The second wave of black metal is filed under Norway, and the filing is wrong at both ends.
It is wrong at the front, because the four records that taught Norway what to do were made in a converted garage on the western edge of Stockholm between 1984 and 1988 by a teenager working on his own. It is wrong at the back, because what came out of Sweden and Finland afterwards was never a provincial copy of Bergen and Oslo. It was two separate arguments, one of them melodic, arranged and recorded with real care, the other one filthy, drunk and closer to hardcore punk than to anything with a cathedral in it, and neither country wanted what Norway wanted.
This chapter is the corrective, and it is deliberately short of churches. The four years described in the previous chapter on Norwegian church burnings have been allowed to stand in for an entire region for thirty years, and everything east and north of the Norwegian border has been reduced to a footnote about influence. What follows runs from Vällingby in 1983 to Reykjavík in the last decade, and it argues one thing throughout: the north is not a single scene with a Norwegian centre. It is four or five scenes that heard each other and then went their own way on purpose.
Sweden got there first, by six years
Bathory formed on 16 March 1983 in Vällingby, on the western edge of Stockholm, and had four albums in the shops before anybody in Norway had a black metal band at all. Thomas Börje Forsberg, who signed himself Quorthon, was eighteen when he recorded the first of them at Heavenshore, a converted garage, in June 1984, and Tyfon Grammofon released it that October with a goat's head on the sleeve and almost nothing on the credits.
The first four albums are the blueprint, and that is not this magazine's word for it: Lords of Chaos, the 1998 book that shaped most English writing about this music, uses exactly that term. Bathory in 1984 and The Return...... in 1985 hand over the vocal, a shriek pushed through cheap reverb until it comes back sounding like weather, and the guitar with the bottom cut out of it. Under the Sign of the Black Mark, recorded in 1986 and released the following year, adds the keyboard wash, the slow ceremonial pieces and the sleeve that half of Scandinavia copied. Blood Fire Death in 1988 adds the long form and the Norse imagery. By Hammerheart, released on Black Mark in 1990, Quorthon had walked out of the method he invented and started a second genre on his way through the door.
He did nearly all of it alone, with session players and his father's small label behind him, and he gave almost no interviews and played almost no concerts. Thomas Forsberg died of heart failure in June 2004, aged 38.
Norway did not invent the weather. It moved into it.
Six years of nothing, and then all of it at once
Sweden then did nothing with its own invention for the better part of a decade. Between 1988 and 1992 the Swedish underground went to death metal instead, to Sunlight Studio in Stockholm and the guitar tone Tomas Skogsberg built there, and it went there in numbers that no other country in Europe could match. While teenagers in Oslo were assembling a doctrine, teenagers in Stockholm were assembling an export industry. That gap is the most useful fact anyone can hold about Swedish black metal, because it explains why the country's second wave arrived late, arrived with players who could already read an arrangement, and never had any patience for the idea that incompetence was a moral position.
When it did arrive it arrived all at once. Marduk, formed in Norrköping in 1990 by the guitarist Morgan Håkansson with the stated intention of being the most blasphemous band in the world, got there first with the Fuck Me Jesus EP in 1991 and Dark Endless in 1992. Necrophobic had formed in Stockholm in 1989 out of the death metal scene and never entirely left it. Dissection formed in Strömstad in 1989, two hours up the coast from Gothenburg and forty minutes from the Norwegian border. The twin brothers from Trollhättan started Nifelheim in 1990 and have spent thirty five years refusing to sound like anything recorded after 1985.
The label that carried most of it was No Fashion Records, run out of Stockholm from 1992 to 2004 by Tomas Nyqvist, who had come to it from editing a fanzine and who ran the roster the way a fanzine editor would, which is to say on taste and on very little money. Marduk, Dissection, Unanimated and eventually Dark Funeral all went out under that logo, and so did a good deal else.
The melodic line, and the room most of it was recorded in
The Swedish answer to the question of what black metal is was, from the first record onward, a musical answer rather than a moral one. Sweden did the thing Norway would not do: it wrote tunes. Harmonised twin guitar lines out of the same tradition that had already produced Gothenburg death metal were laid over blast beats without either side giving way, songs were built in movements with returns and modulations, and the melody was used as a weapon rather than treated as a concession.
