The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around: it cracked and growled, and roared and howled, like noises in a swound!Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Black metal is a set of decisions about sound, and the decisions are narrow enough to write down on the back of a sleeve. Guitars picked at speed on open strings instead of chugged on muted ones. Drums holding a blast beat at tempos that run past two hundred beats a minute and sometimes past three hundred. A voice that shrieks rather than growls, mixed behind the guitars instead of in front of them. A treble weighted production, thin where every other branch of metal is thick, and thin on purpose. Songs built from repetition rather than from verse and chorus, held long enough that the repetition stops being a failure of invention and starts being the subject. Four of those five and the word fits. Two of them and it does not, whatever is painted on the faces in the photograph. If you want the chronology instead of the definition, the overview runs from Newcastle in 1982 to the present.
The five decisions that make the sound
The guitar comes first, because everything else in the genre is arranged around what it refuses to do. Tremolo picking, which is the same note or chord struck as fast as the wrist will manage, turns a riff into a continuous surface rather than a sequence of hits, and because the strings are usually left ringing rather than damped by the palm, the harmonics of one chord are still hanging in the air when the next one arrives. That is where the smear comes from. Solos are rare and are treated with suspicion when they appear. Low tunings are rare too, which is the reverse of death metal practice: the guitars sit high, and the tritone and the minor second get used without apology, so a chord change that would be a mistake in any other genre is here the whole point of the bar.
The drums do the opposite of what drums usually do, which is to mark time in a way you can move to. A blast beat alternating snare and kick at sixteenth notes, held for two minutes without a fill, stops functioning as rhythm and starts functioning as pressure, a flat band of noise underneath the guitars against which the tremolo picking can be heard as melody. Anybody who has tried to nod along to Pure Holocaust has run into the design.
The voice and the mix finish the job. The shriek is placed at a distance, thinned rather than amplified, so that it arrives sounding like something happening at the far edge of a field rather than something happening in the room. And the production, which is the decision outsiders find hardest to accept, deliberately removes the low end that every other kind of heavy music spends money to get: no bass you can locate, no drum sound with weight in it, guitars that hiss. The record is mixed like a building with the roof taken off, everything cold and nothing sheltered. That is not incompetence, or at least it stopped being incompetence around 1992, when bands with access to real studios began asking engineers to make things worse. Peaceville heard the tapes of A Blaze in the Northern Sky, called the sound too weak and asked for a remix, and only released the record as recorded when the band threatened to take it to Euronymous instead.
Get four of the five decisions and the word fits. Get two and it does not, whatever is painted on the faces in the photograph.
Where the word came from, and where the sound came from
The two have different addresses, which is why the definition confuses people. The word arrived first: three men from Newcastle who played faster than they could play cleanly put out an album called Black Metal through Neat Records on 1 November 1982, cut at Impulse Studios in Wallsend with Keith Nichol at the desk, and Venom meant the title as a boast about volume and blasphemy rather than as the name of a style. Almost nothing on that record sounds like what the word now describes. The sound arrived two years later and a sea away, when a Swedish teenager working alone recorded a debut for Tyfon in a converted garage and put a yellow goat on the front of it. Bathory had the shriek, the guitar tone and the reverb before anybody had a category to file them under. Hellhammer and Celtic Frost supplied the weight and the ceremony out of Switzerland, Mercyful Fate supplied the theatre out of Denmark, and Brazil's Sarcofago put corpse paint and bullet belts on a sleeve in 1987, four years before Norway made that a uniform. All of them are on the map of the bands that matter.
What Norway did between 1991 and 1994 was not to invent any of it. The Norwegians codified it, which is a smaller achievement and a more consequential one. Darkthrone made a competent death metal record for Peaceville in 1991 and threw everything about it away inside twelve months, and the three albums that followed, A Blaze in the Northern Sky on 26 February 1992, Under a Funeral Moon in 1993 and Transilvanian Hunger in February 1994, work as a manual: no audible bass, no solos, no studio polish, no groove, chords held until the guitar stops sounding like an instrument. Every band that came afterwards either followed that document or defined itself against it.
How it differs from death metal, in practice
Both genres are fast, both use extreme vocals, and there the family resemblance ends. Death metal is a music of low frequencies, palm muting, tuned down guitars, drums with weight, and a vocal dredged from below the floor; its subject is the body and what can be done to it, and it wants you to hear every part cleanly, which is why Florida bands spent real money on Morrisound. Black metal is a music of high frequencies, open strings, thin drums and a voice that comes from above and far away; its subject is not the body at all. The clearest demonstration is that one band made both records: Darkthrone's 1991 debut and its 1992 follow-up were cut by the same two men roughly a year apart, and nothing about the second is an improvement on the first in any technical sense. It is a different argument about what a record is for.
The ideology, which is part of the definition
Most genres can be defined without reference to what their musicians believe. This one cannot, and pretending otherwise produces bad writing. Satanism, anti-Christianity and misanthropy are not decoration bolted onto the music; the second wave built its aesthetic rules out of them, and the refusal to make the records sound pleasant follows directly from the refusal to make the music welcoming. The scene backed that with actions: church arson in Norway from 1992, a killing in Oslo in August 1993 that put one musician in the ground and another in prison for twenty one years. Those events made the genre famous and they are the least musically interesting thing about it. The other consequence is uglier and still live, which is that a wing of the genre carried the misanthropy into open racism and produced the NSBM sub-scene. That is stated here as fact, once, without argument and without a platform.
The modern argument is about how much of that constitution can be removed before the word stops applying. Bands playing tremolo picking and blast beats with no harsh vocals, no theology and a pink album sleeve have been fighting that argument since about 2007 and it has not been settled, which is a sign of a living genre rather than a dying one. The names most people reach for when the subject comes up are gathered in black Metal Bands Everyone Names First, and several of them fail at least two of the five tests above.
The working test
Argument about categories is cheap, so here is the version that survives contact with a record you have not heard before. Play it once at a sensible volume and ask four questions.
- Are the guitars picking rather than chugging, and are the strings left to ring?
- Is the low end missing, and does the mix sound like it was left outdoors on purpose?
- Does the voice come from behind the music instead of on top of it?
- Does a section repeat past the point where a rock band would have changed something?
Four yeses and the label fits, regardless of what the band says about itself. Three and you are probably holding a blackened death metal record or a symphonic one, both of which are real things with their own rules. Fewer than three and somebody sold you a costume. The genre is narrow by design, which is precisely why forty years of musicians have been able to keep finding new things inside it.
