When first heard the term “blackgaze,” I thought of these guys: 

But apparently the term is a portmanteau for the music of bands like Deafheaven (and Alcest and Oathbreaker), who draw from both the filthy well of black metal and the angelic pond of shoegaze. In fact, any music that includes a soupcon of black metal could be called “blackened.” Add tremolo picked guitar, blast beats, and shrieked vocals to a polka, and you’re serving up blackened polka. Even more so if you record it so it sounds like you played live during a hurricane. 

Consider these guys blackened blackgaze: 

Last week we touched on the success of Deafheaven, a black metal-adjacent act that broke containment and found listeners outside of the metal-sphere in the early 2010s. They’re the poster children for blackened music, having separated themselves from their influences, telling musicradar that they don’t share “the ethos, the aesthetic or really the sound of” a traditional black metal band. 

I get it. When the most famous black metal musician is a nazi and a murderer, you probably want to put some distance between your music and his (even though your music is inspired in no small part by his). 

But Deathheaven isn’t only inspired by the music of nazis and murderers. On their breakthrough Sunbather, they sound as much like 2000s era post-metal bands like Isis and Alcest and then-contemporary rock bands like Cymbals Eat Guitars than Mayhem or Emperor. They also deploy black metal differently. 

Where Marduk or Dissection generously slather on the gnarly, audience-challenging bits, Deafheaven save them for their crescendos. 

There’s also the matter of the mixing. Black metal bands typically leave the edges sticking out. The drums and guitars are too loud, vocals are either submerged or hurt your ears, and bass is a kind of fish, not an instrument or a frequency that deserves consideration. 

Deafheaven, however, smooooooths all that out. Sunbather sounds wide and compressed. If it was a dookie, it would land without a plop and curl around the bowl, whereas traditional black metal (BM, har-har) albums are full of peanuts and hairballs and thumbtacks and ashes. Deafheaven are a perfect gateway band to black metal because they’re so palatable. 

That’s not to say that blackened music can’t still be challenging. For a modern band who’s a little pricklier, try out Liturgy, who sculpt black metal into Cubist structures.  

On Aesthethica, Liturgy’s bone dry guitars recall Helmet’s more than Darkthrone’s, but their polyphonic vocals have no analog in heavy music (unless you count György Ligeti’s vocal orchestra pieces as “heavy music,” which you probably could).

Liturgy is as much an art-rock band as a black metal band. Their start-stop dynamics, broken transmission time signatures, and a seeming allergy to rocking out won’t make them favorites of corpse-painted beer-guzzlers looking for some tunes to burn churches to, but anyone with a brain could appreciate Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix and her Brooklynite co-conspirators’ gnarly mix of black metal nihilism, spiritualism, and jagged, laser-cut riffs. 

Recommended for anyone who likes metal that comes with a reading list. 

Speaking of experimental bands from NYC, one of my favorite current black metal acts is Queen’s own hyper-prolific Krallice. 

On their fourth album Years Past Matter, Krallice showcases what makes them special: namely rhythm guitars interlocked so tightly they might as well be crocheted together. Their guitarists must have immaculate technique to get through their ten-minute songs without succumbing to carpal tunnel syndrome. 

Ironically, Krallice needed to dial back on their distortion to keep their lattice of guitars feeling crisp. That’s right, in order to play heavier, they had to turn their amps down. 

Any article about so-called “blackened” music should include a section on blackened death metal. 

Death metal and black metal sprang from the same diseased womb in the early 1980s, and have feuded like the Gallagher brothers ever since. One’s too gross. The other is too dour. But they both love death as much as they sometimes hate each other. And just like the Gallagher brothers, no matter how much they trash each other in the press, they can’t help but reunite over and over again. 

But let’s save a discussion about black metal and death metal for another time, for the last record I want to shout-out this week is a curveball. 

Composed of metal veterans, NYC’s Vaura blackens post-punk on 2013’s The Missing. 

Metal has a history of combining with goth rock (Type O Negative still looms large even a decade and a half after its frontman’s death), but less experience doing so with goth rock’s own progenitor. Thankfully, The Missing is what you’d get if you put Joy Division and Burzum in a blender. 

Actually, it’s a little more tuneful than that. These pros write complex songs with actual choruses! 

But my favorite part of The Missing is the instrument that’s so often neglected by black metal bands: the bass. Toby Driver’s instrument is fretless wonder across the album’s ten tracks, gluing together the blast beats, spacy guitars and gothic vocals, and taking over completely on “Pleasure Blind.”  

Honestly, The Missing may only be about ten or fifteen percent “blackened,” but it’s just enough char for these songs. Not all music inspired by black metal needs to go full-on church burning.