Last October, we explored Pitchfork’s list of their top industrial albums and listened to a bunch of Germans get all sweaty. This week (and next) we’re examining the music the most translucent people in the world (Scandinavians) made between burning churches and murdering each other and themselves, black metal. Our list comes courtesy of the purveyors of all things loud, Loudwire.com. 

If black metal is known for two things outside the metal sphere, it’s the lo-fi quality of its recordings, and the bonkers stories associated with its bands. So we’re going to be judging these albums on two criteria: 1.) Production Quality: how likely the album was to be recorded in a forest (on a scale of one to three Tapes), and 2.) Netflixability: how successfully the band’s story would translate into a Netflix true crime documentary series (on a scale of one to three Burned Churches). 

EMPEROR’S ANTHEMS TO THE WELKIN AT DUSK 

Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk makes for a wonderful metal album, but it’s a somewhat atypical pick to be Loudwire’s #1 black metal album of all time, because the thing is just so damn clean. 

However, Emperor use the space in the most black metal way possible, filling it to the brim with riffs, drum fills, spooky organs, blast beats, operatic vocals, and shrieks. Anthems may be clean, but it’s dense. For a genre that is known for monochromatic minimalism, Emperor find all the different shades of black in this maximalist masterpiece. 

PQ: Emperor controversially made black metal a safe space for keyboards, and for Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk they found a player who could use more than two fingers. In a world of furiously strummed guitars, they learned that they could use organ chords to hold a section of tremolo picking together, or a single note keyboard harmony to add movement to a black sheet of rhythm guitar. And all of it’s audible because of Anthem’s crisp production. Three tapes. 

Netflixability: Bands that make up the second wave of black metal, the bands we’re discussing today, are most notorious for their connections to series of church burnings in Norway in the 1990s, a series of (often intra-band) murders and suicides in Scandinavia, and the nationalistic and/or outright Nazi politics of some of their members. 

This controversy mars (or “benefits,” depending on your perspective) Emperor’s legacy, as its rhythm section has included both a church-burner and a murderer. Their bandleader Ihahan was also very pro-church burning at the height of its popularity.

We’ll give Emperor two burning churches on the Netflixability scale. 

BATHORY’S UNDER THE SIGN OF THE BLACK MARK 

Listening to Under the Black Mark after Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk feels like using a dial-up phone after getting comfortable with a cell. To be fair, they exist at opposite ends of the black metal timeline. Bathory’s album presaged and inspired what was to come, whereas Emperor’s codified what came before it. 

Bathory still feels like an ‘80s thrash album, but an exceptionally hairy one. The guitar sounds like a wall of static, the drums are furious, and the singer opts for the phlegmy, insectoid rasp that’s become synonymous with the genre. Yet, there’s still plenty of empty space in these songs. Where most black metal tries to choke you out with a forearm, this one’s just using a hand. 

PQ: Black Mark sounds cleaner than most black metal albums, but soupier than most thrash albums. Two tapes. 

Netflixability: Like many black metal bands, Bathory was the project of one multi-instrumentalist mastermind, the Swedish songwriter Quorthon. Also, like most other black metalists, he stopped playing live early in his career and built a mystique around himself, releasing few photos, and granting few interviews. (In one he says he wasn’t down with the murders surrounding the church burnings, even though he was rather ambivalent about the arsons themselves.) Quorthon died suddenly of a congenital heart defect at 38. Not too Netflixable. One burned church. 

MAYHEM’S DE MYSTERIIS DOM SATHANAS

Each Mayhem song seemingly starts with every player strumming/pounding their instrument as fast as possible and then branch off from there. But there’s a method to the madness, but it’s twisted. Their songs have abrupt tempo changes, unique structures, and unusual arrangements, but they’re mostly droning and pummeling. Ultimately, Mayhem sounds like a weirder Darkthrone. 

PQ: Although I’m still not actually sure if Mayhem have a bassist or not (they do) De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas actually has a pretty decent production. Where the starkest black metal albums sound like a demo recorded into a Walkman, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas sounds like it might’ve been recorded onto a 4-track. Two tapes. 

Netflixability: 

 

FADE IN 

INT. CABIN – DAY

Per Yngve Ohlin, AKA Dead, signs his suicide note. The first line: “Please excuse the blood….”

Dead puts a shotgun under his chin and blows his head off. 

Beat. 

After trying to open the front door, Øystein Aarseth, AKA Euronymous, breaks into the cabin’s window, falling onto the floor. 

