Two corners of the north never became scenes, and the reasons are opposite. Denmark exported the record that half of the second wave grew up on and then produced almost nothing for twenty years. The Baltic states produced a great deal, very fast, from 1993 onward, and almost none of it reached anybody because there was no distribution, no money and, for most of the decade, no functioning industry of any kind. Both cases are absent from the standard account set out in chapter four, and both are worth having.
Denmark went first, and then stopped
Mercyful Fate, formed in Copenhagen in 1981, released Melissa in 1983 and Don't Break the Oath in 1984, and those two albums turn up in the stated influences of a remarkable proportion of the Norwegian and Swedish bands who came a decade later. That is the whole of Denmark's contribution to the first wave and it is a considerable one. First in. Then nothing, for twenty years.
What followed was not a scene but a single act of persistence. Founded in 1991 by two brothers who sign themselves Ustumallagam and Azter, and content to work through demos, singles and split releases for a decade and a half before committing to a full length record, Denial Of God did not release a debut album until The Horrors of Satan in 2006, with Death and the Beyond following in 2012. Fifteen years of short form releases is not a career strategy anyone would recommend, and it is the reason the band is respected in the underground and unknown outside it.
Horned Almighty, working from 2000 onward, were the first Danish band in the genre to behave like a professional operation, issuing In the Year of Our Horned Lord in 2004 and keeping a record out roughly every three or four years since, as far as Contagion Zero in 2024. Their material is closer to the blackened end of death metal than to anything Norwegian, which is itself a Danish pattern: the country's extreme music has always leaned towards weight rather than towards cold.
Copenhagen, from 2009
The actual Danish scene is fifteen years old. Solbrud formed in Copenhagen in 2009 and released a self titled debut on 2 April 2012 through Euphonious and Vendetta, followed by three further albums before the band stopped in 2024. Out of the same personnel came Afsky, a solo project of Solbrud's singer and guitarist, with a self titled release in 2015, Sorg in 2018 and Ofte jeg drømmer mig død on Vendetta in 2020. Orm and Slægt worked the same ground in the same city over the same years.
What that generation shares is atmosphere at length: long pieces, melody used structurally, and production that is clean by the standards of the genre. It has more in common with what Iceland was doing at the same moment than with anything in Denmark's own past, and it arrived through the same festival circuit and the same set of European labels.
The country's extreme music has always leaned towards weight rather than towards cold.
The Baltic states began in 1993, and not with Satan
East of the sea the chronology is compressed and the subject matter is different. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1990 and 1991; the first Lithuanian black metal demos, by Anubi and Poccolus, appeared in 1993. Those two facts are not adjacent by accident. The Baltic bands were not arguing with a church, they were arguing with an occupation that had ended the year before last, and the material they reached for was pre Christian, local and linguistic: old gods, old languages, old songs, set to tremolo picking.
Lithuania organised itself into three groups in three towns. Utena produced Poccolus, Ha Lela and Zpoan Vtenz. Kaunas produced Anubi, Nahash and Valefar. Vilnius produced Juodaragis and Obtest, which had started in 1992 as a death metal band and changed course into pagan black metal within a couple of years. None of these bands had access to a pressing plant at home, and cassettes copied one at a time and posted out under a flag that had been legal for three years did the work that distribution networks did elsewhere.
Dangus, and what a label is for
The single most consequential institution in Baltic black metal is a label rather than a band. Dangus, operating out of Lithuania, put out the releases that fixed what the country's music was going to be, and its catalogue in the middle of the decade reads as a national archive before anyone thought to build one.
| Year | Artist | Release |
|---|---|---|
| 1994 | Anubi | Mastabos dvelksmas, demo |
| 1995 | Anubi | Mirties metafora, demo |
| 1995 | Meressin | Satan, Oro Te, Reo Portas Patere |
| 1996 | Poccolus | Poccolus, the self titled album |
| mid 1990s | various | the Dark Fire Dancing compilation series |
| mid 1990s | Zpoan Vtenz, Ha Lela, Ugnėlakis, Wejdas | albums and demos |
Read the third column rather than the first. A compilation series, two demos by one band issued as proper releases, and a self titled album by a group from a small provincial town: that is what a scene looks like when one person with a post office box decides it is going to exist. Nothing on that list sold in quantities anyone would print, and every band in the Baltic states since has worked in its shadow.
Latvia and Estonia
Skyforger assembled in Riga in 1995 out of the remains of a doom band called Grindmaster Dead, recorded a black metal demo in 1997 and then made Kauja pie Saules in 1998, after which the band moved steadily towards folk material without ever abandoning the metal. Pērkoņkalve and the entirely acoustic Zobena dziesma both appeared in 2003, Kurbads went out through Metal Blade in 2010, and Senprūsija in 2015 carried songs in Old Prussian, a language with no living speakers. The kokles, the stabule, the ģīga and the dūdas are all on those records: bagpipes brought into a black metal record the way a blade is laid on a table, without explanation and without apology.
Estonia moved on the same timetable and stayed smaller. Tharaphita, named after a thunder god, was conceived in 1993, held its first rehearsals in 1995 and recorded the demo Must viirastus in August and September of that year, and it has kept a pagan and epic strand of black metal running ever since. Loits has been active since 1996. Manatark, Urt and a short row of others fill in the rest, and none of them has ever had the audience their Lithuanian and Latvian neighbours found.
Four countries, two histories and no headlines. Denmark had the record everybody owned and no scene to put behind it for twenty years. The Baltic states had the scene, the languages and the conviction, and no way to get a box of cassettes across a border. Which of those is the harder problem is worth thinking about before returning to the country that had neither, in the Swedish Black Metal Scene.
