In August 1990 a mail order label working out of California pressed the debut album of a Vancouver band that had been running under one name or another since 1984, ten tracks, thirty minutes and twelve seconds of it, and the thing that came off the record belonged to neither of the two genres it had been assembled from. Blasphemy took the mass, the low tuning and the chest vocal of death metal, bolted them onto the tremolo picking and the deliberately ruined production of the first black metal wave, and sent Fallen Angel of Doom out through Wild Rags Records into a tape network that had no shelf ready for it.
The name arrived afterwards, from the people writing about the music rather than from the people making it, which is why it is still argued over at length. Blackened death metal is a real category with real mechanics. Those mechanics are worth setting out precisely, because the term now gets attached to anything carrying a growl and an inverted cross.
What the two halves are actually doing
Death metal is a music of mass. Palm muted riffing on the low strings, chords voiced thick, a vocal produced from the chest, drums recorded so that kick and snare land like tools on a bench, songs built as sequences of riffs that turn on a beat. Every decision in it is taken so the listener feels weight.
Black metal is a music of surface. Tremolo picked shapes held across whole bars, a shriek produced from the throat, drums used as a continuous field rather than as a run of separate blows, production kept thin on purpose so the guitars read as weather instead of as machinery. Every decision in it is taken so the listener feels cold and distance. Anyone coming to this from the slow end of the family, from what is death doom, will recognise the same argument conducted at the opposite tempo.
Blackened death metal keeps the death metal body and lays the black metal surface over it, and the graft shows in three places. The tuning stays low while the picking hand goes to tremolo. The vocal stays in the chest while the lyric keeps the desecration. And the drums blast through passages where a Florida band would have dropped into a groove and let the riff turn.
The tuning stays low while the picking hand goes to tremolo. That is the whole graft, audible inside a single bar.
What the graft produces is a cathedral with the abattoir doors standing open at the far end of the nave: the reverb and the held chords of one music, the tooling and the physical bulk of the other, both in the room at once and neither of them winning.
| Element | Death metal | Black metal | Blackened death |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guitar | Palm muted, chords voiced thick | Tremolo picked, chords held | Tremolo picking at death metal tuning |
| Vocal | Growl from the chest | Shriek from the throat | Growl, occasionally traded with a shriek |
| Drums | Blows placed against the riff | Blast as a continuous field | Blast, with death metal kick weight |
| Production | Thick, engineered, expensive | Thin, cold, often poor on purpose | Thick, with the highs left harsh |
| Subject | Anatomy, horror, war | Blasphemy, the occult, nature | Blasphemy delivered in the heavier voice |
The lineage, 1987 to 1993
Claimed by several scenes and sired by none of them cleanly, the hybrid begins in Belo Horizonte rather than in Scandinavia or Florida, with a Brazilian band who recorded in July 1987 at J.G. Studio, put the tape out that August on Cogumelo Records, and had Eduardo Patrocinio, credited as D.D. Crazy, blasting across most of it at a speed neither parent genre had yet committed to a record. I.N.R.I. is not a black metal album and it is not a death metal album. It is the first widely traded recording on which the two vocabularies are used with no attempt at all to keep them apart.
Three years after the Brazilians, Gerry Bull, Sean Stone and Geoff Drakes removed what songwriting decorum was left, and the album that resulted has since been reissued twice by labels built specifically to keep that decade in print. A reviewer in Terrorizer reached for a comparison involving the forests of Canada landing on a human foot, which says less about the riffs than about how hard they are to describe.
The Stockholm end of the same lineage runs through a band formed in 1989 by drummer Joakim Sterner and guitarist David Parland, named, it is generally held, after a Slayer song on Reign in Blood. Necrophobic recorded The Nocturnal Silence at Sunlight Studio in Stockholm in March 1993 with Tomas Skogsberg, and Black Mark put it out that summer. It is the cleanest early proof that the hybrid does not have to sound like a rehearsal room fire. Sterner keeps the drums in mid tempo and out of continuous blast, the riffs are legible and Swedish in the way Entombed and Dismember were Swedish, and Anders Strokirk sings across the join rather than picking a side.
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The turn that made it a commercial genre
Formed in Gdansk in 1991 and pagan in subject for most of its first decade, the Polish band spent the stretch between Pandemonic Incantations in 1998 and Satanica in August 1999 taking its own early style apart, and what replaced it was a music in which the riffing carries the shape of both parents at once instead of alternating between them. Adam Darski, credited as Nergal, produced the record with M.A., played guitars, bass, synthesisers and vocals on it, and wrote the words.
The commercial evidence follows the stylistic evidence. Demigod entered the Polish album chart at fifteen in 2004, The Apostasy at nine, Evangelion and The Satanist at one, and The Satanist took best album at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods awards. No second wave black metal band had charted like that. No death metal band had done it carrying this subject matter.
Three others belong beside them, because between them they mark out how much range the category holds. Angelcorpse, formed in Kansas City in 1995 by Pete Helmkamp after Order from Chaos ended, released Hammer of Gods on Osmose Productions in 1996 and pushed the thrash end of the hybrid as far as it goes. Belphegor, working in Salzburg since 1991 under the name Betrayer until 1993, went the other way into occult ceremony and reached number thirty three in Austria with Conjuring the Dead in 2014. Akercocke, founded in London in 1997 by Jason Mendonca and David Gray, wore tailored suits on stage and had Choronzon voted metal release of the year by Terrorizer in 2003. The full spread, band by band, is set out in blackened death metal bands.
Where the border actually sits
Four tests settle most of the arguments, and they work better applied in order than all at once.
- Tuning and picking together. Low tuning plus sustained tremolo is the signature. Low tuning plus palm muting is death metal. High tuning plus tremolo is black metal.
- Where the drums sit. If the blast is the default state and the groove is the interruption, the black metal half is doing the structural work.
- What the vocal is carrying. A growl over a blasphemous text is the hybrid. A shriek over an anatomical one is a different animal and much rarer.
- What the production hides. Black metal production strips the low end on purpose. Blackened death keeps the low end and roughens the top.
Those tests throw out a great deal that gets filed here from habit. A death metal band with an occult lyric is a death metal band. A black metal band that hires a competent engineer is still a black metal band. The category describes how the instruments are being played, not what the sleeve is about, and that confusion is exactly why the family tree is so hard to draw on paper.
What the hybrid did to the wider music is harder to measure and almost certainly larger. It gave death metal a way out of the anatomical subject matter it had exhausted by 1994, and it gave black metal a way to be recorded properly without the recording being read as surrender. Both parents were running out of road. The graft kept them moving.
