Norwegian black metal did not come out of Metallica. It came out of Venom, Bathory and a handful of German records, and the line is direct enough that the musicians involved have spent thirty years saying so without anybody much listening.
The specific records
Sodom's In the Sign of Evil is the central one. Nineteen minutes, recorded almost live, barely competent by any conventional measure, and treated by the Norwegian scene as something close to a founding document.
Alongside it: Kreator's Endless Pain and Pleasure to Kill, Destruction's early releases, Hellhammer's Apocalyptic Raids, and the Venom and Bathory albums that all of those came out of.
What was taken
Four things, and it is worth separating them because the influence is usually described too loosely.
The vocal. The German rasp, low and forward with no attempt at a note, is the direct ancestor of the black metal shriek, which took the same technique and moved it up an octave.
The production philosophy. The German records made a virtue of not fixing anything, and the Norwegian scene took that considerably further into deliberate lo-fi as an aesthetic position rather than a budget constraint.
The imagery. Corpse paint, spikes, bullet belts, inverted crosses and pseudonyms all come from Venom by way of Sodom and, crucially, by way of Sarcofago in Brazil.
And the attitude: that a recording should be uncompromising rather than good, which is the single idea that separates the second wave of black metal from everything around it.
Deathcrush
Mayhem's 1987 debut EP is the clearest evidence. It is not black metal as the term came to be understood; it is fast, filthy thrash with a shrieked vocal, and it sounds like what a Norwegian teenager would make having heard the German records and nothing else.
Everything Norway did afterwards proceeded from there, and the distance travelled between Deathcrush and the records of 1993 is enormous. The starting point is not.
| Element | From | To |
|---|---|---|
| The rasped vocal | Kreator, Sodom | The black metal shriek |
| Lo-fi as a choice | The Caet and Musiclab records | Deliberate primitivism |
| Corpse paint and spikes | Venom, Sodom, Sarcofago | The Norwegian visual language |
| Uncompromising over good | Hellhammer, Venom | The whole second wave |
| Tremolo picking | Kreator, and Bathory | The defining guitar technique |
What was not taken
The riff construction, mostly. German thrash builds from downpicked sequences; black metal builds from tremolo picked figures that fill the space rather than punctuating it, and that is a genuinely different way of writing.
And the subject matter. The German bands were writing about war, the state and chemical weapons; the Norwegian scene was writing about something else entirely and meant it in a way that Sodom did not.
Why it gets missed
Because the histories of black metal are written from Norway forwards, and the histories of thrash are written from California. Neither has much incentive to trace a line from Gelsenkirchen to Oslo, and the fact that both scenes were working from the same three or four British and German records is inconvenient for a story about spontaneous generation.
It also gets missed because the German bands did not claim it. Sodom have been notably relaxed about the whole thing, and a scene that produced a genre and then declined to make anything of it is easy to leave out.
The full German story is in Teutonic Thrash, and the records themselves are ranked in The Best German Thrash Metal Albums.
The Brazilian half
Germany supplied the sound and Brazil supplied the look, and both halves have to be in the account for it to make sense.
Sarcofago's I.N.R.I. in 1987 has corpse paint, bullet belts and spikes on the sleeve, four years before anybody in Norway formed a band. Norwegian musicians have said in print that the photograph was directly formative, and the visual language the world associates with a Scandinavian forest was shot in Minas Gerais.
So the line runs Newcastle to the Ruhr to Belo Horizonte to Oslo, which is a considerably stranger and more interesting route than the one the histories usually draw.
What Sodom made of it
Very little, which is the most German thing about the whole story.
The band have been asked about their influence on black metal repeatedly and have generally responded with a shrug and a variation on the observation that they were teenagers making a record they could barely afford. There has been no attempt to claim paternity, no reissue campaign built around the connection, and no sense that they regard it as their most important achievement.
Given how much of the extreme metal world is built on nineteen minutes they recorded almost live in 1985, that is either admirable restraint or a considerable missed opportunity, depending on how you feel about legacy management.
How to hear the line
Play In the Sign of Evil, then Deathcrush, then something from 1993. The distance between the first and the last is enormous; the distance between the first two is very small indeed.
That middle record is the evidence. Everything Norway became is downstream of a Norwegian band trying to make a German record and not quite managing it.
Why it matters to get right
Not for the sake of credit, which none of the parties involved seems to want, but because the standard family tree of extreme metal is wrong in a way that makes the whole story less interesting.
The usual diagram runs thrash to death metal to black metal, in a sequence, each growing out of the last. What actually happened is that three or four records from 1981 to 1985 were heard in several countries at once and different scenes took different things from them, and the results developed in parallel rather than in series.
Get that right and the 1980s stop being a progression and become what they were: a set of simultaneous, badly informed, geographically scattered experiments on the same raw material.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Attributions of influence follow published interviews with the musicians concerned.
