One thousand copies, hand numbered, put out on cassette and compact disc by Embassy Productions in November 1995 and gone almost before anyone outside France knew they existed. March to the Black Holocaust, the split between Vlad Tepes and Belkètre, sold nothing, charted nowhere and was reviewed by almost nobody. Eighteen years later, in February 2013, Drakkar Productions issued it again on compact disc and double vinyl for an audience nobody counting stock in 1995 would have believed existed. The record had not changed. The people who needed it had multiplied.
That is the shape of this chapter. The second wave left Norway as a finished object: the treble guitar with the bottom cut out of it, the shriek, the paint, the refusal of anything a studio could offer, and a doctrine set down in interviews that read like a catechism. What reached France, Poland, Greece, Germany and eventually Iceland was not a copy of that object. It was a rite transcribed by hand into a dozen languages, every scribe altering the lines he could not read, until the thing that came out at the far end would have been disowned in Oslo. The doctrine in its original form is set out in black metal explained. What follows is what happened to it in translation.
The chapters before this one followed the music north and then east, into swedish black metal and the Finnish scene that shared its distribution network and almost none of its taste. From here the map stops being Scandinavian. Half a dozen countries took this music and did things with it that Norway had never asked for and would, in more than one case, have refused outright.
The tape as doctrine, and the men who would not sell it
The most extreme thing France did with black metal was refuse to sell it.
Les Légions Noires came together in the summer of 1993 out of an alliance between Vordb Bathor Ecsed, who had started Moëvöt in the autumn of 1991, and Meyhna'ch, who had founded Mütiilation the same year. Around those two gathered Vlad Tepes, formed in 1993 by Wlad and Vorlok Drakksteim, Belkètre, Torgeist, Black Murder, Brenoritvrezorkre and a shifting list of projects that shared members, equipment and an invented private language used on sleeves and in letters. The collective was active for roughly four years, 1993 to 1997. Almost all of it went out on cassette, in runs small enough to count on paper, traded rather than sold, and a good deal of it was withheld on purpose from anyone the group decided had no claim on it.
The most extreme thing France did with black metal was refuse to sell it.
The music matches the policy. On the Legions tapes the guitar arrives from the far side of the room, the drums are a rumour under the hiss and the voice is a thin lacerating thing with no low end to sit on: songs recorded so far from the microphone that they reach a listener as weather rather than as performance. Norwegian bands had made a virtue of cheap recording. The Legions walked past that into something closer to refusal, and what they left behind is the first body of black metal whose leading quality is that it does not want you. Half of it is unlistenable. The other half is among the most genuinely frightening music the genre has produced.
France after the Legions
France's first contribution to this music was not a band at all. It was a chequebook. Osmose Productions, trading from the north of the country since 1991, spent the decisive years of the second wave paying for records made by other people's scenes: Immortal's first album, Marduk's second, Enslaved's Frost, and two of the three Greek debuts discussed further down this page. A country with no scene worth the name in 1992 was bankrolling Norway's.
The bands came afterwards and they came strange. Blut Aus Nord, the project of the musician who signs himself Vindsval, released Ultima Thulée on 15 January 1995 through Impure Creations, a cold keyboard-heavy album still recognisably inside the northern line, and then spent three decades walking away from it. The Work Which Transforms God, out in March 2003, replaces the riff with a slowly rotating dissonance that has no obvious ancestor anywhere in metal, and the three 777 records issued between April 2011 and September 2012 on Debemur Morti push that further again. Nothing about the later work would have been legal under the 1993 rules.
Deathspell Omega went the other way and became theologians. Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice, released in February 2004 by Norma Evangelium Diaboli, fills a compact disc to its edge with liturgical Latin, hour-long argument and a guitar sound that curls in on itself, and the band has never given an interview, published a photograph or played a concert. Fas in 2007 and Paracletus in 2010 completed the trilogy; The Furnaces of Palingenesia in 2019 and The Long Defeat in 2022 kept the silence intact. Anonymity in Norway had been a costume. In France it turned into a working method, and the method outlasted the costume by twenty years.