The band from Strömstad wrote the two records the rest of it is measured against. The Somberlain, recorded at Unisound in March 1993 with Dan Swanö engineering and released by No Fashion on 3 December that year, is the one where the method is assembled in public. Storm of the Light's Bane, cut in the same room in March 1995 and released by Nuclear Blast on 17 November, is the one where it works from the first bar to the last: "Night's Blood", "Where Dead Angels Lie" and "Thorns of Crimson Death" carry more written music between them than most of the Norwegian catalogue of the same years, and none of it is any warmer for that.
| Year | Band | Album | Recorded at |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1993 | Dissection | The Somberlain | Unisound |
| 1995 | Unanimated | Ancient God of Evil | Unisound |
| 1995 | Naglfar | Vittra | Abyss |
| 1995 | Dissection | Storm of the Light's Bane | Unisound |
| 1996 | Sacramentum | Far Away from the Sun | Unisound |
| 1996 | Vinterland | Welcome My Last Chapter | Unisound |
| 1996 | Dark Funeral | The Secrets of the Black Arts | Abyss |
Read the last column. Five of the seven were made in one building, Dan Swanö's Unisound, and the other two at Peter Tägtgren's Abyss Studio in Pärlby, which he opened as the melodic line was peaking. Sacramentum spent a fortnight there in the summer of 1995 on Far Away from the Sun. Naglfar cut Vittra at Abyss in July of the same year and Wrong Again put it out that December. Vinterland recorded Welcome My Last Chapter over the winter of 1995 and No Fashion released it on 4 March 1996, and the band then fell apart and left one album behind, which is the most Swedish outcome available. The point is the addresses. There is a professional recording industry underneath this music, and nobody in Sweden pretended otherwise.
What Sweden took from Norway, and what it refused
What it took is easy to list, because it is what everybody took: the tremolo picked figure held for eight bars, the blast beat, the corpse paint, the logo you cannot read, the anti-Christian frame around the whole thing.
What it refused begins with the war on production, and the proof is Dark Funeral. The Stockholm band recorded The Secrets of the Black Arts at Unisound between 15 and 21 January 1995, and the guitarist David Parland refused to let it out, saying the session had been handled unprofessionally and that the drumming was not good enough. The whole album was recorded again at Abyss with Tägtgren producing and No Fashion released it in January 1996. Hold that beside Norway in the same eighteen months, where a rejected rehearsal recording was the desired outcome and a good engineer was an accusation. The Swedes wanted the record to be right.
It refused the isolation as well. Swedish bands toured, took contracts from Nuclear Blast, Osmose and Century Media, played abroad and answered their post, at a moment when a section of the Norwegian scene treated all four of those activities as evidence of weakness. And it very largely refused the arson. One Swedish church, Lundby new church in Gothenburg, burned on 7 February 1993. That is the whole of Sweden's contribution to that particular practice, in a country with a scene at least as large.
Hold that beside Norway in the same eighteen months, where a rejected rehearsal recording was the desired outcome and a good engineer was an accusation.
The Swedish criminal case, when one came, was different in kind, and it is set down here once and plainly. Jon Nödtveidt of Dissection was arrested on 18 December 1997 and convicted of complicity in the murder of Josef ben Meddour, who was killed on 22 July 1997. He was sentenced to ten years and released in 2004. Dissection released no records for seven years. Nödtveidt died on 13 August 2006.
The last difference is the one that shows up in the public record. In January 2011 Watain, formed in Uppsala in 1998, took the Grammis for best hard rock album for Lawless Darkness, against Ghost and Sabaton, at a ceremony run by the Swedish record industry. Whatever else that is, it is a scene that was let into the building.
Finland, which was never in the same argument
The three men from Rovaniemi, four hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, started Beherit in 1989 and produced the ugliest recordings anybody in the north had made to that point. Their first LP was not their doing at all: The Oath of Black Blood, assembled by the label in 1991 out of a demo and an EP after the band spent the studio budget on drink, and Marko Laiho has said since that he hates it. The record they meant to make appeared on 13 November 1993. Drawing Down the Moon, recorded at Studio Sound in Kuopio between April and September 1992 and released by Spinefarm, runs thirteen tracks and thirty nine minutes on synthesiser haze, treated vocals and a rhythm section that sounds as though it is being transmitted from somewhere rather than played in a room.
