Named Before It Existed: The Complete History of Black Metal

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The only brand in extreme metal forged before there was anything to burn it into, the word arrived in November 1982, its letters heated across the sleeve of a record by three men from Newcastle who could barely play their instruments and knew it, and then the iron lay in the frost for the better part of a decade, unclaimed. Black metal is the only extreme metal genre that was named before it existed. The music the name was cut for got built somewhere else entirely, by teenagers who heard that record, stripped it to the bone and drew conclusions from it that nobody in Newcastle had intended. Everything that has happened since is a fight over who holds the iron.

Tempered in a Stockholm suburb by one man and his borrowed players, hammered into doctrine in an Oslo record shop between 1991 and 1994, dragged through the Norwegian courts and then carried out across Sweden and Finland, across a map of Europe that stopped deferring to Norway, into an American quarrel over who was allowed to play it and down into a dozen subgenres with their own founding records, the sound has never once let that iron cool. Every quarrel in the story runs through the same heat. None of it has gone out.

Thin, cold and hostile: what black metal is

Stripped of the mythology, the music has a plain anatomy. The rhythm guitar is neither muted nor chopped but picked in a continuous tremolo, the same chord struck dozens of times a second until the riff stops being a string of blows and becomes one sustained blade of tone with a shape frozen inside it. The drummer plays a blast beat, snare and kick alternating at speeds that can pass three hundred beats a minute, and at that velocity the kit stops keeping time and is ground down into texture, a coat of rime laid over the whole surface of the song. The vocal is not growled from the chest, as in death metal, but shrieked from the throat, high and rasping and pitched to lacerate. And the production is thin on purpose, treble forward, the bass drained out, the guitars scraped in the mix until nothing warm survives in them. Outsiders never believe that last part. A black metal record that sounds cheap usually cost somebody a decision, not a shortage of money.

What the genre wants from all that is atmosphere rather than impact. Thrash and death metal are siege engines built to batter the gate. Black metal is the frost that comes in underneath it and takes the garrison in its sleep, which is why its songs run to seven and eight minutes, why the riffs repeat long past the point of comfort, and why so much of the canon works better on headphones in December than it does through a big PA. The subject matter follows the temperature: Satanism as a position rather than a costume, the pre Christian north, misanthropy, winter, and a hostility to the audience that would be commercial suicide anywhere else. The genre has spent forty years insisting it does not want you. A remarkable number of people took that as an invitation.

Thrash and death metal are siege engines built to batter the gate. Black metal is the frost that comes in underneath it and takes the garrison in its sleep.

The first wave: the word before the music

The Newcastle trio who heated the iron could not have played what it would brand. Formed in Newcastle upon Tyne and signed to the local Neat Records, Venom released Welcome to Hell in 1981 and Black Metal on 1 November 1982, and the second of those is one of the most consequential badly made records in history, the drums arriving late, the guitars melting into mush, the whole thing cut fast and cheap by a band whose stated ambition was to be more extreme than Judas Priest rather than to invent anything at all. What they supplied was permission. The title track and "Countess Bathory" kicked down the door for every teenager in Europe, proof that competence was optional and that the devil could be treated as a career rather than as a lyric. The years when the word had no music attached to it are told in full in the first wave.

The man who actually built it worked in a Stockholm suburb, one man with borrowed players. Formed on 16 March 1983 in Vällingby by Thomas Börje Forsberg, who called himself Quorthon and ran Bathory as a private operation with borrowed help, the project put out a self titled debut in October 1984 that still sounded like fast heavy metal with the lights off, and then spent three years cutting away everything that was not bone. The Return...... in 1985 stripped the drums back to a rattle, and Under the Sign of the Black Mark in 1987 arrived with the reverb pushed until the guitars turned to rime and the vocals came from somewhere behind the room, a voice shouting through the wall of a chapel nobody had heated in a hundred winters. That record, not anything by Venom, is the blueprint. Then Quorthon walked away from it. Blood Fire Death in 1988 turned toward Norse myth and Hammerheart in 1990 invented Viking metal outright, leaving the sound he had perfected lying on the anvil for other people to pick up. He died of heart failure in June 2004, at thirty eight.

Around those two stood the rest of the first wave, a scattered vanguard in which not one band believed it belonged to a genre. Three Swiss teenagers trading as Hellhammer put out Apocalyptic Raids in 1984, a record reviewed at the time as an embarrassment and now studied like a relic hacked out of the permafrost, then became Celtic Frost and grew ambitious in a way black metal would later refuse. The Copenhagen congregation of Mercyful Fate supplied the theatre, the falsetto and the actual Satanism. The Belo Horizonte battalion, Sarcófago, supplied the speed and the face paint. Bulldozer in Italy, Tormentor in Hungary and Master's Hammer in Czechoslovakia worked the same seam behind their own borders. By 1987 the wave had broken and most of those bands had gone somewhere else. What survived was a set of tapes moving through the post like contraband, and a handful of Norwegian teenagers reading the sleeves.

