Between March and May 2003, in Fredman Studio in Gothenburg, a Norwegian band recorded an album with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra on it, arranged by a hired composer and conducted by a man with a career in classical music. Nuclear Blast paid for it. Dimmu Borgir released Death Cult Armageddon on 9 September 2003 and it went onto the Billboard 200 at number 169, which is a sentence that would have been read as a joke ten years earlier. That is one half of what the decade did.
The other half was happening in a bedroom in California, on a four track machine, in editions of two hundred. Both halves are real, and the ten years between them are the most misunderstood stretch in the genre's history, usually written off as the period when nothing happened between the crimes and the current revival. A great deal happened. Most of it happened outside the country everyone was still watching, and it is the through line of black metal 2000s as a whole.
The founders stop, or turn into something else
The generation that had made the second wave spent the decade closing doors. Emperor released Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire and Demise in 2001 and dissolved, on the stated grounds that a fourth album made without conviction would cost more than silence. Immortal put out Sons of Northern Darkness through Nuclear Blast in 2002, the best selling record of its career, and stopped the following year. Ulver had already left, trading tremolo for electronics on Perdition City in 2000 and never coming back. Burzum went silent for the length of a prison sentence.
Two Norwegians took the other route and kept working, in opposite directions. Satyricon went further toward the arena with Volcano in 2002 and its successors, and Darkthrone went in the other direction entirely, abandoning black metal on purpose with The Cult Is Alive in 2006 and spending the rest of the decade making records about crust punk and the heavy metal of 1981. Both were arguments about what a band from that generation was for once the scene that produced it no longer existed.
Sweden takes the doctrine seriously
While Norway was becoming a heritage industry, Sweden built the decade's most disciplined scene, and it did so around belief rather than around a sound. Watain made Casus Luciferi in 2003 and Sworn to the Dark for Season of Mist in 2007, and by the end of the decade was touring with production and a crew. Funeral Mist put out Salvation in 2003 through Norma Evangelium Diaboli, a French label that spent the decade functioning as the movement's publishing house. Craft, from Norrland, made a record in 2005 whose title cannot be printed in a caption and whose contents are the coldest guitar sound of the period.
Dissection came back in 2004 after Jon Nodtveidt was released from prison, toured hard, released Reinkaos in 2006 and ended with his death that August. The Swedish depressive wing ran alongside all of it, Shining reaching its high point with Halmstad in 2007. One country, four positions, none of them borrowed from Oslo.
While Norway was becoming a heritage industry, Sweden built the decade's most disciplined scene, and it did so around belief rather than around a sound.
France writes a book
The most consequential records of the decade came out of France, from people who would not be photographed. Deathspell Omega abandoned ordinary black metal after 2002 and produced Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice in 2004, the Kenose extended play in 2005 and Fas in 2007, a body of work with Orthodox chant inside it and a theological argument running through the texts. Blut aus Nord, one man in Normandy, released The Work Which Transforms God through Candlelight in 2003 and MoRT in 2006, records built out of dissonance and misdirection that sound like the tape is warping and are not.
The third French decision opened a door nobody expected. Stephane Paut, working as Neige, put out the Le Secret extended play in 2005 and then Alcest's first album, Souvenirs d'un autre monde, through Prophecy Productions in August 2007: black metal structure with the aggression removed and shoegaze guitars in its place. Everything that later got called blackgaze descends from that record, including the arguments about whether it should be allowed to.
America finds its own reason to play it
The United States had produced black metal since the early nineties and mostly produced imitations. That stopped with a record made in San Francisco in 1998 by a band that had already broken up by the time it came out. Weakling's Dead as Dreams, released by tUMULt in 2000, is five tracks and seventy six minutes, with a twenty minute title piece, and it established that an American band could take the form apart and rebuild it around length and repetition rather than around Norway.
What followed used the same permission in different ways. Agalloch made The Mantle for The End Records in 2002 out of folk, doom and neofolk. Xasthur and Leviathan, two men working alone on the west coast, filled the Moribund catalogue with recordings that are as much about hiss and distance as about riffs. Wolves in the Throne Room, formed in Olympia in 2002 by the Weaver brothers, released Diadem of 12 Stars on Vendlus in 2006 and Two Hunters on Southern Lord in 2007, and stated in every interview that the subject was the place they lived in rather than any Scandinavian inheritance. Krallice and Nachtmystium closed the decade by pushing the form toward technique and toward psychedelia respectively.
The eastern half of the map
Poland spent the decade producing two bands that would matter for the next twenty years, and they could hardly be less alike. Behemoth completed its move from black metal to a blackened death metal built for large rooms with Demigod in 2004, and by the end of the decade was a touring company with a singer well known outside metal altogether. Mgla, formed in Krakow in 2000 by the two men who still are the band, went the other way: Groza in 2008 on Northern Heritage, a Finnish label with no press department, no photographs worth the name, and songs numbered rather than titled.
Ukraine supplied the decade's quietest catalogue. Drudkh, formed in Kharkiv in 2002 around Roman Saenko, released Forgotten Legends in 2003, Autumn Aurora in 2004 and Blood in Our Wells in 2006 through the English label Supernal Music, gave no interviews at all for the first seven years of its existence and did not maintain a website until 2009. The records are long, melodic and built on repetition, and they reached an audience across Europe entirely on word of mouth and distro lists.
The machinery underneath
None of this would have travelled without a distribution layer that the founders never had. The decade's important labels were nearly all founded inside it, and nearly all by one or two people working from home.
- Nuclear War Now! Productions, founded in 2001 by Yosuke Konishi, built on vinyl reissues and war metal.
- Norma Evangelium Diaboli in France, the publishing arm of the orthodox Satanic wing.
- Profound Lore, founded in May 2004 by Chris Bruni, which became the American home for everything difficult.
- Southern Lord, already established, opening its catalogue to black metal from 2007 onward.
- Moribund and tUMULt in the United States, both running on tiny pressings and mail order.
Above them sat the tape distros, the message boards and the file sharing networks, and at the end of the decade, in September 2008, Bandcamp opened and quietly removed the last reason to have a distributor at all. A genre that had spent the nineties defined by one country spent the two thousands packing itself into padded envelopes and leaving by post. Where it arrived, and who was waiting, is the subject of modern Black Metal Bands, and the ten years described here are the hinge between the two halves of black metal, from the beginning.
