Sunlight Studio, Stockholm, September 1990. In the room is a band of teenagers from Kolbotn, a commuter town south of Oslo, and behind the desk is Tomas Skogsberg, who had spent the previous two years assembling the guitar tone that the whole of his own city was already using. The record they made together came out through Peaceville on 14 January 1991, runs to forty one minutes and forty four seconds, and is death metal of the Swedish kind made by four Norwegians who drove across a border to get it. Eleven months later the same four musicians repudiated it.
Norway is the country everybody skips in this part of the story, and the reason is that its death metal scene was quarried for parts before it had produced more than a handful of albums. The argument over two sounds from one country concerns a place that kept what it built. Norway did the opposite. The bands existed, the demos circulated, the records were made, and then almost every musician involved put the style down and picked up another one, taking the equipment, the contacts and the rehearsal rooms with them.
Rade, Fredrikstad, and the band that got there first
Cadaver formed in 1988 across Rade and Fredrikstad around Anders Odden and Ole Bjerkebakke, put out the demo Abnormal Deformity in 1989, and were picked up on the strength of it by Bill Steer and Jeff Walker of Carcass, which is how a Norwegian band with one demo ended up on an Earache sublabel. Hallucinating Anxiety appeared in 1990 through Necrosis as one half of a split with the only album Sweden's Carnage ever made, so the first Norwegian death metal album and the first Stockholm death metal album arrived in the shops inside the same sleeve. Rene Jansen played bass, Eilert Solstad replaced him, ...In Pains followed through Earache on 14 September 1992 in Britain and 17 November in the United States, and the band fell apart in 1993 over the ordinary internal reasons. Odden restarted it as Cadaver Inc. in 1999 with Carl-Michael Eide on drums and Apollyon singing, dropped the suffix again, stopped in 2004, and reformed in April 2019 with Dirk Verbeuren of Megadeth behind the kit. Three albums have followed since 2020.
Bergen supplied the staff
The west coast produced almost no death metal records and almost every important death metal musician. Old Funeral formed in Bergen in 1988, made two demos in 1989 and 1990 and an EP called Devoured Carcass in 1991, and dissolved by 1992 having supplied Olve Eikemo and Harald Naevdal to Immortal and Kristian Vikernes to Burzum. Amputation, formed the same year, managed two demos before the members reassembled as Immortal. Molested came together in Bergen in May 1991 around the guitarist Oystein Brun and became Borknagar. That is three bands, five demos, one EP and no albums, and it is the single densest concentration of future black metal personnel anywhere in Scandinavia.
Further east the pattern repeated. Thou Shalt Suffer started in 1990 at Akkerhaugen under the name Dark Device, with Vegard Tveitan and Tomas Haugen writing, Ildjarn on bass and Thorbjorn Akkerhaugen on drums, and put out two demos in 1991 before dissolving at the end of that year so that its two writers could give their whole attention to Emperor. The scene was not killed off by a rival style. It was staffed out of existence by one.
Three bands, five demos, one EP, no albums. Bergen exported almost nothing on record and almost everybody in person.
The turn, and how fast it happened
The clearest evidence of how the country changed its mind sits in one band's first two albums. Soulside Journey was produced by Skogsberg with the band and Uffe Cederlund of Entombed credited on the guitars, and it is technical, groove-conscious death metal executed properly. The drummer signed the record under the name Hank Amarillo, a joke at the expense of the American bands he had already stopped taking seriously. Then A Blaze in the Northern Sky arrived in 1992 with the production stripped down to almost nothing, and the label was reportedly unhappy enough about it to say so. Nothing survived the twelve months between the two records except the four men playing.
Sweden built a style and defended it for thirty years. Norway built one, used it as scaffolding, and took it down as soon as the thing behind it could stand.
Andrzej Sawicki, KaosMetal
| Record | Band | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hallucinating Anxiety | Cadaver | Necrosis | 1990 |
| Soulside Journey | Darkthrone | Peaceville | 1991 |
| ...In Pains | Cadaver | Earache | 1992 |
| Blod-draum | Molested | Effigy | 1995 |
Blod-draum, and the last one out
Molested recorded their only album in 1994 and Effigy Records, a new operation with no catalogue behind it, released it on 13 May 1995, by which point every other Norwegian band of the type had either stopped or converted. Decibel, listing the five best Norwegian death metal albums in August 2016, put it third and described Brun as bending his influences into shapes that were recognisable and wrong at the same time, which is as close as anyone has come to a definition of the record. The band then became Borknagar and the country's death metal history closed for roughly a decade. In the same list Darkthrone took first place and Cadaver second, and it is worth noticing how short a list of contenders that leaves.
The men who came back for it, and Kolbotn again
What broke the drought was not a new generation but the same musicians returning to the style once the black metal decade had run its course. Samoth and Trym Torson founded Zyklon in 1998 while Emperor was still a going concern, recruited Destructhor and Secthdamon out of Myrkskog and had Faust writing lyrics, and released World ov Worms in 2001, Aeon in 2003 and Disintegrate in 2006 before going quiet in October 2007 and formally ending in January 2010. Daniel Olaisen, who had played live guitar for Satyricon, started Blood Red Throne in Kristiansand in 1998 with an openly Floridian rather than Swedish model in mind, put Monument of Death out through Hammerheart in 2001, and has kept the band running through twelve albums and every line-up change around him. Neither project is an act of nostalgia. Both are men who had built one thing and went back for the thing they had abandoned to build it.
The revival proper came from the same commuter town the first album had. Obliteration started in Kolbotn in 2001, which is where Darkthrone and Aura Noir had also started, and released Nekropsalms through Fysisk Format on 23 November 2009: old school death metal with doom, punk and early black metal folded into it, slower and more deliberate than the debut, and Decibel put it fourth on that same list. Gorelord's Force Fed on Human Flesh, issued through Baphomet in 2001 to almost no attention, was placed fifth by the same writers fifteen years later, which tells you how thin the field remained even after the country started making these records again.
What Norway proves is that a national style is not the only thing a scene can leave behind. The country made five records worth arguing about in seven years, and then handed its entire personnel to a movement that changed the shape of extreme music. The cold, the tape trading, the shared rehearsal rooms and the small labels were all there, exactly as they were across the border in finnish Death Metal. What the four countries actually held in common, and where the resemblance stops being useful, is the subject of nordic Death Metal.
