The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.John Milton, Paradise Lost
No other country turned this music into a body of argument. Norway produced a doctrine and then spent thirty years defending it, Sweden produced a guitar sound, Poland produced a work ethic. France produced theology, dissonance and a publishing industry, in that order, and it did so from a starting position of having almost no bands at all.
The wider chapter on France, Poland and Greece tracks how the northern records reached each of those countries. This page is about what happened in one of them once the postage had been paid, and the first thing that has to be understood is that France was paying the postage for everybody else.
The chequebook came first
Hervé Herbaut had been running a mail order operation called Strangulation Distribution since 1986, stocking records and demo tapes out of the north of France, when Samael played locally in 1991. He met the band, offered to release Worship Him, and started Osmose Productions in order to do it. Within four years the label had put out Immortal's first album, Marduk's second, records by Enslaved, Impaled Nazarene, Rotting Christ, Absu and Blasphemy, and two of the three Greek debuts of 1993. A country with no scene of its own was underwriting the discography of four other countries, and a considerable number of the bands it funded left for Nuclear Blast, Century Media or Metal Blade as soon as they could.
That is an unglamorous role and it is the reason French black metal arrived late and arrived informed. The people who eventually formed bands here had spent the early nineties handling other people's masters, reading other people's contracts and watching what happened to bands who signed the wrong one. Nobody in this scene has ever been naive about the record business.
From customer to publisher
The turn came with a label rather than with a band. Norma Evangelium Diaboli, run by the musician who signs himself Hasjarl, is not a French label with an international roster so much as a French editorial position with bands attached: theistic satanism, occult doctrine, no interviews, no photographs, records issued when they are finished and not when a quarter ends. Antaeus, Deathspell Omega, the German Katharsis, the Swedish Ofermod and Watain all went out through it. Blood Libels arrived in 2006, Paracletus on 9 November 2010, and by then the phrase orthodox black metal meant a specific catalogue with a specific address rather than a loose attitude.
France stopped being the continent's customer and became its publisher of doctrine.
| Label | Position | Records it is known for |
|---|---|---|
| Osmose Productions | funded the Norwegian and Greek second wave from 1991 | Samael, Immortal, Marduk, Rotting Christ, Necromantia |
| Drakkar Productions | kept the Black Legions catalogue alive from 1994 | Mütiilation, Vlad Tepes, Celestia |
| Norma Evangelium Diaboli | orthodox black metal as an editorial policy | Deathspell Omega, Antaeus, Watain, Ofermod |
| Debemur Morti Productions | the experimental wing | Blut Aus Nord and the 777 trilogy |
| Season of Mist | took French black metal into ordinary shops | Seth, Alcest, Merrimack |
The nineties that were not the Legions
Between the tape collective and the theologians there is a decade that gets skipped, and the band that fills most of it is Antaeus, formed in Maisons-Laffitte in 1993 as a side project and taken seriously from 1995 once Storm and Black Priest completed the line-up. Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan came in 2000 and De Principii Evangelikum in 2002, both of them fast, deliberately unpleasant records with a great deal of death metal in the drumming and none of the atmosphere the northern bands used to soften a mix. The band went quiet after Blood Libels and did not return with a new album until Condemnation in 2016, a gap of ten years that says something about how few people were making a living at this.
Blut Aus Nord spent the same years in a different direction, following Ultima Thulée with Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age in 1996, which is the last French black metal album that could pass for a Norwegian one. Everything the country is now known for was built by musicians who had already made that record and decided not to make it twice.
Dissonance as a national method
What the French actually invented is technical and it is easy to state. Take the tremolo picked figure that the second wave built everything on, and voice the chords underneath it so that they refuse to resolve: no return to the root, no cadence, intervals held against each other until the ear stops waiting for the release. Blut Aus Nord got there first on The Work Which Transforms God in March 2003, Deathspell Omega turned it into a compositional system across the trilogy that ran from 2004 to 2010, and Aosoth, Merrimack and Glaciation made it the ordinary vocabulary of the country. Two decades on it is the single most exported idea in extreme metal, audible in bands from New Zealand to New York who have never heard a Legions tape.
It is worth being blunt about the cost. The method produces records that are extremely difficult to remember, because a listener remembers resolutions and this music has removed them on purpose. The best of these albums survive that by writing long shapes instead of hooks. The worst are indistinguishable from one another and hide behind the reputation of the good ones.
The other France
Running alongside all of that is a wing that took the aggression out entirely, and the two are more closely connected than either audience likes to admit. Stéphane Paut, who works as Neige, played drums in Peste Noire from 2001 to 2009 while simultaneously building Alcest into the band that opened the door for shoegaze guitar in this genre, and also ran Amesoeurs and Les Discrets alongside it. Celeste, from Lyon, came at the same territory from hardcore instead. Whatever anybody thinks of the results, the personnel overlap means the pretty half of French black metal and the ugly half were made in the same rooms by the same hands.
The part that has to be stated
Peste Noire was formed in Avignon in 2000 by Ludovic Faure, who performs as Famine and is now the only permanent member. The politics are not an allegation and not a rumour. The album the band released in 2011 carries antisemitic, anti feminist and anti immigration caricature in its artwork and its presentation; the band has been dropped from festival bills in Germany and Norway on those grounds; and on 25 May 2021 Famine was convicted over an assault committed in a bar in July 2018 and given a suspended sentence and a fine. Those are the facts, they are on the record, and they are the reason this page contains no assessment of the music, no recommended album and no further discussion. The wider subject has an article of its own elsewhere on this site.
Where it got to
The scene's most visible recent moment came from one of its oldest bands. Seth, active since the mid nineties, released La morsure du Christ through the Marseille label Season of Mist on 7 May 2021 with the burning of Notre-Dame de Paris on the cover, an event from 15 April 2019 that had nothing to do with the band and everything to do with what the sleeve was going to mean in France. It was written entirely in French, it reached mainstream music press that had never covered the genre, and it did so without softening anything.
Thirty years after Osmose sent its first cheque to Switzerland, the country that had no bands has the deepest catalogue in Europe and the largest share of the ideas the rest of the world is currently using. The bands themselves, with the dates and the labels, are in french Black Metal Bands.
