On 17 January 2011, at the Grammis gala in Stockholm, the Swedish record industry handed its hard rock award to a band that performs in front of animal carcasses and douses its stage in blood. Watain took it for Lawless Darkness, released the previous June by Season of Mist, and the singer, Erik Danielsson, accepted it without a trace of apology.
I was quite surprised when we even got nominated. But considering all the blood, sweat and tears we have put into this, our life's mission, during the past 13 years, it is by all means an award well deserved.
Erik Danielsson of Watain, quoted by Blabbermouth, January 2011
Nothing of the sort could have happened in 1994. The record industry of any country would sooner have handed a prize to an arsonist, which in a few well documented cases would have been the same transaction. Yet by 2011 the second wave had been in the world for twenty years, its survivors had mortgages, and the music they made as teenagers was being taught, exhibited, licensed and sold back to the countries that had once treated it as a police matter. This chapter picks up black metal, the whole genre at the point where its second wave stopped being news and became a career, and follows it to the present.
Two things happened at once after 2000, and they pull in opposite directions. The founders turned into institutions, or into embarrassments, and in a few cases into both inside the same decade, the iconoclasts of 1993 filing tax returns and answering questions about their back catalogue. Meanwhile the actual centre of gravity moved somewhere none of them controlled: to one person in one room with a computer, a Bandcamp page and five hundred copies on tape. The genre got respectable at the top and stranger at the bottom. Both of those are the story.
The second wave grows old in public
The band that closed the first phase of Norwegian black metal did it by dissolving itself. Emperor released Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire and Demise in 2001 and stopped, having decided in advance that a fourth album made without conviction would cost them more than silence. They came back in pieces: three songs in Oslo on 30 September 2005, the Inferno festival in April 2006, Wacken that August, a run announced on 2 August 2013 for Wacken's twenty fifth anniversary, and another announced on 12 August 2016 to mark twenty years of Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk. In 2023 they toured the United States playing that album from beginning to end. In 2025 they did the same with In the Nightside Eclipse. A quarter of a century without a studio record, and they still close festivals on the strength of two albums cut in the Grieghallen studio in Bergen before most of the audience in front of them was born.
The Oslo band that gave the genre its worst headlines took the opposite route and kept working. Mayhem brought Attila Csihar back in 2004, the Hungarian voice from De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, and issued Chimera the same year and Ordo ad Chao on Season of Mist in 2007, a record that takes the microphones and buries them under the floorboards, so that the first few listens arrive like a rumour of an album rather than an album. Rune Eriksen, who had written their music since 1995 under the name Blasphemer, left in 2008; Morten Iversen, called Teloch, took the chair permanently in 2011 and has held it since. Esoteric Warfare followed in 2014 and Daemon in 2019. Four decades in, they are a touring company with a catalogue and a crew.
Then there is the other end of the respectability scale. Satyricon went from Volcano in 2002, which won a Norwegian Grammy, to The Age of Nero in 2008, certified gold at home, to a self titled album in 2013 that entered the Norwegian chart at number one. In September of that year the band performed with the chorus of the Norwegian National Opera in the opera house on the Oslo waterfront, and the recording came out as Live at the Opera on 4 May 2015. In 2022 they released Satyricon & Munch through Napalm, a piece of music written to be played inside an Edvard Munch exhibition. The distance travelled between a burnt church and a state museum commission is the whole subject of this chapter, compressed into one band.
Darkthrone spent the period doing the least institutional thing available, which was to stop being a black metal band on purpose. The Cult Is Alive in 2006 turned the project toward crust punk and the heavy metal of 1981, and every record since has moved further into that private museum: F.O.A.D. in 2007, Circle the Wagons in 2010, It Beckons Us All on Peaceville on 26 April 2024, with another recorded in an Oslo studio in June 2025. Two men, no concerts, no manager, no interest in being anybody's heritage act. It is the only exit from the museum that anyone from that generation has actually found.
| Band | Most recent studio album | Where they stand |
|---|---|---|
| Mayhem | Daemon (2019) | A working touring band, four decades on |
| Emperor | Prometheus (2001) | Festival headliner with no new record in 25 years |
| Immortal | War Against All (2023) | Demonaz kept the name after Abbath left in 2015 |
| Satyricon | Satyricon & Munch (2022) | Commissioned to write for a national museum |
| Darkthrone | It Beckons Us All (2024) | Two men, no live shows, a new album cut in 2025 |
| Gorgoroth | Instinctus Bestialis (2015) | Infernus kept the name through the courts in 2009 |
| Burzum | Thulêan Mysteries (2020) | Ambient recordings only, no metal since 2012 |
Who owns the name
In October 2007 the two best known members of Gorgoroth, the singer Gaahl and the bassist King ov Hell, announced that they had removed the guitarist who founded the band in 1992 and filed a trademark application for its name, on the argument that they had defined it creatively for eight years. Infernus disagreed in writing and then in court. In March 2009 the verdict went to him: the two who had tried to remove the founder had, in the court's reading, removed themselves. They took their material and formed God Seed, and Gorgoroth continued with a new line up to Instinctus Bestialis in 2015.