Then there is Alcest, whose Souvenirs d'un autre monde in 2007 took the aggression out altogether and opened a door a great many bands have since walked through. The argument that followed, about blackgaze and post black metal and who is allowed to keep the name, is too large to settle in a paragraph and has chapters of its own.
Poland, and the border with death metal
Polish black metal grew up inside a death metal scene that was already there, and it never entirely moved out. That single fact explains most of what the country has produced: harder, squarer and more physically played than the Norwegian model, with the tremolo picking kept and the frost mostly discarded.
The band that carried it out of the country formed in Gdańsk in 1991. Behemoth spent three years on demos, of which From the Pagan Vastlands in 1994 is the one that circulated, and released Sventevith (Storming Near the Baltic) on Pagan Records in 1995, followed by Grom a year later. Both are pagan-themed black metal made with the northern toolkit. Then Adam Darski, who works as Nergal, did the thing this scene keeps doing: he filed the ice off his own records. Satanica in 1999 moved the band into blackened death metal, Demigod in 2004 made it an export, and The Satanist, released on 3 February 2014 and charting at number 15 in Poland, is the record that put a black metal band on festival main stages across Europe.
The years between those albums were not all spent on the road. Darski was diagnosed with leukaemia in August 2010, was treated with a bone marrow transplant, and left the haematology ward of the Uniwersyteckie Centrum Kliniczne in Gdańsk on 17 January 2011. He was also prosecuted for tearing up a Bible on stage in Gdynia in September 2007 and calling on the audience to burn the pages, charged under the Polish provision against offending religious feelings. A court acquitted him in 2011 on the ground that the act fell within artistic expression, prosecutors appealed, and the Supreme Court held in 2012 that the offence did not require a direct intention to offend. The case ran on for years and produced no conviction.
| Country | Band | Debut album | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Czechoslovakia | Master's Hammer | Ritual. | Monitor | 1991 |
| Greece | Rotting Christ | Thy Mighty Contract | Osmose Productions | 1993 |
| Greece | Varathron | His Majesty at the Swamp | Cyber Music | 1993 |
| Greece | Necromantia | Crossing the Fiery Path | Osmose Productions | 1993 |
| Germany | Bethlehem | Dark Metal | Adipocere | 1994 |
| France | Blut Aus Nord | Ultima Thulée | Impure Creations | 1995 |
| Poland | Behemoth | Sventevith (Storming Near the Baltic) | Pagan Records | 1995 |
| Germany | Nagelfar | Hünengrab im Herbst | Kettenhund | 1997 |
| Ukraine | Drudkh | Forgotten Legends | Supernal Music | 2003 |
| Iceland | Svartidauði | Flesh Cathedral | Terratur Possessions | 2012 |
The other Polish line runs quieter and has travelled further. Mgła began in Kraków in 2000 as a studio project of Mikołaj Żentara, who signs himself M., with the drummer Daren, both of them out of Kriegsmaschine; Maciej Kowalski, known as Darkside, took the drum stool in 2006, and the pair have run the band and their own label, No Solace, ever since. Groza arrived in 2008, With Hearts Toward None in 2012, and Exercises in Futility on 4 September 2015 through Northern Heritage. Six numbered pieces, no song titles, no interviews, faces covered on stage, and a rhythm section that swings where the northern model demands a flat blast. It is the most widely praised black metal record any European scene made in that decade.
Poland also produced the strangest single idea in modern black metal and then tore itself apart over who owned it. Batushka, formed in 2015 by Krzysztof Drabikowski with the vocalist Bartłomiej Krysiuk, set Orthodox liturgical chant against tremolo guitar on Litourgiya, released that year by Witching Hour Productions, and numbered the songs as though they were parts of a service. The two men separated in 2018 and both kept the name, which meant two Batushkas touring the same continent with different records behind them. A Warsaw court settled it in May 2024 in Drabikowski's favour. Krysiuk announced on 9 September 2024 that his group would work as Patriarkh, and the change took effect that December.
