In September 2009 a blog began posting under the name Red and Anarchist Black Metal, and the four letters have been in circulation ever since. That is the whole of the origin story. There was no manifesto, no founding record, no label and no scene meeting. A listener started collecting bands whose politics ran the opposite way to the faction described in NSBM, gave the collection an acronym, and the acronym outlived the blog.
Which means the first honest thing to say about RABM is that it is a filing system rather than a movement, and the second is that a good proportion of the bands filed under it have never used the term about themselves. Both of those facts are usually left out, by supporters because they weaken the claim of a movement and by opponents because they weaken the claim of a conspiracy.
The dated markers
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1996 | Black Kronstadt, an anarchist crust band, release The Free Spirit, read afterwards as a precursor |
| 1997 | Profecium put out Socialismo satánico, the earliest record to state the position in its title |
| 2002 | Iskra form in Victoria, British Columbia, out of Black Kronstadt, and call what they play anarchist metal |
| 2007 | Austin Lunn begins Panopticon in Louisville, Kentucky, as a one man studio band |
| 2009 | The blog gives the tendency its four letters |
| 2012 | Panopticon release Kentucky |
| 2015 | Dawn Ray'd form in Liverpool, openly anarchist from the first release |
| 2023 | Dawn Ray'd announce they are finished, in September, and cancel the remaining shows |
Twenty seven years, a handful of bands, no institution of any kind. Set beside the other tendency, with its organisation, its labels bought by political groups and its annual festival, this is a loose association of people who agree about one thing and argue about everything else.
What it is not
It is not a sound. The same objection that applies to the faction at the other end applies here with equal force: nothing in a recording identifies it, and the bands gathered under the label play radically different music. Iskra come out of crust punk and keep the blast beats and the d-beat rhythms that go with it. Panopticon uses banjo, fiddle and Appalachian traditional material. Others work in the long, quiet, forested register that came out of the American north west. Take the lyric sheets away and no listener could sort them into one pile.
It is also not a movement with a door. There is no membership, nothing to join and nothing to be expelled from, which is why the tag is applied from outside far more often than it is claimed from inside, and why arguments about who qualifies are unresolvable by design.
The record that would matter without any of the politics
Austin Lunn started Panopticon in Louisville in 2007 and wrote and played everything on the records himself until live musicians joined in 2016. Kentucky, from 2012, is about the coal industry in his own state and the labour history that goes with it, and it puts banjo, fiddle and acoustic guitar next to tremolo guitar and blast beats without treating either tradition as decoration for the other. It got attention well outside metal.
The verdict this magazine will give is the one that ought to be given to every record on either side of this argument. Kentucky lasts because of an arrangement problem it solved, not because of the position it holds. A banjo tuned into a black metal key signature is a musical decision that had not been made before, and it would still be interesting if the lyrics were about wolves. The politics gave Lunn his subject. They did not give him the tuning.
The politics gave him his subject. They did not give him the tuning, and the tuning is why the record is still played.
The English case, and how it ended
Dawn Ray'd formed in Liverpool in 2015 out of an earlier band, with Simon Barr on vocals and violin, Fabian Devlin on guitar and Matthew Broadley on drums, took their name from an 1898 poem by the American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, and made no secret of any of it. Three albums followed on Prosthetic Records, in 2017, 2019 and 2023, and the middle one drew a four out of five review in Kerrang!, which noted that the band both exemplified and argued with the genre's idea of rebellion. In September 2023 they announced they were finished and cancelled the shows they had left.
That trajectory is worth setting down because it is so ordinary. A band with an explicit politics signed to a mid sized American label, released three records over six years, toured, was reviewed on the same terms as anybody else and then stopped. No festival was seized, no organisation was built and nothing was taken over. Whatever else RABM is, it has not produced an institution, and the honest reading of its size is that it is smaller than the argument about it.
The argument against the whole idea
Three objections are worth stating, because each of them is held seriously by people who know the music.
- That politics is external to a riff, so both tags are category errors, and a listener who sorts records by the opinions of the people who made them is not listening to records.
- That a tendency defined by opposition lets its opponent set the agenda, so the existence of one four letter tag guarantees the other and neither can be dissolved while the other stands.
- That refusing to take a position is itself a position, given that the other faction has organisations, labels and a festival, and that a scene which says nothing is one the organised faction can operate inside undisturbed.
All three are correct at once, which is why nobody has settled it in seventeen years of arguing. What a magazine can do is decline to grade records on their politics in either direction. A stated position is a fact about a band and belongs in the biography, alongside the label, the pressing run and the line-up. It is not a substitute for a verdict on the music, and a record does not get a better review for being on the right side of an argument than a bad record on the wrong side gets a worse one. That is the same standard applied in the other direction, and it is the only one that survives contact with a discography.
None of this has anything to do with the arsons and the killings of the early nineties, which are set out in the criminal chapter and which had no political programme behind them at all, whatever has been read into them since.
The rest of the arguments this genre has had with itself, the ones involving courts, trademarks and album sleeves, are gathered in the Biggest Black Metal Controversies, Explained.