A genre that made its name destroying other people's property now spends a good deal of its time defending its own in front of a judge.
The pattern repeated wherever a band was worth more than the people in it. Immortal lost Abbath in March 2015 over the rights to the name; Demonaz registered it with the Norwegian patent office in July 2019, Horgh appealed successfully in 2020, and the band that emerged from all of it released Northern Chaos Gods in 2018 and War Against All in 2023. The ugliest case belongs to Poland. Batushka, an orthodox liturgy set to black metal that made Litourgiya in 2015 one of the decade's genuine surprises, split on 23 December 2018 when its founder, Krzysztof Drabikowski, announced that he was parting from the singer, Bartlomiej Krysiuk, who owned the label. Both continued under the same name. Both released an album in 2019, Panihida and Hospodi, to an audience that could not tell which was which. A Polish court blocked Krysiuk in May 2019, an appeal reversed that in June, and the case ran until 29 May 2024, when a first instance judgment went to Drabikowski. In September 2024 the other band changed its name to Patriarkh. Six years of litigation over a project about Slavonic chant.
The audit
Varg Vikernes was released on parole in March 2009, after serving close to fifteen years of a twenty one year sentence for murder and arson. He restarted Burzum with Belus in 2010, Fallen in 2011 and Umskiptar in 2012, then abandoned metal for ambient records. He moved to France, where he was arrested in July 2013 and released without charge, and where on 8 July 2014 a court convicted him of inciting racial hatred and gave him a six month suspended sentence and a fine of eight thousand euros. Reviews of the music after 2010 were written almost entirely as arguments about the man, which is what happens when a musician's public statements become the loudest thing he produces.
The wider change is that the genre is now audited. In March 2007 Hoest of Taake walked on stage in Essen with a swastika painted on his chest above an inverted cross, an act he later described as provocation, and the rest of the German dates were cancelled. Eleven years later that photograph ended a North American tour: venues in New York, Portland and Kansas City dropped the shows in February 2018 after organised campaigns against them, the support act left the bill, and the band answered with a statement that Taake is not and never has been a Nazi band. Whatever anyone concludes about that particular case, the mechanism is new. Promoters, festivals and record shops now ask questions that nobody asked in 1993, when the answers were considered part of the entertainment.
One man and a room
The genre's default unit is no longer a band. It is one person. That was true from the beginning in the sense that Burzum was one man in a studio with an engineer, and Bathory before it was largely Quorthon alone, but what was an eccentricity in 1992 became the normal way to make a black metal record after 2000. The reasons are partly technical. A cheap computer replaced the studio, and black metal is the one form of extreme metal whose aesthetics not only tolerate a recording made in a bedroom but frequently prefer it, since distance, hiss and a thin cymbal are read as atmosphere rather than as failure.
The best argument for the format is a brewer from Louisville. Austin Lunn founded Panopticon in 2007 and played everything on it himself, and in 2012 he made Kentucky, a record that puts banjo, fiddle and the union songs of Appalachian coal country inside black metal without either half apologising for the other. Roads to the North followed in 2014. Nobody signed off on that combination, because there was nobody to sign off. Blut aus Nord in France has worked the same way for thirty years, one man plus session help, and has produced a discography stranger than any committee would have permitted. Paysage d'Hiver in Switzerland spent two decades releasing hour long tapes of blizzard.
The format has an obvious cost, which is that there is nobody in the room to say the riff is not good. For every Kentucky there are two hundred projects whose only real content is the logo. The best of the modern bands often split the difference: Mgla, from Poland, is two people, one who writes everything and one who plays the drums, and Exercises in Futility in 2015 became the most widely admired black metal record of its decade by sounding like a band rather than like a man alone with a metronome.
The hood and what it is for
Anonymity in this genre is usually explained by its enemies as theatre and by its practitioners as hygiene. The strongest case for it is French. Deathspell Omega have no official website, no press photographs and no live performances, do not credit their own releases, and have refused nearly all interviews since 2004. What they have instead is a body of work that argues a position: Si monumentum requires, circumspice in 2004, the Kénôse extended play in 2005, Fas in 2007, Paracletus in 2010, then The Synarchy of Molten Bones in 2016, The Furnaces of Palingenesia in 2019 and The Long Defeat in 2022. There is no face to attach any of it to, no tour to explain it, and no interview in which a man in a hotel room reduces the theology to a soundbite. The records do all the talking, which was the stated point.