Around those three sit Furia, Infernal War, Blaze of Perdition and the older Christ Agony, and behind all of them the death metal machinery of Vader, which taught two generations of Polish musicians how to play fast without falling over. Nowhere else in Europe is the border between the two genres so thoroughly ignored.
The Hellenic sound, and what Athens put back
Three Athenian bands released their first albums in 1993, and between them they built a version of this music that owes as much to Iron Maiden and early gothic rock as to anything from Bergen. Varathron, formed in 1988 around the singer Stefan Necroabyssious, put out His Majesty at the Swamp on the Greek label Cyber Music. Necromantia, formed in 1989, put out Crossing the Fiery Path on Osmose. And the band that would outlast both of them released the record that gave the sound its name.
Rotting Christ began in 1987 as a grindcore band run by the brothers Sakis and Themis Tolis, passed through the Passage to Arcturo mini-album in 1991, and cut Thy Mighty Contract at Molon Lave Studio in Athens across November and December 1992 with George Osmak, Anthony Delaportas and the band at the desk. Osmose released it in 1993. Sakis Tolis sang and played guitar, Themis drummed, Jim Patsouris played bass, and the keyboards were handled by George Zacharopoulos, who also ran Necromantia and later the label Black Lotus Records. What the record does is lay a twin guitar harmony over a blast beat and hold a mid tempo for whole minutes at a stretch, gold leaf across a coffin lid.
What Norway had removed on principle, Athens put back on purpose. The warm guitar tone, the pinch harmonic, the keyboard doing the work of a church organ, the refusal to play everything at one speed: none of it was an accident and none of it was ignorance of the northern records, which the Greek musicians owned. It was a choice, and it produced the only regional sound of the nineties that can be identified from four bars.
What Norway had removed on principle, Athens put back on purpose.
Greece then spent a decade somewhere else entirely. Triarchy of the Lost Lovers in 1996 and A Dead Poem in 1997 pulled Rotting Christ towards gothic metal and a Century Media contract, and the band did not come back to its own material until Theogonia in January 2007, which rebuilt the sound out of Greek modal writing, chant and hand percussion. They are still at it: Pro Xristou arrived on 24 May 2024, thirty-seven years after the first rehearsal. Around them Thou Art Lord, Zemial, Kawir and Agatus kept a scene going that never had more than a few dozen people in it.
Bohemia, Germany and the middle of the map
The oldest record in this chapter is Czech and predates most of the Norwegian canon. Master's Hammer cut Ritual. at Studio C between 5 and 9 December 1990 with Miloš Doležal producing, and Monitor released it in February 1991, timpani, hunting horn, opera-house theatrics and all. Osmose put it out worldwide on compact disc in 1994 with two extra tracks. Its standing rests largely on one much-repeated sentence from a man who was present for the Norwegian version.
The first Norwegian black metal album, even though they are from Czechoslovakia.
Fenriz of Darkthrone, blog post, 21 November 2009
Germany is a scene without a capital, which is part of why it took so long to be treated as one. Bethlehem, working out of Grevenbroich since 1991, released Dark Metal through Adipocere in 1994, a slow, wrecked, unclassifiable record that the later depressive bands treat as a starting point and that named its own subgenre on the sleeve. Nagelfar, founded in 1993 by the guitarist Zorn and the drummer Alexander von Meilenwald, made Hünengrab im Herbst for Kettenhund Records in 1997, then Srontgorrth in 1999 and Virus West in 2001 before splitting in April 2002; writing in Rock Hard in October 2009, Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann called the debut the most important German black metal album and placed it sixteenth in the magazine's list of the twenty-five most important black metal albums ever made. Von Meilenwald has run the one-man project The Ruins of Beverast ever since.