Norway, and the black shop that organised it

Talent did not separate the second wave from the first. Organisation did. In the late spring of 1991 Øystein Aarseth, who played guitar in Mayhem under the name Euronymous, opened a record shop called Helvete at Schweigaards gate 56 in Oslo, painted the inside black, filled the basement with the records nobody else stocked and gave a scattered group of teenage bands a room to argue in. He also ran a label, Deathlike Silence Productions, which put the meeting place and the means of release into the same pair of hands, the chapel and the printing press under a single key. Within eighteen months a scene of perhaps thirty people had a sound, a dress code, a list of enemies and a press file.

The Oslo band at the centre of that room had been going since 1984. Founded by Aarseth with the bassist Jørn Stubberud and the drummer Kjetil Manheim, Mayhem put out the 1987 EP Deathcrush, a thousand copies on the tiny Posercorpse Music, and the whole pressing sold out to a network of tape traders who treated it as scripture. In 1988 they recruited a Swedish singer, Per Yngve Ohlin, who performed as Dead, wore white face paint intended to make him look like a corpse rather than like a rock star, and buried his stage clothes between shows so that they would rot. He killed himself with a shotgun on 8 April 1991. The band continued. That decision, and the way it was made public, is the point at which the Norwegian scene stopped being a group of bands and became a story the newspapers wanted.

The record that dragged the method into daylight came from a band who had been doing something else entirely. Out of Kolbotn, Darkthrone released a technically accomplished death metal album called Soulside Journey on Peaceville in 1991 and then threw the style on the pyre. A Blaze in the Northern Sky, in February 1992, is the sound of four musicians who could play choosing not to, the guitars scoured of every ounce of low end, the drums recorded flat, the vocal shredded down to the width of a wire. Peaceville tried to refuse it. The band insisted. Two more followed, Under a Funeral Moon in 1993 and Transilvanian Hunger, taped in Fenriz's bedroom across November and December 1993 and released on 17 February 1994 with the guitars, the bass and the drums all played by the same man, a record that planes the sound down past the bone into bare white cold. It is the most extreme production decision the genre has made. It is also the most copied.

Inside the same two year window the rest of the scene came in like a winter front, and most of it recorded in the same building. Out of Notodden, Emperor cut In the Nightside Eclipse at the Grieg Hall in Bergen in July 1993 with the engineer Eirik Hundvin, known as Pytten, and released it through Candlelight on 21 February 1994 with keyboards laid under the tremolo like a pipe organ sealed beneath the ice of a frozen lake and still playing up through the surface, founding symphonic black metal on the spot. Immortal, from Bergen, aimed the same weapons at an invented frozen kingdom instead of at Satan, and Pure Holocaust in 1993 is still their fastest record, a blizzard with a drum kit buried somewhere inside it. The Haugesund teenagers of Enslaved wrote in Old Norse and Icelandic and put out Vikingligr Veldi on Deathlike Silence in 1994. Burzum, the one man project of Varg Vikernes, made four albums in three years that are among the most imitated of the decade, and their author's place in the history is fixed by a court record, not by the records.

Mayhem's own album took two years and outlived half the people on it. De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas was recorded at the Grieg Hall between June 1992 and May 1993, with Aarseth on guitar, Jan Axel Blomberg on drums, the Hungarian singer Attila Csihar brought in to replace a dead vocalist, and Vikernes playing the bass parts uncredited. By the time Deathlike Silence released it on 24 May 1994, Aarseth had been dead for nine months and Vikernes was in custody for killing him. Blomberg was asked by Aarseth's family to erase the bass tracks and told the press that he had re-recorded them. He had not. What survives is a liturgy played on borrowed amplifiers, every riff hung in the air like an iron bell frozen in the middle of its swing and never allowed to land, and it is the single most examined record the genre has produced. The whole Norwegian sequence, band by band and month by month, is laid out in the Norwegian chapter.

The fires, the killings and the press

The crimes belong in any honest history of the genre because they happened and because they changed the music's reception permanently. They are also the least interesting thing about it, and the reason most writing on black metal is worthless. Only the court record is worth repeating.

The Fantoft stave church outside Bergen, a timber building dating in part from the twelfth century, burned on 6 June 1992. It was the first of a series: by 1996 Norwegian authorities counted around fifty arson attacks on churches, and in every case that was solved the people responsible turned out to be connected to the black metal scene. In March 1993 Vikernes released an EP called Aske, the Norwegian word for ash, with a photograph of the Fantoft ruin on the cover, taken by Are Mundal at his request, and packaged the first thousand copies with a cigarette lighter.

