NSBM is not a subgenre. It is a political faction that uses a subgenre's distribution network, and the distinction matters because every other way of describing it concedes something that is not true: that there is a sound involved, that it belongs on a genre map, that it is one more branch off the tree. There is no riff, no production choice and no vocal register that identifies it. Take the lyric sheet away and most of it is ordinary second wave black metal, or pagan metal with folk instruments on top, made competently and in small quantities. The letters stand for national socialist black metal, the bands apply the term to themselves, and what they are announcing is a political programme rather than a musical one.
This article documents it. It names no releases and recommends nothing, because the phenomenon is small, it survives by circulation, and a directory is the one thing a magazine should never supply. What follows is the history, the structures and the numbers, which is what the readers of a serious publication are entitled to when a corner of their subject is what this one is.
Where it came from, and when
The phenomenon dates from the middle of the nineties, with the first explicitly labelled releases in 1995, and it grew out of two things happening at once. The first was the arrival of a Norwegian scene whose most publicised figure was making political statements from a prison cell that were not black metal statements at all but ordinary far right ones, given a mythological vocabulary. That is documented and it is not a matter of interpretation: the same man was convicted in France on 8 July 2014 of inciting racial hatred, receiving a suspended sentence of six months and a fine of eight thousand euros.
The second was a small number of German and Polish bands who took the anti-Christian, pre-Christian and nationalist material that was already lying around in pagan metal and made the politics explicit. Poland, Ukraine and Russia are where the documented scenes have been largest since, and Germany produced the earliest ones. The proportion of black metal as a whole that this accounts for has never been large. It is a minority faction inside a genre that is itself a minority interest, and the reason it takes up more space than its size warrants is the subject of the last two sections of this article.
The case that settles the question of whether it is a pose
Black metal has spent thirty years arguing that its imagery is theatre. In this corner of it the argument has a counterexample with a court record attached.
A band was formed at Sondershausen in Thuringia in 1992 by two schoolboys, with a third joining later. On 29 April 1993, all three of them around seventeen years old, they lured a fifteen year old boy named Sandro Beyer to a meeting and strangled him. All three were convicted. All three were released on parole in 1998 because of their age at the time of the offence. One of them left Germany for the United States in 1999 and was arrested there by the federal authorities in August 2001 for immigration offences. The band is classified as right wing extremist by the state office for the protection of the constitution in Thuringia, which is a statement made by a government agency and not by a music magazine.
That sequence is the reason this subject cannot be handled with the shrug that is normally applied to extreme music imagery. A boy was killed by members of a band whose politics were not a stage costume, and the killing became a credential in the circles that later organised around them.
The imagery is theatre until it is not, and the only reliable test is what the people holding it do when they are not on a stage.
How it is actually organised
The durable part of this is not the music, which is unremarkable, but the infrastructure, and the infrastructure has been documented for twenty five years. An international organisation calling itself the Pagan Front linked bands across Europe and North America from the turn of the century. A label promoting white nationalism, based in Canada and later associated with the American organisation the National Alliance and its founder William Luther Pierce, bought up a small label belonging to the imprisoned Norwegian musician mentioned above and issued this material through a sub label. That is a political organisation buying a record company in order to move a message through it, and it is the clearest single illustration of what the scene is for.
The events are the other half. A festival founded in Moscow in 2012 by the singer of a Russian band moved to Kyiv in 2014 when its organisers joined a militia, and has been documented by researchers and by the mainstream press as a meeting point for far right groups from several countries, including organisations proscribed or investigated in their own jurisdictions. Attendance figures in the low thousands make it small as festivals go. As a recruitment venue with a soundtrack, it is not small at all.
What the rest of the genre has done about it
More than the outside world assumes, and less than would settle the matter. Musicians who have publicly refused any part of it include Infernus and King ov Hell of Gorgoroth, Erik Danielsson of Watain and the late Jon Nödtveidt of Dissection, and the common argument they make is worth repeating because it is a black metal argument rather than a liberal one: that a hatred organised around one ethnic group is narrower and more sentimental than the misanthropy the genre claims for itself, and that national socialism is a collectivist and authoritarian creed of exactly the sort the music is supposed to despise.
Since the middle of the 2010s the practical response has been booking policy. Festivals have dropped bands, venues have cancelled shows, streaming services and download platforms have removed catalogues, and a number of long running acts have issued statements clarifying positions they had left conveniently ambiguous for years. This works, in the narrow sense that it makes the material harder to buy and the events harder to hold.
It also produces a problem the genre has not solved. The same machinery that removes a band with a stated programme also removes a band with one ill-judged photograph from 2007, and once the two are treated as the same thing the accusation stops carrying information. A magazine can at least keep the categories apart: a stated political position, documented in the band's own words, is one thing; a provocation aimed at nobody in particular is another; and an accusation made on the internet with no evidence attached is a third. The criminal record described in the criminal chapter is a fourth thing again, and confusing it with this one is how a reader ends up believing that Norwegian black metal was a fascist movement, which it was not.
A faction that has to be identified by its label, its distributor and its guest list rather than by its records has already told you what it is: a politics that needed a music, not a music that developed a politics.
Andrzej Sawicki, KaosMetal
There is a mirror image of all this at the other end of the political map, organised more loosely, with no killings behind it and a great deal more argument inside it, and the same analytical distance applies to that one: RABM.
