On 15 June 1969 Mercury Records put out an album by an American band called Coven with inverted crosses on the sleeve, a song called "Black Sabbath" as the opening track and a thirteen minute recording of a satanic mass at the end. It was pulled from the shops within months. Nobody has ever proposed Coven as the inventors of black metal.
That is the shape of the whole problem. Being first with a component is not the same as inventing the thing, and every candidate for the title turns out to have supplied one part and no others. There is no founder here. There is an estate divided among five men who never met, most of whom did not know there was an estate.
What invented has to mean
Black metal has four separable inventions inside it, and they were made in four countries across nine years. There is the name, which is a phrase printed on a sleeve. There is the sound, which is a set of decisions about guitar tone, vocal technique and recording. There is the appearance, which is a photograph. And there is the ideology, which is the position that this music is not entertainment, a position nobody in the first wave held.
Ask who invented black metal and you get a different answer for each of the four. Ask which of the four counts as the invention and you are no longer asking a question about history, you are choosing a definition. That is why the argument has run for forty years without moving, and why where the name came from and where the music came from have to be answered separately.
The two strongest claims: a title and a tone
Conrad Lant of Venom supplied the phrase. His band put Black Metal into British shops on 1 November 1982 with the words in gothic capitals under a horned face he had drawn himself in correction fluid, and forty years of interviews have not shifted his account of what he meant by it, which is that it described the lyrics on the record and was never a programme for anybody. He is right about his intentions and it has changed nothing, because names are not owned by the people who coin them.
Thomas Forsberg, who signed himself Quorthon, supplied the music. Working in Stockholm from the age of seventeen, on a family label, with musicians hired for single sessions and a budget that ran to hours rather than days, he made three records between October 1984 and May 1987 that between them fix the guitar tone, the vocal, the tempo and the atmosphere of everything Norway would do five years later. Fenriz of Darkthrone has called the third of them the quintessential black metal album, which is an unusually direct piece of testimony from the generation that did the copying.
Forsberg's claim is complicated by his own evidence. He spent years denying that Venom mattered to him, saying he had not heard them until late 1984 at the earliest, and then told Metal Forces that he had listened to Black Metal in 1983 and considered it one of the best albums ever made. Both statements cannot be true. That contradiction is itself a fact about how paternity works in this music: everyone involved had an interest in having arrived alone.
I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
The three who supplied the rest of it
Kim Bendix Petersen, who performs as King Diamond, invented the seriousness. Mercyful Fate formed in Copenhagen in the spring of 1981 out of the wreckage of a group called Brats, recorded Melissa at Easy Sound in July 1983 with Henrik Lund producing and released it that October, and the difference between that record and everything around it is that the occult content is handled by somebody who had read the material. He also put white and black paint on his face on a stage in 1983, which is where the visual half of this begins.
Thomas Gabriel Fischer invented the method. Hellhammer in Switzerland worked by removing things: no solos worth the name, no clean passages, two chord riffs held past comfort, a recording so poor that poverty stopped being an excuse and became a position. Every band since who has chosen to sound worse than their equipment allows is working from that. And Wagner Lamounier of Sarcofago completed the picture, or rather stood in it: the four of them photographed for the front of I.N.R.I. in 1987 in white face paint, leather, spikes and bullet belts, four years before anyone in Norway assembled the same kit. Euronymous of Mayhem corresponded with him directly and was fixated on exactly that photograph.
The man who invented the scene rather than the music
Oystein Aarseth invented none of the components and is nonetheless the reason the genre exists as a genre. From 1991 he ran a record shop in Oslo, a label out of its basement, and a correspondence network that told a few dozen young musicians in several countries that they belonged to something with rules. He supplied the one thing the first wave never had: the insistence that this was not a performance.
What that produced is the darkest part of the history and it is not a matter of interpretation. Church buildings across Norway were destroyed by arson between 1992 and 1996 and several musicians were convicted. Aarseth himself was killed on the night of 10 August 1993, and Varg Vikernes was convicted of the murder on 16 May 1994 and sentenced to twenty one years, of which he served fifteen. The organisational invention and the criminal record belong to the same short period and cannot be separated in an honest account.
So who invented black metal
Before the table, one set of claimants who never appear in the argument and have a better case than most of the musicians. None of these records exists without somebody willing to pay for the studio time. Dave Wood ran Impulse Studios in Wallsend and founded Neat Records out of an office above a bingo hall in 1979, and it was Neat that put out both Venom albums when no larger label in Britain would have gone near them. Noise Records took Hellhammer after every other label the band wrote to had refused, and then took Celtic Frost, and then most of the German thrash catalogue. Tyfon Grammofon in Sweden was a family business that put an unknown act on a compilation to fill a gap and gave it an album when the letters started arriving. Cogumelo in Belo Horizonte pressed the Brazilian records out of a shop.
Four small labels, none of them with an artists and repertoire department, are the reason the six inventions above reached anybody at all. That is not a romantic account of how a genre begins and it is closer to the truth than any of the founder stories.
| Component | Invented by | Where and when |
|---|---|---|
| The name | Conrad Lant, Venom | Newcastle, November 1982 |
| The seriousness and the face paint | King Diamond, Mercyful Fate | Copenhagen, 1983 |
| The method of subtraction | Thomas Gabriel Fischer, Hellhammer | Switzerland, 1983 and 1984 |
| The sound | Quorthon, Bathory | Stockholm, 1984 to 1987 |
| The complete visual uniform | Wagner Lamounier, Sarcofago | Belo Horizonte, 1987 |
| The scene and the ideology | Oystein Aarseth, Mayhem | Oslo, 1991 to 1993 |
Read the table down and the honest answer is that the question is badly formed. If invention means the name, it is Newcastle in 1982. If it means the music, it is Stockholm between 1984 and 1987. If it means the thing as a movement with a look, a creed and a set of rules, it is Oslo in 1991, made out of parts shipped in from four other countries by people who had no idea they were contributing.
What none of them did is invent it together, and the reason the credit is still argued about is that each of the six can point at a part of the result and say truthfully that it came from him. The record with the strongest single claim is dealt with in venom and the Album That Gave the Genre Its Name, and the full arc across the first wave, the second and everything after is where all six eventually meet.