On 21 August 1992, in Lillehammer, Bård Eithun, who drummed for Emperor as Faust, stabbed a man named Magne Andreassen to death in a park. He was arrested a year later, convicted, sentenced to fourteen years and released in 2003. On 10 August 1993 Vikernes travelled from Bergen to Oslo with Snorre Ruch and killed Aarseth in the stairwell of his flat; the autopsy recorded twenty three wounds. On 16 May 1994 Vikernes was convicted of the murder, of the arson of Holmenkollen chapel, Skjold church and Åsane church, and of the possession of a large quantity of explosives, and was sentenced to twenty one years, the maximum Norwegian law allowed. He was released in 2009. Ruch was given eight years as an accomplice. Tomas Haugen of Emperor, who records as Samoth, was convicted of arson and served his sentence.

Those are the facts. They do not need help. What they produced was a decade of coverage in which the music was a footnote to the police file, a bestselling book in Lords of Chaos that nailed the story into that shape for English speaking readers, and a permanent supply of bands who worked out that a crime is cheaper than a good riff. The court record, the contemporary reporting and the long argument about how a magazine should handle any of it are in the crimes.

The rest of the frozen north

The older scene across the border answered late, and the lateness turned out to be a weapon. Formed in Strömstad in 1989 by Jon Nödtveidt, Dissection released Storm of the Light's Bane through Nuclear Blast on 17 November 1995 and smashed the one law Norwegian orthodoxy had cut into the ice: they wrote melodies, borrowed the twin guitar phrasing of the Gothenburg death metal bands, and produced the record cleanly enough that you can hear it. Purists called it a compromise. Thirty years on it is one of the four or five records almost everybody actually starts with. Nödtveidt was arrested in December 1997 for complicity in a murder committed that July, served ten years less remission and was released in 2004; the band's final album Reinkaos came out in April 2006, and he died in August of the same year.

The rest of Sweden went in the opposite direction. Marduk, from Norrköping, made speed the entire argument. Abruptum made records that are barely music. Watain, formed in Uppsala in 1998, took Dissection's craft and the Norwegian scene's ritual seriousness and turned the combination into the most successful black metal band Sweden has produced. Finland went stranger and got there earlier: Beherit released Drawing Down the Moon on Spinefarm in 1993, a record of such murk and ceremony that it founded an entire school of bestial black metal, Impaled Nazarene played it as speed and provocation, and Archgoat simply refused to develop for thirty five years and were proved right. The island that arrived last hit hardest. After 2010 Svartidauði and Misþyrming hammered a dissonant Icelandic national style out of almost nothing, riffs split open like basalt under a sledge. The Swedish and Finnish scenes, their labels and their long quarrel with Norwegian orthodoxy are in the Swedish and Finnish chapter.

The map after Norway

Once the Norwegian scene collapsed into court dates, the interesting work moved abroad, and the countries that picked it up off the ice were the ones with no stake in the orthodoxy. France produced two answers at once. The collective known as Les Légions Noires made deliberately unlistenable tapes in tiny numbers and refused to explain themselves. Then Blut aus Nord put out The Work Which Transforms God in 2003, built from guitars that never resolve, chords left hanging like cracked icons over a stripped altar, and the French heretics of Deathspell Omega tore theology down to its beams and rebuilt it as structure across a run of albums closer to composed liturgical music than to anything from Oslo. From the same country and the same decade, Alcest went the other way entirely, and the shoegaze guitars of Souvenirs d'un autre monde in 2007 opened a schism the genre is still arguing about.

Poland treated it as craft. Born as a raw black metal band in the early 1990s, Behemoth hardened into something closer to death metal and in 2014, with The Satanist, made the record that hauled them to the top of European festival bills. Mgła, two musicians in plain black hoods, spent the 2010s writing the most disciplined riffs anyone in the genre was writing. Poland also produced Graveland and the national socialist strand that grew up around it, which is a real part of the record and gets stated as such: the politics are documented, the bands are not worth defending, and pretending the strand does not exist has never once helped anybody understand the music. Greece built something separate again, warmer and more Mediterranean, with Varathron and Necromantia working out of Athens and Rotting Christ's Thy Mighty Contract in 1993, cut at Molon Lave over November and December 1992 and released by Osmose. The whole European map, country by country, is in black metal across Europe.

America was slower, angrier and eventually more inventive. Von in San Francisco and Profanatica in New York were making primitive black metal in 1990 and 1991, at the same time as Norway and with none of the attention. Through the 1990s the American version was a scatter of one man projects working by post, and after 2000 it produced the genre's loneliest music in Xasthur and Leviathan. Then Weakling's Dead as Dreams, recorded in 1998 and released in 2000, drove the long form past twenty minutes a song without the structure caving in, and the bands of the Pacific Northwest took the hint. Wolves in the Throne Room put out Two Hunters in 2007, threw Satan out of the forest and put ecology in his place, and got called Cascadian black metal for it.

