Studio Fredman, on the western edge of Gothenburg, 1995. Two brothers from a village in Dalsland are making their first album, and because the guitar parts are beyond what either of them can play, a share of the work is being done by John Zwetsloot and Jon Nödtveidt of Dissection. The invoice is going to Fremont, California, to a label called Necropolis Records that Paul Thind had started two years earlier and would keep running until 2003. Everything on the tape is Swedish. The money is not.
That arrangement is the least discussed fact about the country's black metal and the most useful one. The corrective chapter on swedish black metal establishes that Sweden got there first and then wrote tunes; what it does not have room for is the machinery. Sweden supplied the players, the songs, the arrangements and the recording rooms. The capital came from California, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and so, in the end, did the doctrine. This is a scene that exported its music and imported almost everything else it needed to make it.
A local scene funded from somewhere else
Nifelheim, the twin brothers Erik and Per Gustavsson, who sign themselves Tyrant and Hellbutcher, were only the clearest case. Necropolis had come into the Swedish underground through Nödtveidt, who put Thind in touch with the brothers, and by the middle of the decade the same Californian roster carried Dawn and Arckanum as well. Osmose, in France, took Marduk. Hammerheart and Black Mark handled the records nobody else wanted to press. The one substantial Swedish operation, No Fashion in Stockholm, ran on a fanzine editor's taste and a fanzine editor's budget, which is why so many of its bands left it the moment a German or French offer arrived.
The other structural fact is that Swedish black metal came out of Swedish death metal rather than out of any reaction against it. Necrophobic formed in Stockholm in 1989 around the drummer Joakim Sterner and the guitarist David Parland, and cut The Nocturnal Silence at Sunlight Studio in March 1993, in the room that had given the country's death metal its house tone. Parland then left in 1996 and turned up as the man who refused to release Dark Funeral's first attempt at a debut. He died in 2013. That single career runs through both genres without ever leaving the same postal district, and there are a dozen more like it.
Three waves that barely share a member
What gets written about as one scene is three, and the second wave did not inherit the first, it replaced it. The founding group formed between 1989 and 1993 and were finished, dormant or imprisoned by the turn of the century. The orthodox group formed between 1994 and 1998 and reached its records after 2000. The depressive strand came later still, out of a different town and a different problem. Personnel overlap between the three is thin enough to count on one hand.
| Band | Town | Formed | First album |
|---|---|---|---|
| Necrophobic | Stockholm | 1989 | The Nocturnal Silence, 1993 |
| Dissection | Strömstad | 1989 | The Somberlain, 1993 |
| Marduk | Norrköping | 1990 | Dark Endless, 1992 |
| Nifelheim | Dals Långed | 1990 | Nifelheim, 1995 |
| Naglfar | Umeå | 1992 | Vittra, 1995 |
| Dark Funeral | Stockholm | 1993 | The Secrets of the Black Arts, 1996 |
Read the second column and the argument about a Stockholm scene falls over. Strömstad is on the Norwegian border, Umeå is six hundred kilometres north of the capital, Dals Långed is a village. Naglfar began in 1992 under the name Uninterred and changed it before the first demo went out, and their Vittra was released by Wrong Again Records, the label Per Gyllenbäck and Wez Wenedikter had founded in 1993 and which broke up after five years, at which point Gyllenbäck built Regain Records out of what was left. Naglfar went with him, then to Century Media, and made Diabolical in 1998, Sheol in 2003 and Cerecloth in 2020 without ever moving south.
Read the second column and the argument about a Stockholm scene falls over.
The order, and a hymnal printed in France
The wave that followed did not want better distribution. It wanted a doctrine, and it built one. Formed in Norrköping in 1996 by Mika Hakola, who signs himself Belfagor and had come from drumming and writing lyrics in Nefandus, Ofermod dedicated itself from the first release to a creed rather than to a sound, and it is Ofermod that supplied the term the whole of the following decade was filed under, orthodox black metal. Mystérion Tés Anomias went out on Pounding Metal Productions in 1998. The full album took ten more years: Tiamtü, 2008.
The rest of the group formed in the same window and moved at the same pace. Malign started in Spånga in 1994 around the two men who record as Nord and Mörk, and issued almost nothing for a decade; Mörk played live with Watain between 2001 and 2006 and wrote lyrics for other people's records. Funeral Mist put out Salvation in 2003 and then went quiet until Maranatha in February 2009. Ondskapt's Dödens evangelium arrived in 2005. Watain themselves formed in Uppsala in 1998 around Erik Danielsson, Pelle Forsberg and Håkan Jonsson, took their name from an early recording by the American band Von, and released Rabid Death's Curse in 2000 and Casus Luciferi in 2003 through Drakkar.
Here is the part that matters. The label that gathered nearly all of it, Norma Evangelium Diaboli, is French, run by the guitarist who signs himself Hasjarl, and the catalogue that turned a handful of Stockholm and Uppsala musicians into an international position was assembled and pressed abroad. An altar assembled by post, and a hymnal printed in another country. The releases were slow, small, expensive and heavily ceremonial in their packaging, which consecrated the tape as an object before anyone had heard a note of it, and it worked: by the end of the decade the orthodox records were being reviewed in Europe and North America as a school rather than as a set of bands.
Halmstad, and the other way of being Swedish
While that was going on, a third thing was happening in the south west that had no interest in ceremony at all. Shining was started in Halmstad in 1996 by Niklas Kvarforth, who was twelve years old, and moved through Within Deep Dark Chambers in 2000, Livets ändhållplats in 2001 and the numbered albums after them on Osmose, Spinefarm, Season of Mist and Napalm. Kvarforth stepped away from the band in July 2006 and was back in front of it by February 2007, performing under another name. The music is slower than the orthodox records, closer to rock in its chord movement, and it made a subgenre that the rest of the country had no part in inventing.
Set that beside the tremolo picked, tightly arranged material that the swedish Black Metal Bands of the first wave were making, and the range inside one small country becomes obvious. Craft, started in Dalarna in 1994 under the name Nocta, went the other way again, into something dry and repetitive with the guitars kept deliberately plain. Lord Belial, formed in Trollhättan in 1992, and Sacramentum, formed in Falköping in the summer of 1990 as Tumulus, took the melodic route to its limit. Six or seven towns, no shared aesthetic, and a national scene that was never a scene in the sense the word usually carries.
A frost manufactured indoors, on a booked and paid for afternoon, is still frost. That is the Swedish position, and no other country in the north would have taken it.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
What is still standing
The unusual thing about this scene is how much of it is still running. Nifelheim stopped in 2022 after thirty two years, and Per Gustavsson put out a self titled album under the name Hellbutcher in 2024 with the same material and the same refusal to acknowledge anything recorded after 1985. Necrophobic released In the Twilight Grey in 2024, thirty five years after forming, with Sebastian Ramstedt back on guitar and Anders Strokirk back on vocals. Marduk reached Memento Mori in 2023. Dark Funeral, whose début had to be recorded twice, put out We Are the Apocalypse in 2022.
That is a scene that has buried its own founders and is still filing releases, which is more than can be said for most of what stood next to it in 1995. It arrived late, it paid for its studio time, it borrowed its money from four countries and its theology from a small religious order, and it produced two separate canons rather than one. What it never produced was a single centre. The Norwegian story runs on a room in Oslo and a shop counter; the Swedish story runs on train timetables. For where this fits in the larger argument, go back to back to the top.
