Britain named this music and then spent the following decade failing to make it. The word came off an English sleeve in 1982, the tape trading network that carried the Norwegian demos ran through English post boxes, and the label that paid for the founding records of the second wave was English too. What the country did not produce, at the point when it mattered, was bands. That gap is the most interesting thing about British black metal and it explains almost everything that came afterwards, including why the most commercially successful band in this article is the one the genre likes least.
This is a scene the wider survey in chapter five does not reach, because Britain is not a continental scene and its story does not run in parallel with theirs. It runs in reverse.
A chequebook, again
Peaceville Records was founded in 1987 in Dewsbury by Paul Halmshaw, known as Hammy, and it began life as a tape label releasing anarcho punk with an explicitly left wing outlook and an anti major label position. Within five years it was releasing Darkthrone, and it stayed with the band through the records that defined the entire aesthetic, including the one recorded on a four track in a bedroom. It also carried My Dying Bride, Anathema, Paradise Lost, Katatonia and Autopsy. Halmshaw and his co-manager left in November 2006 after the label was sold to Snapper Music.
Set that beside Osmose in France and the point makes itself. Two of the three companies that paid for Norwegian black metal were not Norwegian, and one of them had come out of the anarcho punk scene. Whatever the second wave believed about itself, its distribution was arranged by people in Yorkshire and northern France with entirely different politics, and Cacophonous and Candlelight, both English, took much of the rest.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Cradle of Filth and the reputation problem
Cradle of Filth formed in Suffolk in 1991 and released The Principle of Evil Made Flesh through Cacophonous in 1994, then Dusk... and Her Embrace in 1996, Cruelty and the Beast in 1998 and Midian in 2000 through Music for Nations, before moving to Sony, Roadrunner, Peaceville, Nuclear Blast and Napalm across the following twenty five years. The honest assessment is in two parts and neither half is fashionable. The first record is a genuinely strange piece of work, keyboard heavy and badly recorded in an interesting way, and it is better than the genre has ever been willing to concede. Everything from 1996 onwards is a gothic metal band with a black metal vocal on top, which is a legitimate thing to be and is not what the audience arguing about it thinks it is arguing about.
The band also generated the only merchandising controversy this genre has produced that reached actual courtrooms. A shirt combining religious imagery with an obscene slogan was banned in New Zealand and people were prosecuted for wearing it in Britain; an official in Glasgow called it sick and offensive, a phrase the band promptly reprinted in its own advertising. In 2010 a public vote to name Suffolk icons gave the band over thirteen thousand votes and the organisers left them off the list anyway. Whatever else is true, no other band in this article has been argued about by a local council.
The nineties that Britain actually had
The reason is not mysterious and it is worth stating plainly rather than treating as a failure of nerve. By 1991 the British underground had already spent five years building something else. Grindcore and death metal had taken the rehearsal rooms, the fanzines and the small venues, Earache in Nottingham was the label an ambitious extreme band wanted and could realistically reach, and the musicians who in Norway would have been nineteen and starting a black metal band were in England already in a grindcore band with a record out. A scene has a fixed number of people in it. Britain had spent its allocation.
The handful of black metal bands that did appear in those years were therefore doing something eccentric rather than orthodox, because there was no local orthodoxy for them to join. Bal-Sagoth emerged from Sheffield with symphonic arrangements and pulp fantasy narration and released A Black Moon Broods Over Lemuria through Cacophonous in 1995. Akercocke formed in London in 1997 and played blackened death metal in tailored suits, which was read as a joke for about two albums and then stopped being one. Anaal Nathrakh came out of Birmingham in 1999 and made The Codex Necro in 2001, a record with the treble of black metal, the tempos of grindcore and a drum machine underneath, and it remains the most extreme thing the country has produced.
Britain got to the name first and to the music last, and nothing about the order was accidental.
The pastoral turn
What finally produced a recognisable British scene was landscape. From about 2007 a set of bands began writing long, melodic, wind blown black metal about English and Scottish terrain and history: Winterfylleth out of Manchester, Wodensthrone, Fen, the Victorian conceit of A Forest of Stars and, in Scotland, Saor. The music is closer to the Cascadian bands than to anything Norwegian, and it is the first time this country produced a group of bands that sounded like each other on purpose.
It also produced the argument that follows any music built on national heritage. Winterfylleth replaced its bass player between its first and second albums after antifascists drew attention to slogans associated with the American far right posted on his personal page, and a Manchester festival cancelled a booking over it. The band changed its line-up, has said repeatedly that it does not hold those views, and has continued. Both halves of that belong in the record. Anybody writing about Anglo-Saxon heritage in this genre inherits the argument whether they want it or not, and the honest thing to say is that the question was raised for a reason and that the band answered it by removing a member.
The answer from the other side
Britain also produced the clearest opposite case in the genre. Dawn Ray'd, a trio from Liverpool, put out its first release in 2015, signed to Prosthetic Records in 2017 and released Behold Sedition Plainsong in 2019, an explicitly anarchist and antifascist black metal record with a violin in it, which Kerrang! reviewed at four out of five. The band announced its end in September 2023. It is easy to be cynical about politics in this music and rather harder to name another band that made an argument, stuck to it for eight years and then stopped rather than repeat itself.
Put the whole thing together and Britain looks less like a failed scene than like an unusually honest one. It arrived late, it never pretended to a lineage it did not have, its biggest band went commercial and said so, and its best records came from people writing about where they actually live. The next country in this chapter had the opposite instinct, ceremony and theatre rather than terrain, and it is covered in italian and Iberian Black Metal.