After he regains his composure, he comes upon Dead’s body.

He stares, at first in stunned silence, and then cracks a huge smile. He laughs, “You finally did it!.”

Euronymous pockets pieces of Dead’s skull, rearranges his body into a somehow more graphic tableau, and snaps pictures with a disposable camera. 

One of those photos transforms into the album cover for The Dawn of the Black Hearts, a Mayhem live album. 

End first scene.

 

Mayhem’s is a story of murder, suicide, jealousy, Satanism, artistic innovation, competition, pretending to be evil, actually being evil, extreme politics, extreme metal, finding community, getting ruined by that community, cultic behavior, dishonoring the dead, burning churches, and hanging out in a record store. 

Euronymous, the guitarist of Mayhem, founder of the label Deathlike Silence Productions, and the owner of the record shop Helvete  – a man who was as responsible as anyone for nurturing the Norwegian black metal scene –  exploited his singer Dead’s death to capitalize on their career. Later he would be stabbed nearly two dozen times by his own bassist Varg Vikernes (more on this sweetheart next week). 

The two appear together on the Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. Vikernes’s replacement Hellhammer, who was supposed to dub his basslines over Vikernes’, decided not to, saying, “I thought it was appropriate that the murderer and victim were on the same record.”

Oh, yeah, and Mayhem – well, Vikernes and  Euronymous – were responsible for at least three of the over fifty church arsons attributed to the Norwegian black metal scene in the ‘90s. 

It’s all the stuff of legend, and would make a monster Netflix show. Three burning churches.

DISSECTION’S STORM OF THE LIGHT’S BANE 

With Storm of the Light’s Bane, Sweden’s Dissection created the most modern-sounding album on this week’s list. Dissection were still as death obsessed as any of their peers, but they allowed for moments of, you know, actual fun. Influenced as much by the melodic death metal scene of Gothenburg as Norway’s black metal, they incorporated harmonized guitars, acoustic interludes, guitar solos that don’t sound like cats being tortured, and actual melody. 

PQ: From the layered dynamics, to the tight, (occasionally) groovy rhythm section, Storm of Light’s Bane is as clean as black metal gets. It’s probably the most accessible record on this list, which would make it a good starter album for the black metal neophyte. Give it to your girlfriend for Valentine’s Day. She’s love it. Three tapes. 

Netflixability: In 1998, Sweden sentenced Dissection founder, singer, and lead guitarist Jon Nödtveidt as an accessory to the murder of Josef ben Meddour, the motive of which may have involved Satanism, but certainly included homophobia. Charming lad. 

After being released from prison, Nödtveidt’s body was discovered surrounded by candles with a Satanic spell book nearby, apparently dead by his own hand. Like an Aryan Mishima, he said of suicide: “The Satanist decides of his own life and death and prefers to go out with a smile on his lips when he has reached his peak in life.” He was 31. 

Three burned churches. 

DARKTHRONE’S UNDER A FUNERAL MOON: 

Under the Funeral Moon has the most archetypal black metal sound of any album on this list: furiously strummed guitars; plodding bass; vocals that are somehow both too wet and too dry at the same time. 

PQ: Guitars sound like static, drums sound like they were recorded down the hall, and the bass is…surprisingly present, even though it mostly plays root notes sixteen times a measure. Of this week’s five albums, this one is the most rudimentary. One tape. 

Netflixability: Darkthrone has one of the most traditional and enduring careers in black metal. 

The band, the duo of Fenriz and Nocturno Culto, began by playing death metal but transitioned into black metal after the second wave kicked off in the early 1990s. They were early and influential, releasing the “Unholy Trinity,” a trio of foundational black metal within a span of three years. 

They’ve since released almost two dozen albums, stylistically dipping their toes in punk, doom, and other forms of extreme music. 

Pure careerism, if you ask me. They didn’t even do any murders or church burnings.  

Darkthrone are largely responsible for many of the trappings of the genre, from their adoption of corpse paint, to their grimy monochromatic album covers that look like they cost $1.50, to their eternal obsession with death. Oh, and like their primary influence Bathory, Darkthrone decided early in their career not to perform live.

To this day, Fenriz keeps up on new music, for which he’s constantly advocating, by listening to it during his shift as a part-time postal employee. Cute. Boring. One burned church. 

Next week we’re talking American black metal, Greek black metal, and Nazi dorks.