In 1996 a German band handed its second album to a bass player borrowed from another group and let him sing it. Bethlehem, formed in 1991 in Grevenbroich by Jurgen Bartsch, Klaus Matton and Andreas Classen, had already put Dark Metal out through the French label Adipocere in 1994. For Dictius Te Necare, issued by the American label Red Stream, Classen was gone and Rainer Landfermann, the bass player of the German death metal band Pavor, stood in front of the microphone and produced forty minutes of vocal that reviewers have been trying to find a comparison for ever since without much success.
The title is Latin. It is a command addressed to the listener, and the band never pretended otherwise.
DSBM stands for depressive suicidal black metal, and it is the only branch of this music named after its subject matter rather than after a sound, a country or a decade. That is the first thing about it worth being suspicious of, and it is also why the tag has been fastened onto records that share almost nothing else. Where the style sits among its neighbours, and which of them it borrowed from, is laid out across every branch of black metal.
Where the name came from
The phrase was not coined by a critic. Niklas Kvarforth, born in Halmstad in 1983, started the Swedish band Shining in 1996 at the age of twelve, self released the seven inch Submit to Self-Destruction in 1998 and hung the words suicidal black metal on it, partly as a description and partly to fence his own work off from everybody else. By 2001 he had dropped the term. His stated reason is the most useful sentence anyone has produced about the genre: other bands had taken it up and were using the music as therapy, when he had intended it as a weapon aimed at the listener.
What filled the gap was the internet. Forums, file sharing and later video uploads welded depressive to suicidal, shortened the result to four letters and applied it backwards to everything that fitted, so that records made years before anybody used the acronym now sit under it. Bethlehem called their own music dark metal. Burzum called it nothing at all.
What the music actually does
Strip the mythology off and there is a real set of conventions underneath, and they are unusually consistent for a style with no scene, no city and no founding manifesto. The Norwegian second wave built cold, fast, forward moving music out of tremolo picking and blast beats. This branch took the same tools, halved the speed and pointed them at one room instead of at a country.
- Tempos in the middle and lower range, with the blast beat used as an event rather than as the default. Whole records go by without one.
- A tremolo line held far past the point where a riff would normally change, until repetition stops being a device and becomes the structure.
- Guitar tone thin and trebly rather than the wide frozen roar of the second wave, frequently recorded direct with no room around it at all.
- A vocal in the highest register the throat will produce, mixed either far behind the guitars or uncomfortably in front of them, almost never in a normal place.
- Clean guitar, piano and long ambient passages used as whole sections, not as introductions.
- Songs of eight to twenty minutes, drum machines as often as drummers, and one person doing everything.
That last point is the structural fact of the whole style. The one man project is standard here in a way it is not even in the atmospheric wing, where collectives and full line ups are common enough to pass without comment, as the bands collected in atmospheric Black Metal Bands show. Nobody negotiates with a bandmate about whether a section has run too long. Nothing gets edited. The results are extreme in both directions.
The records that fixed the shape
Four albums did most of the defining, and only one of them was made by anybody who wanted the job.
The Swedish two piece Silencer, founded in 1995 by the guitarist and bass player Andreas Casado, with a vocalist credited as Nattramn who joined before 1998, recorded Death - Pierce Me from July 2000 and released it through Prophecy Productions in 2001, with Steve Wolz brought in on drums. The band never played a concert and never gave an interview, then stopped. Its reputation rests on a vocal performance that sounds like nothing else on record and on a legend about its singer that has never been confirmed by anyone.
Bethlehem supplied the ancestry, Silencer supplied the extremity, Shining supplied the discipline of an actual songwriter, and the Californian project Xasthur, started in December 1995 by Scott Conner in Alhambra, supplied the sound most people now hear in their head when the four letters are said: guitars pushed to the back, keyboards used as fog, drums that barely surface, an entire record playing as though it were coming up through a floor. Telepathic with the Deceased and To Violate the Oblivious both landed on Moribund in 2004, and Subliminal Genocide came out on Hydra Head in 2006, which put a project made alone in a bedroom onto the roster of a label better known for post hardcore.
| Album | Band | Year | Label | What it fixed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dictius Te Necare | Bethlehem | 1996 | Red Stream | The vocal as an event rather than a delivery |
| Death - Pierce Me | Silencer | 2001 | Prophecy Productions | The extremity, and the folklore around it |
| Livets andhallplats | Shining | 2001 | Selbstmord Services | Written songs, clean sections, real arrangement |
| Subliminal Genocide | Xasthur | 2006 | Hydra Head | The buried, keyboard heavy production everyone copied |
One room and a hundred tapes
The economy explains the discography. A style that needs one person, one guitar, a drum machine and a four track produces an enormous quantity of releases, and the distribution was built to match: dubbed cassettes in runs of fifty or a hundred, split releases pairing two unknown projects, and small labels working by post. Northern Silence Productions, founded in Germany in 2003 and now one of the larger homes for this music and for its atmospheric cousin, is the respectable end of that trade. The other end was hundreds of tapes with photocopied covers and no distribution beyond a mailing list.
Two consequences follow. The first is that the ratio of poor records to good ones here is worse than in any other branch of the genre, because nothing filtered anything. The second is that a listener arriving through a streaming playlist gets the sound without the sorting, which is why the projects actually worth the hours are worth naming, and they are named in depressive Black Metal Bands.
What the genre is doing when it does this
Now the honest question, which the style's own defenders usually step around. Music has always been allowed to be about despair. The blues is about despair, so is most of doom, and nobody asks for a warning label on Nick Drake. What is different here is that a part of this scene has treated real suffering as a credential, and a smaller part has gone considerably further than that. Kvarforth handed out razor blades to an audience in 2007 and has performed self harm on stage, and he was accused of assaulting and threatening audience members in 2017. Those are documented events rather than scene rumour, and they are indefensible whatever the artistic argument behind them.
Despair is a subject. It has never been a credential.
The folklore is the weakest thing in this music and it is also the most heavily marketed part of it. A vocalist whose whereabouts nobody can confirm becomes proof of sincerity. A death becomes a selling point. When Jonas Bergqvist of the Swedish band Lifelover died on 9 September 2011, an autopsy recorded an accidental overdose of prescription medication, and the surviving members ended the band on the grounds that the songwriter was gone; what followed in certain corners of the internet was the treatment of that death as an endorsement of the records, which inverts the way a record is supposed to earn anything at all. Nobody was ever helped by being told that their worst year was their best material.
The correct position is neither the apologist's nor the prosecutor's. These are records, and they get judged as records: the writing, the arrangement, the tone, whether the twelve minute song has twelve minutes of ideas inside it. Some clear that bar comfortably. A great many do not, and the ones that do not are frequently the ones with the most biography attached to them.
The short answer
Depressive suicidal black metal is a slow, thin sounding, repetition driven offshoot of second wave black metal, made almost entirely by solo musicians, built out of held tremolo lines, high shrieked vocals, clean interludes and lo fi production, and named after its lyrical subject by the scene rather than by any critic. It begins with German and Norwegian records from the middle nineties, is fixed in place by four albums between 1996 and 2006, and now survives mostly as an internet category holding several hundred projects of wildly uneven quality. Its best albums are genuinely good and the folklore around them is worth nothing. The wider story it grew out of runs through the genre in full.