There is no face to attach it to, no tour to explain it, and no interview in which a man in a hotel room reduces the theology to a soundbite.
The convention also gets used as a marketing device, and occasionally as a hiding place. Ghost Bath spent 2014 and 2015 being written about as a Chinese band from Chongqing, on the strength of a debut released by a Chinese label, until the attention got large enough that somebody checked and found four men from Minot, North Dakota. Their singer, Dennis Mikula, said afterwards that the band had refused to correct anyone because it did not wish to put actual faces onto its music. The less flattering use is well known to anyone who buys records in this genre: a hood and a sigil let a musician avoid answering for opinions he has published in his own lyrics, and the small national socialist wing of the underground has relied on exactly that for thirty years. The mask that protects the work also protects the man who does not want to be asked.
Five hundred copies
The economy underneath all of this is small, physical and deliberately awkward. A modern black metal release is often a tape of a few hundred copies, hand numbered, sold by post from a distribution list, followed by a vinyl pressing on a label with no staff. Nuclear War Now! Productions, founded in 2001 by Yosuke Konishi, and Profound Lore, founded in May 2004 by Chris Bruni, built catalogues of several hundred titles apiece on that model. Norma Evangelium Diaboli in France, Iron Bonehead in Germany, Debemur Morti, Northern Heritage in Finland: none of them are large companies, and all of them have released records that a major label would not have understood how to sell.
Two things kept the model alive. The first is the split album, black metal's characteristic handshake, in which two bands share one release and each lends the other half of an audience. It is the cheapest form of promotion ever devised and it works in a genre where trust travels by association. The second is Bandcamp, which opened in Oakland in September 2008 and gave every bedroom project a shop window, a price it set itself and a direct line to a few hundred people scattered across a dozen countries. The underground did not need a distributor after that. It needed a post office and an audience willing to wait three weeks for a padded envelope.
Above that layer sits a professional tier that did not exist in 1996. Watain, Marduk and Behemoth tour with production, crews and merchandise operations, and the prize in Stockholm was one symptom of it. Season of Mist, Century Media and Nuclear Blast now carry black metal as a normal part of a catalogue. The genre supports perhaps two dozen bands who can live off it and several thousand who cannot, and the second group has always been where the interesting records come from.
The people who were not there
Helvete, the shop in Oslo where the second wave organised itself, closed in 1993. A large part of the music worth hearing now is made by people who were small children then or who had not been born, and who found the genre through a screen rather than through a counter and a hand written flyer. That distance shows in the records. It also removed the argument about credentials: a project in Montreal, Lisbon or Copenhagen no longer has to explain why it is not Norwegian.
Some of the results are orthodox and very good: Spectral Wound in Montreal, Gaerea in Portugal playing behind masks, Uada in Oregon in hoods, Afsky in Denmark, Lamp of Murmuur assembling raw black metal in a bedroom in California. Some of it is deliberately outside the tradition and started a fight because of it. Deafheaven put shoegaze guitars and a pink sleeve on Sunbather in 2013, took a hammer to the genre's dress code in the process, and sold the record to an audience that had never bought a black metal album in its life. Liturgy published a manifesto for what its founder called transcendental black metal and was treated by much of the underground as an invasion. Zeal and Ardor built Devil Is Fine in 2016 out of American spirituals and tremolo guitar and was reviewed by newspapers that had never printed the word blastbeat. The American end of that argument, including the environmental and left leaning strand that goes under the name cascadian black metal, is a chapter of its own.
What all of this produced is a genre with more branches than any of its founders intended, from depressive projects recording in a single room to symphonic bands with an orchestra on retainer. The full map of what black metal split into after 1995, and where each border actually runs, is laid out in black metal subgenres.
Where this leaves it
Black metal in 2026 is in better condition as music than it has been since about 1996, and in far worse condition as a threat, which is exactly the trade the founders said they would never make. Inferno, founded in Oslo in 2001 by Jens F. Ryland of Borknagar with Jan Martin Jensen, fills the Norwegian capital every Easter with people carrying rucksacks and festival wristbands. Beyond the Gates does the same in Bergen, a short walk from where most of this began. The pyre the second wave lit in the churchyards now burns behind glass, on a timer, with a plaque beside it and a queue at the door. Roadburn and Hellfest programme black metal alongside everything else, and the audience holds as many people who came for the atmosphere as for the blasphemy.
The founders are institutions, defendants, recluses or all three. The music has gone somewhere they do not control, into rooms with a laptop and a microphone stand and a cat asleep on the amplifier, and it is producing records that would have been unimaginable to anyone standing in Helvete in 1992. That is not decline. A genre that can only be made by twelve men in one city is a scene. A genre that can be made anywhere by anyone who understands it is a form, and forms last.
