoeuvre in England with a vampire library where the orchestra pit would go. Their standing inside the subgenres explained is the standing any commercially successful branch gets in a genre built on refusal.
The figures are the part nobody argues with, because they are not opinions. Death Cult Armageddon, cut between March and May 2003 at Fredman Studio in Gothenburg with Fredrik Nordström, with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra on most of its tracks under arrangements by Gaute Storås and the baton of Adam Klemens, entered the Billboard 200 at 169 and went past a hundred thousand copies in the United States, the first record on Nuclear Blast to manage it. In Sorte Diaboli took the Norwegian album chart to number one in 2007, the first black metal album ever to do so. Cradle of Filth put Nymphetamine in at 89 on the American chart in 2004 and Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder at 48 in 2008.
| Album | Year | Label | Peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dimmu Borgir, Death Cult Armageddon | 2003 | Nuclear Blast | 169, Billboard 200 |
| Cradle of Filth, Nymphetamine | 2004 | Roadrunner | 89, Billboard 200 |
| Dimmu Borgir, In Sorte Diaboli | 2007 | Nuclear Blast | 1, Norway |
| Cradle of Filth, Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder | 2008 | Roadrunner | 48, Billboard 200 |
Take the numbers away and the objection has to name what it objects to, and it is almost never the scoring. It is the presentation: the corsets, the smoke, the promotional photographs, the video budget, the plain fact that a band standing in front of a choir cannot pretend to be a danger to anybody. That is a complaint about theatre, and this music has been theatre since a Newcastle band put the words black metal on a sleeve in 1982. Most of what gets thrown at these two would land just as cleanly on Mayhem in 1993, and nobody throws it.
None of which makes the records good by default. The worst habit in the Jessheim band's catalogue is writing the orchestral part first and then finding guitars that agree with it, which builds a wall where a song should be, and long stretches of Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia in 2001 move without travelling. The English band's is a vocal that changes register every eight bars because the arrangement has nothing else to offer. Both verdicts get given once. These are ordinary complaints about writing, available to anyone who listens twice, and the audience prefers the other kind because the other kind costs nothing.
Fifty three players against one man and a sampler
There are two ways to get an orchestra and they produce different records. One is to hire it. The Jessheim band took the Prague route in 2003 and then, on 28 May 2011, stood on the stage of the Oslo Spektrum with fifty three players from the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and thirty voices from the Schola Cantorum choir at their back, a performance eventually issued as Forces of the Northern Night. Hired players push back. They breathe in the wrong places, they drag behind a click, and the guitars have to make room for them, which is the single most useful thing that can happen to a band of this kind.
Hail horrors, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell receive thy new Possessor.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
The other way is one person and a machine, and it built more of this branch than the concert halls ever did. Limbonic Art, started at Sandefjord in 1993 and reduced for most of its life to two men and then to one, made Moon in the Scorpio in 1996 out of programmed strings and drum programming and never went near a session player. Bal-Sagoth, working out of Sheffield from 1993, moved Jonny Maudling off the drum stool and onto the keyboard rig at the end of the decade and wrote what amounts to film music for stories their own singer was publishing as prose. Arcturus took the same equipment somewhere else entirely on La Masquerade Infernale, issued by Misanthropy on 27 October 1997, with the screams dropped for a low clean voice and Simen Hestnæs brought in to sing operatically over the top. Sampled orchestras date badly and everyone involved knows it. They also let a band with no budget write for forty instruments, which is the only reason this branch has a bottom half at all.
What it is worth now
Three decades on, this is the most audible part of black metal and the least discussed on its own terms. It fills festival slots no raw band will ever fill, it is the door through which most listeners arrive at the rest of KaosMetal's black metal history, and it is the only branch with a route into rooms that have seating and a cloakroom.
The honest verdict is narrow and it cuts in both directions. As a compositional problem, scoring a black metal record for orchestra is the hardest thing anyone in the genre has set themselves, and a small number of records answer it completely. As a commercial format it also produced a decade of albums where the strings are a coat of paint over four chords, and the fact that those sold is not an argument in their favour. Sorting one from the other takes listening rather than allegiance, and the sorting is done in symphonic Black Metal Bands. Play the records first. The reputations can wait.