The argument came to a head over one record with a pink sleeve. Recorded at Atomic Garden in East Palo Alto in January 2013 with the producer Jack Shirley and released through the hardcore label Deathwish on 11 June, Deafheaven's Sunbather finished the year with a Metacritic score of 92, the first metal album to top that site's annual ranking. Half the genre treated it as vindication and the other half as trespass. Both readings assume black metal belongs to somebody, which is the assumption the American story exists to test, and it is tested properly in the American chapter.

Half the genre treated Sunbather as vindication and the other half as trespass. Both readings assume black metal belongs to somebody.

Corpse paint, logos and the forest

No other genre has a visual grammar this fixed or this widely misread. The face paint began as theatre in the first wave and turned, in the hands of Dead, into a stated intention to look like a dead man, and the distance between those two uses is the whole distance between 1984 and 1991. The logo is an argument in itself. A black metal logo is drawn to be almost unreadable, a thicket of branches and inverted crosses in which the band's name is technically present, a brand pressed so deep into the hide that the letters have scarred over, and the Belgian illustrator Christophe Szpajdel has drawn several hundred of them, Emperor's among them. The point of an illegible logo is that it filters. If you cannot read it, it was not addressed to you.

Then there is the photograph in the forest, which by 1994 was as standardised as a passport picture: bare trees, snow, a monochrome exposure pushed until the sky goes white, musicians in paint and studs holding weapons that belong in a museum. It is easy to mock. It worked, because it told an audience with no shared language exactly what the record would sound like before the shrink wrap came off. Corpse paint, the illegible logos, the sleeve photography, the spikes, the deliberately unflattering press shot and the reasons all of it hardened into a rulebook are in the aesthetics.

After the second wave: the frost that stayed

The genre that was supposed to exhaust itself has settled instead into permanence, which is a stranger fate than the one it wanted. Reformed in 1995 around Blomberg and the guitarist Rune Eriksen, Mayhem made Grand Declaration of War in 2000, which almost nobody liked at the time and which now reads as the most adventurous thing they did, then Ordo Ad Chao in 2007 and Daemon in 2019. In February 2026 they released Liturgy of Death through Century Media, recorded with Tore Stjerna, their first new music in seven years and the record that marks their fortieth year. Emperor split in 2001 and have played selectively ever since. Immortal, Satyricon, Enslaved, Gorgoroth and Darkthrone all continued, and Darkthrone in particular spent the 2000s taking a sledgehammer to their own orthodoxy in public and daring the audience to complain about it.

The Devil won again.

Erik Danielsson of Watain, on the band's Swedish Grammis, Blabbermouth, 2011

Beneath the founders the frost has crept further than any of them intended, across symphonic, atmospheric, depressive, war metal, blackgaze, black and roll, pagan, and a dozen national styles that would have been unimaginable in 1993. The last twenty five years, from the professionalisation of the scene to the festival economy to the argument about politics that will not go away, are in black metal since 2000.

Those strands have hardened into recognisable forms with their own rules, their own founding records and their own quarrels, and the guide to which is which, what separates depressive from atmospheric and war metal from the bestial school, is in black metal subgenres.

The bands and the records

The bands get a roll call of their own, from the four or five anybody can name to the ones that never left the tape network, each with a paragraph and a link into the database, and it is meant to be argued with: black metal bands. The records get a shelf of their own, ranked by the KaosMetal score, which combines critic ratings with the fan ratings on this site, with a note on every record and a place to start for anyone who has never heard a note of this: the essential black metal albums.

Ten records tell the story on their own, in order of release, with the usual caveat that any serious listener would swap three of them and be right to.

Named by a band that could not play it, perfected by one man and his borrowed players in a Swedish suburb, organised by a record shop that lasted about two years and then handed to the world by people who spent the following decade in court, black metal owes its survival to none of that. It survived because the sound itself, thin and cold and repetitive and hostile, turned out to be the most portable idea metal has ever had: one guitar, one room and a reason. The iron forged in Newcastle has never cooled. Forty years on, somewhere north of you tonight, somebody is pressing it into a recording made badly on purpose. That is the whole tradition, and it is in better health than its founders would have liked.

Sources and notes

• Wikipedia: Early Norwegian black metal scene
• Wikipedia: De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
• Wikipedia: Transilvanian Hunger
• Wikipedia: Aske (EP)
• Wikipedia: Dissection (band)
• Blabbermouth: Watain mainman on Grammis award
• Bandcamp Daily: Ten bands pushing the boundaries of extreme black metal