Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws.William Shakespeare, Sonnet 19
Twenty years, five countries doing the early work and one doing the loudest, and a shape that only becomes visible when the dates are set out in a column. The useful thing about a timeline of this music is not that it lists records. It is that the gaps in it are as informative as the entries, and the two biggest gaps sit exactly where the standard telling insists there was momentum.
What follows is a working reference: one line per year from the first record to the end of the first phase, with the dates that can be checked and the reason each one earns its place. The full account of the founding records lives elsewhere, and so does the argument about the name itself. This is the skeleton those articles hang on.
Why the clock starts in December 1981
Two records by the same three men, eleven months apart, and the genre takes something different from each. Welcome to Hell was cut in three days at Impulse Studios in Wallsend in August 1981 and reached shops that December, and it carries the sound: bass and voice arriving as a single distorted event, drums falling forward through the bars, everything a producer would have tried to repair left exactly where it fell. Black Metal arrived on 1 November 1982 and carries the words, in block capitals, on the front. Neither record is the thing they name. Both are load bearing, and dating the genre from the second while the first supplies the method is the small dishonesty at the base of every account that starts in 1982.
The years, one line each
| Year | What happened, with the date | Why it is on the list |
|---|---|---|
| 1981 | December: Venom, Welcome to Hell, Neat, cut in three days at Impulse Studios | The method arrives with no name attached to it |
| 1982 | 1 November: Venom, Black Metal, Neat | The name arrives with nothing behind it yet |
| 1983 | 16 March: Bathory forms. October: Mercyful Fate, Melissa, Roadrunner | Occultism handled as though the books had been read |
| 1984 | March: Hellhammer, Apocalyptic Raids, Noise. 2 October: Bathory, Bathory, Tyfon. November: Celtic Frost, Morbid Tales | Subtraction and the treble guitar, invented in the same twelve months by people who had never met |
| 1985 | 27 May: Bathory, The Return......, Black Mark | The first record with no hospitality anywhere on it |
| 1986 | 10 August: Vulcano, Bloody Vengeance. 30 November: Warfare Noise, Cogumelo | South America goes on record, in editions almost nobody could buy |
| 1987 | 11 May: Bathory, Under the Sign of the Black Mark. August: Sarcofago, I.N.R.I., Cogumelo. August: Mayhem, Deathcrush | The atmosphere, the uniform and the first Norwegian object, inside four months |
| 1988 | 17 October: Bathory, Blood Fire Death, Under One Flag | The man who built the instrument puts it down |
| 1989 | Blasphemy circulate the demo Blood Upon the Altar. Mystifier form in Salvador | The European founders have all stopped; what activity there is sits on other continents |
| 1990 | Bathory, Hammerheart. 5 to 9 December: Master's Hammer record Ritual in Prague | The one Swedish record of the year points away from the genre, and the new ideas are in Prague |
| 1991 | 8 April: Per Ohlin dies. Around May: Helvete opens in Oslo. August: Darkthrone record A Blaze in the Northern Sky at Creative Studios | The scene acquires an address, and a death it will never stop being asked about |
| 1992 | February: Darkthrone, A Blaze in the Northern Sky, Peaceville. March: Burzum, Burzum, Deathlike Silence. 6 June: the Fantoft stave church burns. 22 June: the Mayhem sessions begin at Grieghallen | Poor fidelity becomes a stated position rather than a budget |
| 1993 | 15 February: Darkthrone, Under a Funeral Moon. Early in the year: Helvete closes. July: Emperor record at Grieghallen. 10 August: Oystein Aarseth is killed. 25 October: Satyricon, Dark Medieval Times, Moonfog | The scene starts running its own labels and loses its centre in the same year |
| 1994 | 17, 21 and 22 February: three albums in six days. 2 to 16 May: the Vikernes trial. 24 May: Mayhem, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas | The whole backlog reaches shops at once and the period closes behind it |
| 1995 | February: Ulver, Bergtatt, Head Not Found. 5 June: Darkthrone, Panzerfaust, Moonfog. Ved Buens Ende, Written in Waters | The first records made by people arguing with the doctrine rather than obeying it |
| 1996 | January: Burzum, Filosofem, Misanthropy. Satyricon, Nemesis Divina. Dimmu Borgir, Stormblast. Ulver, Kveldssanger | Ambition arrives, and with it the first commercial temperature |
| 1997 | Dimmu Borgir, Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, Nuclear Blast. March: Ulver, Nattens madrigal. Emperor, Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk | The symphonic wing gets a budget and the purity argument gets a target |
| 1998 | Ulver leave the genre outright with an album built on William Blake | The exits begin, and they are made by the best musicians in it |
| 1999 | Dodheimsgard, 666 International. Satyricon, Rebel Extravaganza, number 32 in Norway | Norwegians dismantling the form from the inside, and charting while they do it |
| 2000 | Weakling, Dead as Dreams. Mayhem, Grand Declaration of War | The argument moves abroad and the first phase is over |
The hole in the middle, 1988 to 1990
Read the column and the first thing that jumps is three consecutive years with almost nothing European in them. The founders had all stopped or turned by the end of 1988. Hellhammer no longer existed and had not since 1984. Celtic Frost had walked out of the style entirely. Mercyful Fate had split once already. Venom had lost their guitarist and were making records nobody now defends. Quorthon, the only one still moving, moved in the opposite direction and took Norse myth with him.
A genre spent three years with no working practitioners in the country that would later claim to have founded it, and the tape traders kept the thing alive by post while it had nothing to trade.
What filled the gap was outside the eventual centre in every case: Brazil kept working, Colombia kept working, and a Prague band recorded in December 1990 an album that does most of what the Norwegian records would do a year later, complete with timpani and a hunting horn. This is why the two wave model, however useful, hides as much as it shows. The waves are not consecutive swells. They are two separate events with a trough between them in which the music was carried by countries that got no credit for it.
Four weeks in 1994, and why they are misread
| Date | Event | Label |
|---|---|---|
| 17 February | Darkthrone, Transilvanian Hunger | Peaceville |
| 21 February | Emperor, In the Nightside Eclipse | Candlelight |
| 22 February | Enslaved, Vikingligr Veldi | Deathlike Silence |
| 2 to 16 May | The trial, and a sentence of twenty one years | |
| 24 May | Mayhem, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas | Deathlike Silence |
Six days in February 1994 produced three of the most cited albums in the genre, on three labels in two countries, and the arrangement reads in hindsight like a campaign. It was nothing of the sort. Two of the three had been recorded a year or more earlier, one label was working through a backlog, another was being wound up out of a dead man's estate, and the compression is an accident of paperwork rather than a statement of intent. Every one of these records was finished long before it was sold.
Why the list stops in 2000
Because by then the argument had left the country that owned it. Ulver had gone, having announced plainly that they were not a black metal band and did not wish to be treated as one. Dodheimsgard had taken the form apart with drum machines and left the pieces on the floor. The symphonic wing had major label money and television. And a band in San Francisco released a record in 2000 that ran to nearly eighty minutes across five pieces and moved the whole conversation onto another continent, which is where the second half of the story happens.
None of that is a decline and calling it one is lazy. It is what happens when a set of rules made by about thirty people in one city meets several thousand musicians who never had to obey them. The years after 2000 belong to a different account, and the full arc from the goat's skull sleeve to the present is set out in the black metal overview.
One question the dates cannot settle is the one people ask first, which is where those two words came from and who is entitled to them. Newcastle printed them, Sweden and Brazil earned them, and Norway trademarked them, and the argument is worked through in why Is It Called Black Metal.
