More than half of the tickets for Norway's largest extreme metal festival are bought outside Norway, by people in more than fifty different countries, for four days of concerts held in Oslo every Easter. That is what the Norwegian black metal scene is now. A season, an export, a line on a tourist board's list of things to do.
The four years that made the name are told elsewhere and there is nothing to gain from telling them twice. What happened in norwegian black metal between 1991 and 1994 comes down to one shop, one concert hall studio and about a dozen records, all of it inside a window shorter than a school degree. This article is the rest of the organism: the underground that was already running before the shop opened, the labels and the post office that carried the records out of the country, the generations who arrived to find the doors shut, and the afterlife in which the least sellable music the country ever made turned into one of its better known exports.
The underground that was already there
Nothing began in 1991. The four from Kolbotn who would spend the rest of the decade stripping their own competence back to the bone, Darkthrone, had been running since 1986 under two earlier names, had put out four demos between 1988 and 1989, and reached February 1991 with a technical death metal album recorded at Sunlight in Stockholm, the studio every Swedish band of the period queued for, released by Peaceville in England. Soulside Journey has no shriek anywhere on it. It is a good record made by people who were within a year of deciding that good records were the problem.
Bergen had more of the underground than Oslo did. Old Funeral formed there in 1988 and at various points carried Varg Vikernes on guitar and both Abbath and Demonaz in the line-up, and it was out of that band and out of Amputation that Immortal was assembled in 1991. Oslo had Cadaver, formed the same year as Old Funeral, with an album out in 1990. The Norwegian entries in the tape trading lists of the late eighties are death metal entries almost without exception, and the men who wrote those entries are the same men who two years later were telling anyone who would listen that death metal had gone soft.
That is the part the retellings drop. Nobody walked out of the treeline in 1991 with a new idea. A working death metal underground turned on itself in public, and the turn was made by people who already knew how to book a studio, how to get a thousand copies pressed and how to move a tape from a suburb south of Oslo to a bedroom in Brazil.
Who paid, and who put it in the envelope
A scene is not a mood. It is a small number of people with a bank account, a print run and a walk to the post office, and Norway's supply of all three was thin enough to name in a paragraph. Deathlike Silence Productions, founded in Oslo in 1987 under the name Posercorpse and run from the back of a record shop, reached nine catalogue numbers before its owner was killed in August 1993; the distributor Voices of Wonder took the wreckage on and the label was finished by 1994. Slayer Magazine had been coming out of Sarpsborg since 1985, and its editor Jon Kristiansen started Head Not Found in 1992, which is how the first two Ulver albums reached a shop counter at all. Satyr set up Moonfog in January 1993 to put out his own band and ended up carrying Darkthrone for the better part of a decade.
| Label | From | Run by | Carried | Fate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deathlike Silence | Oslo, 1987 | Euronymous | Merciless, Burzum, Mayhem, Abruptum, Sigh, Enslaved | Nine releases; wound up in 1994 |
| Head Not Found | Norway, 1992 | Jon Kristiansen | Ulver, and a wide non black metal roster | Absorbed into Voices of Wonder |
| Moonfog | Oslo, 1993 | Satyr of Satyricon | Satyricon, Darkthrone, Dodheimsgard, Isengard | Defunct 2017 |
| Osmose | France, 1991 | Herve Herbaut | Immortal, Enslaved | Still trading |
| Candlelight | England, 1992 | Lee Barrett | Emperor | Still trading |
| Century Media | Germany, 1988 | Robert Kampf | Ulver, Satyricon reissues | Sold to Sony, 2015 |
Half the money was never Norwegian. Immortal went to Osmose in France, Emperor to Candlelight in England, Ulver to Century Media in Germany, Dimmu Borgir to Nuclear Blast. A music made in a country of four and a quarter million people was financed almost from the start by companies in three others, and the balance has never really reversed since. What Norway supplied was the argument and the personnel. What Germany, France and England supplied was the pressing plant.
The generation that arrived after the doors closed
By 1996 the founders were already leaving. Ulver put out three albums in three years, Bergtatt in February 1995 and Kveldssanger in March 1996 for Head Not Found and Nattens madrigal for Century Media in March 1997, then walked out of the genre with a flat statement that they were not a black metal band and did not wish to be treated as one. Emperor lasted to 2001 and stopped. Darkthrone stayed and slowly turned into a different band altogether. What that left behind was a country full of teenagers who had read about all of it in the newspapers, bought the records afterwards, and now had to make a case for themselves against four years they had been too young to see.
A country full of teenagers who bought the records after the fact, and then had to argue with four years they had been too young to see.
The best of them refused to be respectful about it. The Oslo band who took their name from the year the plague reached Bergen went in the opposite direction to everyone else and played faster, with Frost of Satyricon behind the kit, and Hellfire in October 2005 is a genuinely violent record rather than a well mannered tribute to one. Tsjuder had been going since 1993 and did not get a debut album out until Demonic Possession in 2002. Khold made four albums in the first half of the 2000s in plain Norwegian and at walking pace, which nobody else was doing. Which of these deserve the shelf space is the business of KaosMetal's guide to norwegian Black Metal Bands, not of this one.
The survivors, meanwhile, started charting. Satyricon's Rebel Extravaganza reached number 32 in Norway in 1999, Volcano went to number 4 in 2002 and took the Spellemannprisen in the metal category, and Now, Diabolical came in at number 2 in 2006. That is a national top five for a band whose first album had been sold by post out of a bedroom label nine years earlier.
Trondheim, and a scene that declines to behave like one
The one genuinely new thing to come out of Norway since is in neither of the two cities that get written about. Trondheim, called Nidaros when it was the country's medieval capital, has produced since the early 2000s a body of work whose own participants named it Nidrosian: Mare from 2003, One Tail One Head, Whoredom Rife from 2014, a spine of shared musicians running through all of them, and a local label, Terratur Possessions, that carries most of it.
It is the inverse of the first scene in every respect that counts. No music weekly, no manifesto, no shop with the walls painted black and a gravestone in the window. Small pressings, sleeves that tell a buyer nothing, no interviews worth the name, and ceremony in place of provocation. A scene that grows its own permafrost over itself and lets the records come out from under it one at a time. It now has a photographic book and a festival of its own in the city, which is roughly the point at which such things stop being secret.
The scene as a public institution
The last stage is the strangest and it is barely written about in English. Inferno Metal Festival began in Oslo in 2001, put together by the Borknagar guitarist Jens F. Ryland with a booking agent, and now runs four days over Easter with sixty or seventy concerts. More than half its tickets go abroad. The music conference attached to it since 2006 drew close to three hundred delegates from thirty six countries in 2024, which makes the largest professional gathering in metal an Easter event in a city of seven hundred thousand people.
The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Then the state arrived. In 2014 Norwegian officials commissioned Enslaved, formed in 1991 by a thirteen year old and a seventeen year old, to write music for the two hundredth anniversary of the country's constitution. Satyricon played the Norwegian National Opera in 2015 with the opera's own chorus. Both bands have taken the national industry award. Oslo's tourist board publishes a page of advice for visitors who come for this and nothing else, and there is a sightseeing bus that goes round the sites.
And Schweigaards gate 56 is a shop again. Neseblod Records has traded from the old address since the middle of the 2000s, with a basement of demos, flyers and tape trading letters that works as a museum of the whole business, and on 9 April 2024 a fire in that basement destroyed a large part of it. A music that left the country in envelopes now arrives back through an airport, and the room it left from is a museum with a fire report attached to it. Nothing in this story is tidier than that. Readers who want the arc from the first wave forward will find it in KaosMetal's black metal history.
