Mexico City, 1992. Two brothers in a city with almost no venues that would take this music, no label worth writing to, no distribution and no press, working in a metal underground that had grown out of punk bands modelled on Discharge and GBH and had spent the eighties waiting for foreign groups who mostly never came. They named the band after the Mayan underworld and wrote about the end of a calendar. Nobody around them was doing anything like it, and one of them has since described black metal bands in that city as fringe oddities inside a scene that was already an outcast.
That is where mexican black metal starts, and it is worth setting down properly, because the Spanish speaking half of this continent has been filed for thirty years as an appendix to the Brazilian first wave when it is a separate thing with separate materials.
Xibalba, and a record about the world running out
Xibalba formed in 1992 around Marco Ek Balam on guitar and vocals and his brother Jorge Ah Ektenel on drums, with Vic Ehxibchac joining on bass for the album. The demo In Lucescitae Tristis Hiei went into the trading network that year. Ah Dzam Poop Ek followed in June 1994 on Guttural Records, and it is the founding document of black metal in the country and one of the few records anywhere in the genre whose subject is genuinely local rather than borrowed.
The concept is the closing of the Maya long count and the ending of the world by flood or by collapse from beneath. Pipes and hand percussion open several of the pieces before the guitars take the track back, which is a compromise rather than a fusion, and the band has never pretended otherwise. What matters is that the material underneath is not Norse, not Satanic in the northern European sense and not translated from anybody. A band in Mexico looked at what was locally available in the way of apocalypse and found there was rather a lot of it.
A music with no winter to draw on, using a calendar running out instead.
The band later worked as Xibalba Itzaes and let twenty four years pass before a second album, which Nuclear War Now! Productions put out in October 2018. In between, the debut moved slowly through the reissue economy until it had a standing in Europe and North America that it never had at home.
The rest of the country
Around Xibalba grew a scene with two habits. One half took the Norwegian method whole and played it accurately: Avzhia, working in Mexico City from the mid nineties, is the clearest example, and their records are competent, cold and entirely uninterested in inventing anything. The other half went the way of the debut and built the subject matter out of the ground under it, which is where Hacavitz and a run of smaller groups sit. Alongside both ran a death metal line good enough to export, most obviously The Chasm, whose guitarist has been making records in the United States since the nineties.
The conditions explain the shape. There was no Mexican equivalent of a shop with a counter and a doctrine behind it, no engineer with a concert hall to let by the hour, no label with the money to press a thousand copies and wait. What existed was the post, a small number of tape traders and a domestic audience that could not sustain a band. Every serious Mexican record of the period was made for people who lived somewhere else.
Blasphemy is not a costume here
The one advantage the continent had was the seriousness of the opposition. In Norway the church was a national institution that most of the population had stopped attending. In Mexico, Colombia and Peru the Catholic church is the largest thing in most towns, its calendar organises the year, and a band that attacks it in its own language is not making a gesture at an abstraction. That is the flat answer to the question of authenticity that gets asked of every scene outside Scandinavia, and it is the exact inverse of the argument that has been running for a decade about American bands and their right to the form, which is set out in the Deafheaven Argument.
It also explains the register. The Spanish and Portuguese language records of this continent are, as a body, less concerned with atmosphere and more concerned with attack than anything from the north. Where a Norwegian band built cold, a Colombian or Peruvian band built noise and speed, and the reason is not poverty of imagination. It is that the target was standing in the square and did not need to be evoked.
Peru, Chile and the southern cone
Peru has the longest continuous line, and it starts in death metal rather than in this genre. Mortem came together in Lima in the July and August of 1986 around Fernan Nebiros and Alvaro Amduscias, which makes them older than the entire Norwegian second wave; they taped rehearsals in Spanish in 1988, put out the demo Evil Dead in 1989 and did not manage a first album until Demon Tales on the Peruvian label Huasipungo in 1995. Nine years from a rehearsal room to a record is the ordinary rate of exchange here. In 2003 and 2004 they became the first Peruvian metal band to tour Europe and the United States.
The black metal proper came later and harder. Goat Semen formed in 2000 and put out a first demo in 2003, followed by Devotos del Diablo in 2004, Ego Sum Satana in 2015 and Fuck Christ in 2024. Between them, those two bands cover four decades of a country with no industry at all, and the second one is the reason the blackened death revival on this continent has a centre.
Chile assembled its scene in the nineties and kept it deliberately obscure. Dominus formed in 1992, released a demo the same year and an EP in 1997, and became Dominus Xul for the album The Primigeni Xul (I Condemned My Enemies) in 1998. Force of Darkness followed in the next generation with Darkness Revelation in 2010. Argentina, Venezuela and Uruguay each produced a handful of bands working in near total isolation from one another, which is the standing condition of this music across four thousand kilometres of very bad transport.
| Country | Band | Record | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mexico | Xibalba | Ah Dzam Poop Ek | 1994 |
| Peru | Mortem | Demon Tales | 1995 |
| Chile | Dominus Xul | The Primigeni Xul | 1998 |
| Peru | Goat Semen | Devotos del Diablo | 2004 |
| Chile | Force of Darkness | Darkness Revelation | 2010 |
| Mexico | Xibalba Itzaes | Second album | 2018 |
What travelled north
The influence ran upward rather than downward, and it went to exactly one place. Everything the Brazilian and Colombian first wave had done in the eighties, the total saturation, the refusal of legibility, the drumming as impact rather than as time, was picked up in the early nineties by bands in the Pacific Northwest and turned into a durable method with a name attached to it. Medellin carried the Colombian end of that, and Masacre, working there since the late eighties and still touring European festivals four decades on, is the band that outlasted everyone around it. The line from a record shop in Belo Horizonte to a cemetery in Victoria is short and direct, and where it lands is canadian Black Metal.
The rest of the traffic has been commercial and recent. Nuclear War Now!, Hells Headbangers and a dozen smaller operations have spent twenty years reissuing this continent's back catalogue on vinyl for European and North American buyers, which has rescued a great deal of it from disappearing and has also put most of the money a long way from the people who made the records. The wider fight about who is entitled to make this music, conducted almost entirely between Europe and the United States while an entire continent got on with it, is black metal in America.
The verdict
Judged by volume this is a minor region and judged by originality it is not. One Mexican album from 1994 did something nobody in Norway attempted, which was to build the whole subject out of a local cosmology rather than an imported one, and it did it with a demo budget in a city with no scene to support it. The Peruvian and Chilean bands have kept a line running for thirty five years on almost no money and no attention. What the continent has never had is an institution: no shop, no engineer, no label with a chequebook, nothing to concentrate thirty people in one room for eighteen months. It produced the records anyway, one at a time, at the far end of a very long postal route.