Underneath the albums sits a tape culture as severe as anything in France. Moonblood, from Schneeberg in Saxony and active from 1994, put thirteen rehearsal tapes into the trading network and almost nothing a person could buy in a shop. Lunar Aurora made Weltengänger in 1996 and Katharsis made 666 in 2000, and No Colours Records pressed a large part of the decade. Italy meanwhile went for ceremony rather than winter: Mortuary Drape, formed in Alessandria in 1986, released All the Witches Dance in 1994, and Opera IX made The Call of the Wood in 1995, both of them occult in a theatrical, seance-holding sense the northern bands would have found ridiculous.
East of the Carpathians
Ukraine produced the most disciplined body of work in this chapter and told nobody anything about it. Drudkh formed in Kharkiv in 2002 around the guitarist Roman Saenko, who also runs Hate Forest, released Forgotten Legends through Supernal Music in 2003 and Autumn Aurora the year after, and built its lyrics out of nineteenth and twentieth century Ukrainian poetry rather than out of anything a metal band would ordinarily reach for. The group gave no interviews at all, had no website until its label opened one in 2009, and signed to Season of Mist in 2008, where it remains. Long melodies over a rolling blast, recorded warm and folded end to end: it is the one eastern scene that produced a sound rather than a posture. Russia answered with the Blazebirth Hall circle in the late nineties and, much later, the slower Sivyj Yar.
An honest account has to record that a nationalist strand runs through parts of the central and eastern scenes and that in places it is explicitly national socialist. Graveland, the Polish project Robert Fudali has run as Rob Darken since 1991, has been reported on those grounds for three decades, was dropped by its Austrian label after racist statements, and lost bookings in France and Canada in 2016 after protests. Nokturnal Mortum, from the same city as Drudkh, spent its early years attached to the same politics and later published statements distancing itself from them. Both facts belong in the record and neither belongs on a poster. The great majority of the bands in this chapter have nothing to do with any of it, and the ones that do are not made more interesting by it.
Iceland, and the last scene to arrive
Nothing here is harder to explain than Iceland. A country of fewer than four hundred thousand people, with no black metal history to speak of before 2010, produced inside five years a body of work with a recognisable sound, its own festival and an audience on two continents. The membership overlaps so heavily that two dozen musicians account for very nearly all of it.
Svartidauði, formed in 2006 by Sturla Viðar and Þórir Garðarsson, recorded Flesh Cathedral at Manus Nigra Studios in Reykjavík across January and February 2011, roughly twelve days of work with Stephen Lockhart producing, and Terratur Possessions and Daemon Worship released it on 3 December 2012. Rock Hard gave it 8.5 out of 10; Kerrang! placed it in its 2020 list of the thirteen greatest black metal albums of the century. What it sounds like is a rope bridge with a plank missing, walked at speed: chords stacked until they refuse to resolve, a rhythm section that tilts rather than drives, and no interest whatever in the clean cold treble of 1993.
Misþyrming followed with Söngvar elds og óreiðu on 7 February 2015 through Fallen Empire and Terratur Possessions, and after that came Sinmara, Naðra, Auðn, Wormlust, Almyrkvi and Zhrine, most of them sharing players. Lockhart, who engineers a large part of it at Studio Emissary, also organised Oration MMXVI in Reykjavík, the first international black metal festival the country had held. A scene that could fit into one room booked a week of it and filled the room.
Set the two ends of this chapter beside each other and the argument makes itself. The Legions hoarded a thousand cassettes and told the world it was not welcome; Iceland built a festival and invited it. Both are black metal, both descend from the same handful of Norwegian records, and neither would have been endorsed by the men who made those records. Norway built the object. Everywhere else built a use for it, which is the only reason the music is still alive thirty years on. The loudest argument about who is entitled to make it was never settled in Europe at all, and that fight is the American chapter.
