On 17 December 1998, Jester Records released an album of William Blake set to electronics, industrial percussion, jazz brass and long ambient passages, by a band who three years earlier had made one of the best Norwegian black metal debuts of the decade. Ulver have not made a metal record since. That is not an anomaly in this genre, it is closer to the standard career, and the list of bands who left is longer and more interesting than the list of bands who stayed.
The exit was built in from the beginning
The first band to walk out of black metal was the band that invented most of it. Bathory spent 1984 to 1987 building the template every Norwegian later copied, and then Quorthon put choirs, acoustic guitars, clean singing and Norse mythology onto Blood Fire Death in 1988 and Hammerheart in 1990, and founded viking metal on the way out. The man responsible for the second wave sound had abandoned it before the second wave started. Nobody in Norway treated that as a betrayal, because at the time nobody in Norway had anything to betray.
What this means in practice is that the genre's rules and the genre's escape hatch arrived in the same decade and from the same person. A form built on refusal produces musicians for whom the next refusal is the form itself. Almost every band in any survey of who to listen to either left, tried to leave, or made a career out of pointedly not leaving.
The Norwegian class of 1997 to 1999
Three years is all it took for half the interesting Norwegian bands to stop. Ulver did it most completely: Bergtatt in 1995 was folk melody and clean singing, Nattens madrigal in 1997 was nothing but treble and hostility, and then the Blake double album ended the argument, with a sleeve note stating the band did not consider themselves part of the so-called black metal scene at all. Kristoffer Rygg has said since that they never regarded themselves as strictly a black metal band and that they left because the form was limiting. Arcturus made La Masquerade Infernale in 1997 out of theatre, cabaret and orchestration. Dodheimsgard put out an industrial record in 1999 that still sounds like a machine failing. Solefald wrote about art history. In the Woods... went to progressive rock inside two albums.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The common factor is that all of them had made a black metal record first and had nothing further to say inside the format. That is the honest version. The dishonest version, which circulated at the time, was that these musicians had softened. Listen to the Dodheimsgard record and to any orthodox album released the same year and the accusation collapses: the band that left was making the more difficult music by a wide margin.
The slow leavers
Enslaved are the longest and least dramatic case in the genre. Two teenagers formed the band in 1991, made viking black metal for a decade, and then moved a small distance on every subsequent album until sixteen records later they are a progressive rock band with harsh vocals. There is no single album where the seam shows, which is why nobody ever accused them of anything. Satyricon did the opposite and were entirely open about it: Volcano came out on Moonfog on 25 October 2002, reached number four in Norway, won the national Spellemannsprisen for best metal album, and is a rock record with black metal furniture. Satyr has never pretended otherwise, which is more honest than most and cost the band a section of its audience anyway.
Emperor took the shortest route, which was to stop. Prometheus in 2001 abandoned almost every convention of the genre in favour of dense progressive writing, and then the band ended, and Ihsahn has spent the twenty five years since making solo records that have less to do with black metal each time. Borknagar started in 1996 as a black metal band with folk melody in it and finished as a folk and progressive band with black metal in it, without ever announcing a change of direction.
The traffic also runs the other way, which is the part these arguments always forget. Darkthrone arrived as a death metal band and made a competent death metal album for Peaceville in 1991 before converting inside twelve months. Rotting Christ began as a grindcore band in the late eighties, spent the nineties as the best black metal band in Greece, spent the end of that decade making gothic rock, and then came back to the extreme end and stayed there. Switzerland's Samael made a genuine black metal record in 1994 and an industrial one two years later. Behemoth went from raw Polish black metal to death metal across the turn of the century and have been arguing with the label ever since. A band changing genre is not a verdict on the band; it is a description of what musicians do when a set of rules stops producing anything.
Darkthrone, which is the strangest case of all
The two men who wrote the rulebook were also the first to throw it out in public. The Cult Is Alive in 2006 is crust punk. What followed is old heavy metal, speed metal, doom, and by the 2020s a set of records that have almost nothing to do with the three albums the band is famous for. The reason this matters more than any of the departures above is that it was done by the band with the most to lose from doing it, and done without a single defensive interview. Immortal, meanwhile, provide the control condition: ten albums about the same invented winter over thirty years, no departure, no experiment, no apology, and a catalogue that is more consistent than anybody else's and less interesting to argue about.
| Band | Last record inside the genre | The album that left | What it turned into |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bathory | Under the Sign of the Black Mark (1987) | Hammerheart (1990) | Viking metal |
| Ulver | Nattens madrigal (1997) | Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1998) | Electronics and ambient |
| Arcturus | Aspera Hiems Symfonia (1996) | La Masquerade Infernale (1997) | Avant garde metal |
| Satyricon | Rebel Extravaganza (1999) | Volcano (2002) | Rock with black metal furniture |
| Emperor | IX Equilibrium (1999) | Prometheus (2001) | Progressive metal, then nothing |
| Darkthrone | Sardonic Wrath (2004) | The Cult Is Alive (2006) | Crust, heavy metal, doom |
| Alcest | Les voyages de l'ame (2012) | Shelter (2014) | Dream pop, then back |
| Deafheaven | Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (2018) | Infinite Granite (2021) | Shoegaze, then back |
The modern version, which includes a return ticket
Two bands in the last fifteen years have made the departure and then reversed it, which nobody in the nineties did. Alcest released Shelter through Prophecy on 17 January 2014, recorded in Iceland with Sigur Ros's engineer, with no harsh vocals and no metal on it at all; the reception split hard, and the band's next album put the distortion back. Deafheaven did the same on a shorter cycle, releasing the clean sung Infinite Granite through Sargent House on 20 August 2021 and then returning with Lonely People with Power in 2025. Both round trips suggest something about the genre that the nineties departures could not: it turns out the format was not exhausted, only the patience of the people playing it.
The lesson for anyone reading a discography is to stop treating a change of style as a scandal or a decline. Some of these departures produced the best records their makers ever made and some produced nothing of value, and which is which has no relationship at all to how far the band moved. It has to do with whether they had anything to say when they got there. The bands whose leaving changed what everybody else did afterwards are a smaller group, and they are listed in the Most Influential Black Metal Bands.
