The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.John Milton, Paradise Lost
Newcastle supplied the title deed and Stockholm built the house. Everything a listener now identifies as black metal from the first note, the guitar tone, the shriek, the absence of any warmth in the mix, the sense that the recording is coming from somewhere colder than the room you are in, was worked out by one Swede between the summer of 1984 and the autumn of 1986 in a converted repair garage with almost no money and no help.
Thomas Borje Forsberg, born in Stockholm on 17 February 1966 and signing himself Quorthon, is the technical father of the genre. That is not a compliment paid to a favourite. It is a description of what is on the tapes.
A family label and a gap on a compilation
Bathory formed on 16 March 1983 with Quorthon on guitar and vocals, and its route to a record was as unglamorous as routes get. His father Stig Borje Forsberg, known as Boss, ran a small Swedish label called Tyfon Grammofon, and when another group withdrew from a compilation the label was assembling, the gap was filled with two tracks by his son's band, "Sacrifice" and "The Return of Darkness and Evil", cut in January 1984. Scandinavian Metal Attack came out that March, and almost every letter Tyfon received about it was about the band that had been added last. The label asked for an album.
Quorthon was seventeen. His stated starting points were punk rather than metal, the Exploited and GBH alongside Black Sabbath and Motorhead, and he said later that if he had not started playing in punk bands around 1979 his life would have gone somewhere much worse. That inheritance matters, because what he did to the guitar in 1984 is closer to a punk band's contempt for tone than to anything a metal guitarist of the period would have accepted.
Three records that built the instrument
The debut was recorded in June 1984 in the converted garage Quorthon called Heavenshore and released by Tyfon on 2 October, with Rickard Bergman on bass and Stefan Larsson on drums, the three of them having rehearsed together exactly once. The budget bought a single master tape, so the eight channel machine was run at half speed to fit the album onto it, and the whole thing was recorded and mixed in somewhere between thirty two and fifty six hours. The first pressing was a thousand copies and it went in a fortnight.
What is on it had no precedent. There is no bottom register at all, which was a decision and not an accident, and the guitars are pushed so far into treble and distortion that individual notes stop being separable. The vocal on "Hades" and "In Conspiracy with Satan" is not singing and is not the low shout of the English and German records; it is pitched high and torn. The drums abandon rock time. Nothing is warm anywhere on the record, and every reviewer since has reached for weather to describe it.
The Return......, cut at Electra Studios in February 1985 and released on 27 May, takes the same method further in the only direction left, which is further down. Twelve tracks in thirty six minutes, the sides labelled Darkness and Evil, the song titles arranged so that read in order they form a single sentence. The guitars arrive out of a fog of distortion, the bass is buried and the drumming is, by common consent including that of people who love the record, some of the worst ever released by a functioning label. None of that stopped Fenriz of Darkthrone calling it the essence of black metal.
Then the third record adds the thing nobody else had thought to add, which is space. Recorded back at Heavenshore in September 1986 and released on 11 May 1987, Under the Sign of the Black Mark puts a keyboard drone under the riffs, opens the tempos out instead of accelerating them, and uses reverb as a building material rather than a finish. "Enter the Eternal Fire" is slow, long and processional and has almost nothing to do with speed metal. "Woman of Dark Desires" and "Call from the Grave" complete the vocabulary. Fenriz has called it the quintessential black metal album and named it as the model for a Darkthrone record made eight years later. Rolling Stone put it eighty first among the greatest metal albums in 2017.
| Album | Recorded | Released | What it added |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bathory | June 1984, Heavenshore | 2 October 1984 | The treble guitar, the high torn vocal, no bottom register |
| The Return...... | February 1985, Electra | 27 May 1985 | Density, and distortion used to erase detail |
| Under the Sign of the Black Mark | September 1986, Heavenshore | 11 May 1987 | Keyboard drone, opened tempos, reverb standing in for a room |
What exactly Norway took
The inheritance is specific and it is worth itemising rather than gesturing at, because the vague version of this claim has been repeated for thirty years without anybody saying what it means. Norway took five things and left the rest.
- The guitar tone: treble at the top of the range, distortion heavy enough to smear the notes together, and nothing underneath it.
- The vocal, pitched high and torn rather than shouted low. Every second wave shriek descends from this rather than from Newcastle or the Ruhr.
- Reverb used as a substitute for a room, which is the third album's method exactly, adopted by bands who also could not afford a studio.
- Tempo that opens rather than accelerates, which is what separates atmospheric black metal from fast metal with a rasp on top.
- Poverty as a position: the idea that a recording should sound like what it cost, and that fixing it would be a betrayal.
A converted repair garage in Stockholm, where the lack of everything was turned into the instrument.
What Norway did not take is equally clear. The song structures on these records are conventional, the riffs are largely built from struck power chords rather than tremolo picking, and the pacing is closer to speed metal than to anything from 1993. Quorthon supplied the sound and the atmosphere. The grammar of the riff arrived later and from somewhere else.
The turn away, 1988 to 1991
Having finished the job, he abandoned it. Blood Fire Death, recorded at Heavenshore in February 1988 and released on 17 October by Under One Flag, slows down, brings in acoustic passages and choral voices, and turns from Satanism to Norse myth. The sleeve is a Norwegian painting from 1872 of the wild hunt riding through the sky. "A Fine Day to Die" opens the record with four minutes of nothing much and then does not sound like any metal band of 1988; Rolling Stone ranked it seventy sixth among the greatest metal songs in 2023. The album also introduces two session musicians credited as Kothaar and Vvornth, whose identity was never confirmed, and Boss Forsberg said afterwards that his son had played the drums himself.
Hammerheart followed in 1990 and is the record most people mean when they say viking metal, with Twilight of the Gods after it in 1991. Whether that turn is a second founding or a departure is a separate argument, taken up in blood Fire Death and the Birth of Viking Metal. What matters here is that the man who built the black metal instrument stopped using it four years before anybody else picked it up.
The verdict, and the awkward evidence
Quorthon spent years denying that Venom mattered to him, saying he had not heard them until the end of 1984 at the earliest, and then told Metal Forces that he had listened to Black Metal in 1983 and thought it one of the best albums ever made. He also said plainly that he regarded Satanism and Christianity alike as religious nonsense and that the imagery was there to attack the church rather than to profess anything. Both admissions cut against the legend and neither one damages the work.
He died in Stockholm on 3 June 2004, aged 38, of a congenital heart defect, and Bathory ended with him. What he left is the only body of work from the first wave that a listener can put on next to a 1993 Norwegian album without hearing a gap. That claim is tested against the rest of the founders in chapter one, and the long consequences of what he built run through the genre in full.
