A thousand copies on black vinyl and roughly thirty on green marble, pressed in Sydney in June 1991 from tapes that had been sitting since March 1988. That is the founding object of australian black metal, and every number in the sentence is doing work: the run was tiny, the delay was three years, and the record was finished before most of the Norwegian bands it is now shelved beside had written a note.
What this country and the one across the Tasman Sea built out of the form has almost nothing in common with the northern European version, and the divergence is not a failure to copy properly. It is a different set of decisions taken in isolation, and the isolation is the whole story. The argument about who is entitled to make this music, which consumed Europe and North America for two decades, ran past Australia entirely: see the American scenes for how that fight was conducted.
Sydney, and a record that waited
Sadistik Exekution assembled in Sydney in the mid eighties and recorded The Magus in March 1988. Vampire Records, a small local operation, took three years to get it pressed, and when it finally appeared in June 1991 it was already a document of something that had happened. It is not a black metal record in any Norwegian sense and it is not a death metal record either. It is faster than either, played with an aggression that keeps outrunning the arrangement, and it sits at exactly the point where the Brazilian and Colombian records of the eighties are heading.
The band spent the next fifteen years refusing to behave like a career, which is one reason the record's reputation grew steadily and quietly rather than all at once. What it established for everything that followed in this country was a permission: that the music could be a rout rather than a rite, and that nothing about it needed to be legible.
Melbourne, and the invention of war metal
The record that put a name on the method was made a thousand kilometres south. Bestial Warlust, who had been working as Corpse Molestation, recorded and mixed Vengeance War 'till Death at Studio 001 in Carlton across December 1993 and January 1994, mastered it at a Sony facility in Sydney and released it that year through Modern Invasion Music: eight songs, thirty three minutes, and no two seconds of it interested in atmosphere, melody, nature or theology. It is routinely named as the first war metal album, and whether or not that title belongs to it or to a Vancouver band four years earlier, it is the record that fixed the style for everybody who came after.
A continent that built its black metal out of ordnance rather than out of weather.
Out of that band came Destroyer 666, formed in 1994 by the guitarist and singer who works as K.K. Warslut, introduced by an EP in 1995 and properly launched by Unchain the Wolves in March 1997. This is where the Australian line splits from the Canadian one it is usually filed with. Destroyer 666 kept the speed and the aggression and added the thing war metal had removed on principle, which is a riff you can follow, plus the gallop, the harmonised lead and a good deal of Motorhead. Phoenix Rising in 2000 and Cold Steel... for an Iron Age in 2002 are the records that carried it out of the country, and the band has been based in Europe for most of the time since.
The other Australia
Underneath the war metal reputation runs a second tradition that sounds nothing like it. Nazxul released Totem in March 1995 out of Sydney, an album of keyboards, layered guitar and long ceremonial structures that has more in common with what was coming out of Bergen than with anything in Melbourne, and it stood almost alone for a decade. From the 2000s onward the one man project became the country's characteristic format: Striborg in Tasmania, Woods of Desolation and Pestilential Shadows in New South Wales, Ruins working out of Hobart. Long pieces, open melodies, recorded at home and released in editions of a few hundred through European labels, because there was still no domestic market to speak of.
Both traditions were shaped by the same fact, which is that Australia is further from everywhere than any other country with a metal scene. There was no circuit that could carry a band from one city to the next without a fortnight and a great deal of money, no touring foreign acts to measure yourself against, and no shop that concentrated a scene into one room. Every Australian record of the period was made by people who had heard the northern albums on dubbed cassettes months late and had drawn their own conclusions from them.
New Zealand, which is a separate country in every sense
The scene across the Tasman is smaller, later and considerably heavier. Sinistrous Diabolus were working from 1990. Vassafor began in 1994 and has run ever since on a diet of splits, demos and long records issued in small numbers. Diocletian arrived in 2004 and took the war metal method to a place even the Melbourne bands had not gone, and Witchrist and Heresiarch worked the same ground beside them, sharing musicians the way a scene of thirty people has to. Around the same players sits Ulcerate, whose business is death metal rather than this, and who are the best known extreme band the country has produced.
Isolation does not produce a weaker version of a music. It produces a stranger one, because nobody is available to tell you that you have understood it wrongly.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
An honest account has to record that a nationalist strand exists in the Australian underground and has done since the nineties, most openly in one Brisbane band that has described its own music in those terms for thirty years. Several Australian groups have lost European bookings over accusations of the same, and some of those accusations have been denied by the people they were aimed at. The fact belongs in the record. It is not what the scene is, and the great majority of the bands named on this page have nothing to do with it.
The verdict
Australia produced one genuinely new thing and New Zealand refined it, and neither country has ever been given proper credit for it because the credit went north to Vancouver, where a band with better distribution was doing something similar at the same time. The war metal method is a real compositional position: remove every element that lets a listener orient themselves and structure the piece by density instead, which is harder than it sounds and is why so few of the imitators are any good. Set against that, the atmospheric wing is more listenable and less original. What both halves share is a complete indifference to being heard, which forty years of distance will do to a music. The exact opposite case, a scene that uses the identical vocabulary in the service of the thing this genre was built to attack, is christian Black Metal, or Unblack.
