Black Metal
Located in 2 routes
Black metal is extreme metal built on tremolo-picked, high-register guitar riffs that blur into walls of dissonant harmony, blasting double-kick and blast-beat drumming, and shrieked, rasped, or screeched vocals soaked in reverb. Production is famously raw and trebly, often deliberately lo-fi, with thin guitars, buried bass and a cold, atmospheric mid-high mix; tempos swing from frantic 200+ BPM blasts to glacial dirges. The mood is icy, occult, misanthropic and ritualistic, frequently using minor-key melody, droning repetition, synth ambience and corpse-paint theatricality to evoke darkness, nature, Satanism and death.
History
The term comes from Venom's 1982 album Black Metal, and a loose 'first wave' (Venom, Bathory, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, Mercyful Fate, Brazil's Sarcofago) fused speed/thrash with overt Satanic imagery in the early-to-mid 1980s. The genre's defining 'second wave' erupted in Norway around 1990-1994 through the Oslo/Bergen scene centered on Euronymous's Deathlike Silence label and his Helvete record shop, producing Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, Emperor, Immortal and Satyricon; the era was marked by church burnings, the suicide of Mayhem's Dead and the 1993 murder of Euronymous by Varg Vikernes. Sweden (Marduk, Dark Funeral, Dissection) and France's Les Legions Noires followed, and from the late 1990s the style splintered into symphonic, atmospheric, depressive, post-black and avant-garde branches that keep it globally active today.
Sub-genres in this family
18 sub-genres · 13 written up
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Dayal Patterson, Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult (Feral House)
- Encyclopaedia Metallum (metal-archives.com) band/album pages
- Wikipedia: Black metal
- De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas