Raw production, glacial atmosphere and shrieked vocals: metal's most radical and most contested subgenre.
6 bands in the archive
Black metal has two origins. The first, in the early 1980s, lies with Britain's Venom and Denmark's Mercyful Fate, which gave a name and an imagery to what was still a variation on thrash. The second, in the early 1990s, is the one that defined the genre as it is known: the Norwegian scene, with Darkthrone, Emperor and Mayhem, which traded clean production for deliberately raw recording and built an aesthetic of cold, forest and darkness.
Musically it is the subgenre furthest from the song: continuous tremolo picking, blast beats, high shrieked vocals and structures that favour atmosphere over chorus. Dimmu Borgir took that base into symphonic territory and reached a far wider audience. It is also the subgenre with the heaviest history — the Norwegian scene of the 1990s involved church burnings and violent crimes, episodes that still accompany any discussion of the genre.
