Conrad Lant has told the same story about the phrase for years, and the version he gave Loudwire in December 2018 is the plainest. Asked in an early eighties interview where his band fitted into heavy metal, having just seen a Michael Jackson single sitting at the top of a heavy metal chart, he said they did not fit and started listing alternatives off the top of his head: power metal, death metal, thrash metal, speed metal, black metal. In his own words, it stuck.
The album carrying two of those words was already in the shops when he said it, which makes the anecdote an explanation rather than an origin. It is still the entire etymology of the most solemn genre name in music. Not a manifesto, not a coinage anybody laboured over, but one item in a list of five thrown out by an irritated musician, printed on a sleeve, and then carried for nine years by people who had no idea what it was going to be attached to.
Where the two words come from
The adjective was standard equipment in British rock long before Venom used it. Black mass, black magic, black arts: the word had meant forbidden and occult in English for centuries, and by 1970 it was the natural label for a rock band with an interest in the devil. Black Sabbath released their debut on 13 February 1970 and took their name from a Boris Karloff film by way of one of their own songs. Black Widow put out Sacrifice on CBS in March of the same year with its best known track calling the listener to the sabbat, and Coven had come out of Chicago the summer before with inverted crosses on the sleeve. None of those three is black metal in any sense a listener now uses. All three establish that black was the adjective you reached for.
The noun did the other half. Heavy metal in 1981 meant chrome, leather, arenas and a chorus a crowd could return. Putting black in front of it was a refusal of all of that in one word, and the second half of the phrase is doing exactly as much work as the first: black metal names itself against something rather than for anything.
The ten years when the phrase meant almost nothing
Through the whole of the eighties the phrase was a coat hung on any band dark enough to wear it. Possessed, Slayer, Sodom, Bathory, Hellhammer and Celtic Frost were all described as black metal in print at some point in that decade, by writers who meant nothing more precise than that the lyrics concerned the devil and the records were fast. The competing labels were speed metal, thrash metal and, from 1984, death metal, and none of the four had settled edges.
What that means practically is that a reader working backwards through eighties press cannot use the term as evidence of anything musical. A 1986 review calling a record black metal is telling you about its lyric sheet. The same review would have used death metal a paragraph later without noticing a contradiction, because there was not yet a contradiction to notice.
How the neighbouring names were made
The pattern is worth setting down because it is consistent and because it is not how genre names usually happen. Extreme metal did not get its vocabulary from critics. It got it from song and album titles written by teenagers.
Death metal came from Jeff Becerra of Possessed, who has said he came up with it in early 1983 for a school English assignment, used it as the title of a demo his band circulated in 1984 and then as a song on Seven Churches, released by Combat in 1985. Black metal came from a Venom album title and the song that opens it. In both cases a teenager named a genre by naming a track, and the press adopted the word afterwards because it needed something to write.
Every genre in this music is named after a song. The critics arrived later and pretended they had done the work.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
When the meaning narrowed
Between 1991 and 1994 the phrase stopped being a description and became a specification. A small circle of Norwegian musicians used it prescriptively, to say what a record had to sound like and what it had to be about, and within three years an international audience had accepted the narrowed definition. Fenriz of Darkthrone, whose band made three of the albums that did the narrowing, has said that at the time they simply called what they were doing black metal, without any of the classification that arrived afterwards.
The narrowing then ran backwards over the previous decade. Records made in 1982 and 1984 were re-labelled to fit a definition invented in 1992, which is how a fast rock album from Newcastle ended up as the founding document of a genre it does not resemble. That retrospective sorting is what the chapter this belongs to works through band by band, and the shape of the period it produced is set out in first Wave Black Metal Explained.
For ten years the phrase was a coat hung on any band dark enough to wear it. Then somebody decided what the coat meant.
Why a badly fitting name held
Names in music are almost never accurate and almost always permanent. Nothing about rhythm and blues describes what the phrase came to cover, punk was an insult before it was a badge, and grunge started as a throwaway word a Seattle musician used about his own band. Black metal is the same kind of accident and it survived for the same three reasons.
It was short. It was on a sleeve, which means it was on shop racks and in mail order lists before anybody argued about it. And unlike death metal or thrash, it described a subject rather than a technique, which meant it could survive a complete change in the music without becoming false. When the guitars, the drumming and the recording all changed between 1984 and 1992, the words on the sleeve still fitted, because they had never been about the guitars in the first place.
It also beat everything it was competing against, and the losers are worth naming because they show what the winner had. Satanic metal was in use and described only the lyrics. Evil metal and occult metal turn up in eighties fanzines and went nowhere. In Medellin the local word was ultra metal, coined for a scene that was doing much the same thing at much the same time and had no reason to defer to a British album title. Each of those was either too narrow, too silly or too local, and black metal was none of the three.
The last piece of evidence for the name's fitness is what happened to it afterwards. A working genre name has to take modifiers, and this one takes them easily: symphonic black metal, atmospheric black metal, depressive black metal, blackened death metal, war metal. Each of those is intelligible on sight to somebody who knows the parent term, which is a property the phrase would not have if it named a guitar technique. Thrash cannot do that. Grindcore cannot do that. Two words that describe an attitude rather than a method turn out to be endlessly extensible, and that is why a genre that has changed almost everything about itself since 1982 has never once considered changing what it is called.
That durability is the whole reason a phrase reeled off in a list of five now covers four decades of records. The order in which those decades arrived is laid out in A Black Metal Timeline, 1981 to 2000.
