American black metal has no founding scene, no shop anybody stood outside and no year the people involved can agree on, and that absence is the most useful fact about it. Norway produced a movement because forty people could reach each other on a tram. The United States produced a hundred separate projects that could not, and every peculiarity of the American catalogue follows from that one condition.
There was no circle to be thrown out of, so nobody had to obey anything. There was also nobody to tell a band that what they had made was already being made better in the next town, so the country generated the most conservative records in the genre and the most heretical ones inside the same decade, frequently in the same postal district.
The first American bands, and why almost nobody heard them
Assembled on O'ahu in 1987 and moved to San Francisco soon afterwards, Von made a demo called Satanic Blood in 1991 that consists of short songs built from two or three chords played without decoration of any kind, disbanded in 1992 without a label having shown the slightest interest, and turned out to have written the template for a good deal of what Scandinavia did next. Dark Funeral, Enthroned, Taake and Krieg have all recorded their songs. Watain took their name from one of them. A tape that sold in the low hundreds by post did more work than most catalogues.
Profanatica is the other founding case and its story is worse. Formed in 1990 at New Paltz in New York State when Paul Ledney, Aragon Amori and Brett Makowski walked out of the death metal band Incantation, the group cut two demos inside eighteen months, put out the Weeping in Heaven EP through After World Records in 1991, split a twelve inch with the Colombian band Masacre on Osmose in 1992, then lost the master tapes of the album they had recorded and dissolved before the year ended. Ledney restarted it in 2001. The first Profanatica full length, Profanatitas de Domonatia, appeared on Hells Headbangers in 2007, seventeen years after the band existed.
There was no circle to be thrown out of, so nobody had to obey anything. Every band was its own garrison, defending a fort that did not exist.
The rest of the first generation runs the same way. Judas Iscariot began in 1992 at DeKalb in Illinois as one man, Andrew Harris, working under the name Akhenaten, and released a substantial catalogue almost nobody outside the tape network saw. Absu, formed in Dallas in 1989 and originally called Dolmen, put out The Sun of Tiphareth through Osmose in 1995 with an occult and Celtic vocabulary that had nothing to do with Norwegian winter. Demoncy and Grand Belial's Key worked in similar isolation. None of them had a scene. All of them had a post office.
The record that changed the shape of the thing
Then a band from San Francisco recorded five songs in December 1998 at Louder Studios, released them through tUMULt in 2000 as Dead as Dreams, and split up. Weakling made one album, the shortest piece on it runs past nine minutes and the longest past twenty, and the guitar sound is dense and layered where the European orthodoxy demanded thin and dry. It sold slowly, it went out of print, and every significant American band of the following fifteen years has pointed at it. That is an unusual amount of authority for a record made by people who had no expectation of anybody hearing it.
What it proved is narrow and it mattered enormously. The long form works. A black metal song can run twenty minutes without becoming a doom record, provided the harmony keeps moving underneath the repetition, and once that was demonstrated on American terms the Pacific Northwest had somewhere to start from.
One man and a four track
The 2000s belonged to musicians working alone, and the reason is economic rather than philosophical. A band needs four people who agree, a room that costs money by the hour and a vehicle. A four track tape recorder in a bedroom needs none of those, and the American underground had far more bedrooms than rehearsal rooms. What came out of them is the most monastic music in the genre and its most claustrophobic.
Xasthur ran from 1995 in Alhambra, California as the sole work of Scott Conner, who recorded as Malefic, and produced albums of deliberately smothered sound in which the drums are barely present and the guitars sit under several layers of hiss. Leviathan began in 1998 when Jef Whitehead adopted the name Wrest and started issuing demos he had recorded himself; The Tenth Sub Level of Suicide was cut entirely at home on a Tascam four track and released by the Seattle label Moribund Cult on 29 September 2003. Krieg was formed in 1995 at Somers Point in New Jersey by Neill Jameson, ran under the name Imperial until 1997, and has produced two decades of records that sound like they were made in a state of permanent irritation.
The band comes back, and so does ambition
By the middle of the 2000s the solo model had gone as far as it could and the four piece band returned with technique attached. Averse Sefira, formed at Austin in 1996 by Sanguine Mapsama and Wrath Sathariel Diabolus, arrived at Battle's Clarion in 2001 with an arrangement style that owed more to progressive metal than to anything from Bergen. Krallice assembled in New York in 2007 around musicians with conservatory training and were received in some quarters as an intrusion, which says more about the receiving end than about the records.
| Period | Bands | Working method | Reach |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1987 to 1994 | Von, Profanatica, Judas Iscariot, Absu, Demoncy | Demos, tape trading, small labels | Hundreds of copies |
| 1995 to 2002 | Weakling, Krieg, Xasthur, Leviathan | Home recording, one or two people | Out of print inside a year |
| 2003 to 2010 | Averse Sefira, Krallice, Woe, Nachtmystium | Full bands, real studios | Distributed internationally |
| 2011 onward | Panopticon, Deafheaven, Wolves in the Throne Room, Ghost Bath | Everything at once | Charts, festivals, arguments |
What USBM actually is
It is not a sound, and every attempt to describe it as one collapses on contact with the catalogue. Nothing connects a Von demo to a Krallice record except a country. What connects them is a condition: distance, no orthodoxy anybody was obliged to defend, and a permanent absence of the social pressure that made the Norwegian scene both coherent and dangerous. Bands here answered to nobody, which is why the American wing produced the genre's most extreme fidelity to the 1993 template and its most complete departures from it, sometimes on the same label.
The country's best known branch, the one that came out of the forest rather than the bedroom, grew in the Pacific Northwest and gets treated on its own terms in cascadian Black Metal. The full American chapter, including the long fight about who is entitled to the name, is cascadian black metal and its neighbours. For the ground all of this was built on, a history of black metal starts in England in 1982 and gets to Oslo by the second act.
Start with Dead as Dreams, which is the single most consequential American record in the genre and still sounds like it was made by people who had worked out something nobody had told them. Then the Satanic Blood demo, for the opposite reason: two chords, no production, no ambition on display, and half of Scandinavia in its debt. Desolation is a resource and America had more of it than anywhere.
