On 24 May 1994, Deathlike Silence Productions released De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, the first studio album by Mayhem, and the man who had founded the label was not alive to see it reach the shops. Built by the band’s own guitarist, Euronymous, to press the music no one else in Norway would touch, the little label delivered the record that would set down the floor plan for every black metal temple raised after it, eight tracks and forty-six minutes of dark masonry hauled up out of a crypt and laid course upon course until the vault closed overhead and shut out the daylight for good. Thirty-two years on, the roof has not moved.
The quartet that finally stood in the studio inside Bergen’s Grieghallen, where Eirik “Pytten” Hundvin produced the sessions alongside Euronymous and the drummer Hellhammer between 22 June 1992 and May 1993, was not the band that had set out to make this album. The singer Per Yngve “Dead” Ohlin died by suicide on 8 April 1991, before a note of it was recorded. In his place came Attila Csihar of the Hungarian band Tormentor, with Varg Vikernes on bass and Snorre “Blackthorn” Ruch contributing lyrics and riffs. The album was already tracked when, on 10 August 1993, Vikernes killed Euronymous at his apartment in Oslo. Vikernes was convicted and sentenced to 21 years. That is the history. The record is the subject.
The masonry
The master mason of this building, Euronymous, cut every load-bearing stone himself. His riffs are the walls of the record, tremolo lines squared off and set in long courses, raw on the face and with a melodic seam running through the rock that stops the whole structure from reading as rubble. “Funeral Fog” throws the doors open and lets the air of the crypt out at once, no antechamber, the full intensity of the record present from its first bar and the tone of every room after it fixed before the listener has found a pew. “Freezing Moon” is the high altar, the song the genre has covered and measured itself against ever since, and it holds that position on riffing alone: the most memorable figures on a record packed with memorable figures, hammered into the stone so deep that no amount of legend on the surface can scrape them off. Blasphemy has rarely sounded this well built.
“Life Eternal” is the nave. It is the longest span on the album at six minutes and fifty-seven seconds, set dead in the centre of the running order, and the band later lent its name to the 2009 EP of rough mixes from these same Grieghallen sessions, the one track chosen to stand for the whole construction site. “From the Dark Past” is the chapel built from salvaged stone, carrying riffs first written for a Thorns demo and fitted into the wall so cleanly that the join does not show. “Buried by Time and Dust”, three minutes and thirty-four seconds, is the short passage between chambers. Then the title track seals the building. “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas” closes the record the way a slab closes a tomb, heavy, final, the weight of every course above it pressing down on the last few minutes, and the Latin over the door is not decoration. The occult material here is written as a rite, not as a provocation, which is why it has aged when so much of the shock of 1994 has not.
The voice in the nave
The dividing line runs straight down the aisle, and it is the voice. Attila Csihar does not shriek the way the genre had agreed a black metal singer should shriek. He howls, whispers, groans and drags his phrases into long liturgical lines, a cantor chanting to an empty congregation from somewhere below the flagstones, theatrical to the point where half the room walks out and the other half never leaves again. Heard one way, it is repellent and hard to follow, a man staging a ritual rather than living one. Heard the other way, it is the most original element on the album, the thing that turns a strong set of riffs into a rite. The second reading is the right one. A standard rasp would have made this a fine second-wave record among several; Csihar’s performance made it a church, and cut a doorway into the stone that every singer since who has chosen to sound possessed rather than merely furious has walked through. Speaking to Wall of Sound on 13 December 2017, he explained that the band took so long to play the album live because it was “very dark, even too dark for us and very emotional”. The builders felt the cold of their own nave.
Every black metal temple raised since has been drawn to the floor plan of this one crypt.
Cracks in the vault
The limit is in the mortar. The mix is raw and at points muddy, black metal production of its moment with the low end pressed flat into the walls, and the bass rarely steps out of the masonry to be heard on its own. The murk is part of the chill of the building, and scrubbing it clean would demolish the record along with it. It is also a real door, and it stays shut for anyone raised on clearer production; no amount of reputation will prop it open, and that cost is the reason this record sits a step below the very few that stand above everything else. The second limit is not on the tape at all. The story around this album stands in front of it like scaffolding that never came down, and it is easy to admire the scaffolding and call it the cathedral. Take the legend away and the riffs are still load-bearing, though the walls stand a little lower than the myth insists. That is the test. It passes, with the cracks showing.
This is for anyone who wants to stand where the second wave of Norwegian black metal laid its foundation stone, and above all for anyone who has only read about this album rather than heard it, because the legend is the least interesting thing in the building. Live in Leipzig had shown the band could raise a storm in a room; this record raised the room itself, arch by arch, and nothing Mayhem built afterwards, Grand Declaration of War included, stands on ground this solid. It is essential, and it is not flawless: the mortar is muddy, the bass is sealed inside it, and the story still crowds the doorway. Ignoring it costs the floor plan of an entire genre. The vault has held for thirty-two years. It will hold longer.