In 1993 Iceland had no black metal band at all. In 2016 it had a festival that people flew to Reykjavík in February to attend.
Everything interesting about this scene sits inside that gap. Iceland was not there for the years that every other country in the region is remembered for, which means its musicians did not receive black metal as news, as a scandal or as a set of rules being argued over in real time. They received it as a finished body of recorded music, twenty years old, with the arguments already settled by other people. It arrived late. It arrived finished. What Iceland made out of it is a commentary rather than a continuation, and it does not sound like anything else in the north. The wider regional picture is in the chapter on the other Nordic scenes.
What was there before, which is almost nothing
The prehistory takes one paragraph. Sólstafir formed in 1995 and left the genre almost immediately, moving through viking themes into something closer to post rock, which is where they have stayed and where their audience is. Carpe Noctem and a handful of others existed. None of it built a scene, none of it produced a recognisable national sound, and by the end of the nineties Iceland's contribution to the form was a footnote in other people's chapters.
The real start is Svartidauði, from Kópavogur, who put out three self released demos between 2006 and 2010 and then made Flesh Cathedral in 2012 for the Norwegian label Terratur Possessions. That record did what a founding record has to do: it established a way of writing that other people could take up without copying the songs. The Synthesis of Whore and Beast followed in 2014 and Revelations of the Red Sword on Ván Records in 2018, and the band ended in 2022, by which point half the country was working in the language it had built.
One engineer, one room
Opened in 2010 by a Dubliner who had landed in Reykjavík three years earlier, and responsible since then for very nearly every record the country has sent abroad, Studio Emissary is the single most important address in Icelandic music that nobody outside the genre has heard of. Stephen Lockhart engineered Flesh Cathedral and has since recorded Sinmara, Zhrine, Almyrkvi, Auðn, Kaleikr and a long list of others. He runs the Oration label. He records his own material as Rebirth of Nefast and has played in Slidhr and in Sinmara.
Anyone who has read about Norway will recognise the shape of this. Grieghallen and Eirik Hundvin did the same job for Bergen in the early nineties, and the result there was the same: a national sound that is partly a set of compositional habits and partly one man's decisions about microphones. The difference is that Iceland's version happened on purpose, in a scene small enough that everybody records in the same building because there is no reason to record anywhere else.
What the Icelandic sound actually is
The whole north had spent twenty five years arguing about melody, and Iceland simply declined to take part. There is very little harmonised guitar writing here and almost no consonant resolution. What there is instead is dissonance held rather than passed through: a chord left hanging over the bar line like a door standing open onto weather, then another one that does not answer it. Melody appears in fragments, three or four notes at a time, and disappears before it can become a tune.
The second characteristic is pace, and it is not tempo. The drums are often as fast as anything in Norway; what has slowed down is the rate at which the harmony changes, harmony slowed until it moves at the speed of a tide rather than a pulse. A single unresolved sonority can occupy thirty seconds while the kit goes flat out underneath it, and the effect is of something enormous moving very slowly behind a great deal of noise. Reviewers reaching for a description have tended to settle on shimmering, on cosmic horror and on haze, which are three ways of saying the same thing: the records do not tell you where they are going and never arrive.
Melody appears in fragments, three or four notes at a time, and disappears before it can become a tune.
Thirty people, and all of them in four bands
Formed in Reykjavík in June 2013 around D.G., Misþyrming made Söngvar elds og óreiðu in 2015 and were invited to be artists in residence at the Roadburn festival the following year, which is how most of Europe first heard any of this. Algleymi came in 2019 and Með hamri in 2022, and the band's drummer is the man who had been playing in Svartidauði until it stopped. A split release with Sinmara appeared in 2017. Nothing here is a coincidence: the same twenty or thirty musicians hold three or four projects each, and the Vánagandr label is run by members of Misþyrming and Naðra between them.
Sinmara, Naðra, Almyrkvi, Auðn, Zhrine, Wormlust, Mannveira and Kaleikr are all part of the same body of players. In most countries that would be a weakness. Here it is the mechanism: a scene small enough to fit in one room and loud enough to be heard from another continent, in a country of fewer than four hundred thousand people, most of them nowhere near it.
Bare is his back who has no brother.
Njal's Saga, translated by George Webbe Dasent
How it got out
The scene exported itself deliberately and it used three routes. The first is the labels: Terratur Possessions in Norway, Norma Evangelium Diaboli in France, Ván in Germany and Fallen Empire in the United States all carried Icelandic records abroad before any Icelandic operation was large enough to do it. The second is Vánagandr and Oration at home, which kept the local pressings and the local control. The third is the festivals. Oration ran in Reykjavík in 2016, 2017 and 2018, the first international black metal festival the country had held, and Ascension replaced it from 2019. Eistnaflug, on the east coast, had been putting these bands in front of audiences since long before anyone abroad was paying attention, and the Úlfsmessa ritual assembles four or more of the bands at once for a single ceremonial performance.
Twenty years late and it did not matter, because the thing Iceland brought was not a new attitude or a new crime, it was a new harmony. That is a rarer contribution and it has aged better. The last of these northern corners, the two that never got a chapter at all, is danish and Baltic Black Metal, and the melodic tradition Iceland was answering is set out in melodic Black Metal Bands.