Then, in 1995, Electric Doom Synthesis, which is dark ambient and has no metal in it whatever. The band that had helped invent the most primitive form of the music simply walked out of it into synthesisers, years ahead of the ambient turns that followed elsewhere in the north.
Impaled Nazarene formed in Oulu in November 1990 and did the same job from the other direction. Tol Cormpt Norz Norz Norz, out on the French label Osmose in 1992, entered the Finnish album chart, which no Norwegian band of that year managed at home. Ugra-Karma followed in 1993 and Suomi Finland Perkele in 1994, and across all three the hardcore punk, the grindcore and the thrash are audible in the mix from the first minute. Nobody in Oulu was policing the border of the genre because nobody in Oulu recognised one.
He will charm thee with his singing,
Elias Lönnrot, Kalevala, Rune III, translated by John Martin Crawford
Will bewitch thee in his anger,
He will drive thee back dishonored,
Sink thee in the fatal snow-drift.
Archgoat had formed in Turku in 1989 and Barathrum in Kuopio in 1990, and behind all of them stood Spinefarm, started in Helsinki in 1990 by Riku Pääkkönen as a mail order operation and turned into the label that would later carry most of Finnish metal to the rest of the world. What Finland refused was the purity test. No one there was auditing anyone else's record collection for correctness, no one was issuing lists of who counted, and the results are drunker, funnier, dirtier and a good deal less concerned with being taken seriously than what was being made three hundred kilometres west in the same years.
The second Finnish generation
The Finnish scene's real weight arrived after the noise had died down in Norway, and it has never really stopped since. The names are worth having in one place:
- Horna, formed in Lappeenranta in 1994 and still the spine of the whole scene, with more releases than most people can count.
- Behexen, formed the same year, the ceremonial end of it.
- Sargeist, begun in 1999 as a solo project by Horna's Shatraug and later filled out with members of Behexen.
- Clandestine Blaze, begun in 1998 by Mikko Aspa, who also runs the Northern Heritage label out of which a large part of this generation was released.
What that generation does that neither Sweden nor Norway does is put melody and grief in the same bar. The Finnish records of the 2000s are melodic without being harmonised, which is the whole difference: a single lead line repeated until it turns into mourning, no keyboards, no orchestra, and tape hiss kept on the record long after anybody had to keep it. It is the least discussed of the northern traditions and it has outlasted most of the ones that got the coverage.
Nobody in Oulu was policing the border of the genre because nobody in Oulu recognised one.
Denmark, Iceland and the edges
Denmark got in earliest and then went quiet. Mercyful Fate belongs to the first wave and to any honest list of what the second one was listening to, and after them the line runs thin: Denial of God, formed in 1991, kept a Danish black metal band on the map for two decades largely by refusing to stop, and the current Danish material is a recent thing rather than a continuous tradition.
Iceland waited longest and then arrived complete. Svartidauði formed in 2006 and Sinmara out of the same small pool of players, Misþyrming followed in 2013, and by 2016 the Oration festival in Reykjavík was putting the scene in front of an international audience for the first time. What the press settled on calling the Icelandic sound, discordant, unhurried and built out of chords that refuse to resolve, is the most distinct regional accent the music has grown since Finland, and it came from a country with a population smaller than Bergen and Trondheim combined.
East of the Baltic, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania built scenes of their own through the nineties, mostly pagan in subject matter and folk in melody, on almost no money and with almost no distribution. That is a chapter in itself and it gets one.
Four countries, four answers, and only one of them ever made the front pages. Sweden wrote the tunes and paid for the studio time. Finland refused to behave and outlasted nearly everybody. Iceland waited twenty years and then turned up with the strangest guitar sound in the region. Norway got the headlines. The rest of the continent had been listening to all of it and had already begun answering back, which is the subject of black metal across Europe.
