If Sepultura became the international face of the Brazilian metal scene, then Mystifier represented is blasphemous underside. In 2020, as they released a documentary, Dois dias na Capital do Metal da Morte, mainman Armando ‘Beelzeebubth’ da Silva Conceição looked back over a career of chaos and provocation

The awe has its own force of gravity. The three members of Mystifier have made a pilgrimage to the Cemitério do Bonfim in Belo Horizonte, nearly 800 miles south of their hometown, Salvador, that sits on Brazil’s east coast.

Amid row upon dense row of gothic gravestones and mausoleums stands a structure that has become the most potent epicentre of the country’s underground metal scene and beyond. Flanked by two dark pillars holding up an imposing arched shrine, a contrasting white marbled, crucified Christ looks down, as if in mourning for the act of blasphemy that was carried out under its shadow.

It was here in 1987 that four bullet-belted, ghoulishly made-up teenagers shot the cover for the album without which Mystifier, and a host of other bands now sworn to the dark, would not exist: Sarcófago’s landmark black/thrash debut, I.N.R.I..

Band founder and guitarist, Armando ‘Beelzeebubth’ da Silva Conceição, vocalist, bassist and keyboard player Diego Do’Urden and drummer Eduardo ‘Warmonger’ Amorim are being filmed for an online documentary on Mystifier, Dois dias na Capital do Metal da Morte (‘Two Days In The Capital Of Death Metal’).

Across its 46 revealing minutes, it’s made clear that their deep and profound connection to their roots is inseparable from the multi-faceted, often contrarian and trailblazing path they’ve travelled since their formation two years after I.N.R.I.’s release.

“To talk about emotions is quite easy, right, my brothers?” muses an overcome Beelzeebubth. “To talk about sensations is a little difficult.”

Before I.N.R.I.’s release, Beelzeebubth had been a diehard fan of Sepultura. Their original lead vocalist, Wagner Antichrist, had abandoned them for Sarcófago, starting an inter-band feud in the process. Inspired to form a band of his own,in part a homage to the sacrilegious, blastbeating frenzy of his newfound heroes, Beelzeebubth took Mystifier into even darker, more primitive places over the course of two demos and their 1992 debut album, Wicca.

The bestial roars of then-vocalist Meugninousouan seemed to emanate from another realm, tapping into the kind of abyssal atmospheres that had been both early death and black metal’s unholy grail, granted only to those whose sense of purpose was willing to go beyond the realms of the rational. The band even staged their own, I.N.R.I.-inspired photoshoot featuring a blood-stained Christ crawling with an equally blood-splattered cross as the band carried flaming torches behind him.

“I was only 18 years old when we took that picture for the back cover of Wicca,” Beelzeebubth recalls. “I wanted to take the most extreme shot that any band on the planet had ever done! Several people stopped their cars to watch us as we did the shoot.

“A friend brought a dog to the session for some reason, and some Christian people said that it was blasphemy and called the fuckin’ cops. But it was liberating. It was a time of many discoveries and many realisations in my life.”

If the release of I.N.R.I. was a watermark for some, not everyone was onboard from the off. “They were different times,” says Beelzeebubth. “Some thrash, death and grindcore bands did not support or like black metal bands. Sarcófago faced a lot of rejection by that audience, mainly for the rivalry with Sepultura. It took time for Brazilians to open their minds to bands like us, Sarcófago, Vulcano, Impurity and others.”

In the early 80s, the Brazilian underground was riven by factions: within cities, between cities, and between rival scenes. The military dictatorship that ruled over Brazil from 1964 to 1985, and the extreme levels of poverty that were deeply entrenched throughout the country, all created a violence-primed backdrop that was reflected in the raw, visceral nature of the music of that time.

“The tribalism was very strong here in Brazil, for sure,” says frontman Diego. “The skinheads had the Nazi guys and they were against the punks. But eventually the metal guys joined the punks and the hardcore people to fight the Nazis, because the skinhead guys were the real evil guys. If there are still a couple of them nowadays, they are afraid of coming out. Nobody ever sees a Nazi at concerts anymore.”

The year of Mystifier’s formation, Sepultura released Beneath The Remains, the album that, despite the inroads Sarcófago had made, truly broke out of the Brazilian scene and made them an international sensation. As much as thrash, with its roots in social upheaval, had always been embedded in the Brazilian underground, their transition from the dank, deathly approach of their early years left the remaining Brazilian bands with ambivalent feelings.

“Some of the bands tried to change a little bit to try out this new formula that Sepultura had, and some of the extreme people got upset because they were getting out of the Satanic extremity of the first two records,” says Diego. “But back then it was so difficult to get into the international market. It was a game of luck and contacts.

“So when Sepultura became famous, it was actually good for us, because the Brazilian scene stood out to the world. You could even say that it helped Mystifier because we were found by Osmose Productions after that.”

Released by the French underground label, Mystifier’s following two albums, 1993’s Göetia and 1996’s milestone The World Is So Good That Who Made It Doesn’t Live Here, saw the band become a cult act worldwide while consciously refusing to fall into standard black metal tropes. Even the use of keyboards, along with the operatic vocals on The World Is So Good…, forged their own, adversarial bond with black metal’s founding, undiluted ideals.

“I don’t like to repeat the same old formulas,” states Beelzeebubth. “I am always looking for new sources of inspiration. I didn’t want to sound like a traditional Norwegian band, as many were doing for trading and profit.”

To this day, Mystifier are still a revered act. 2019’s Protogoni Mavri Magiki Dynasteia, their first album in 18 years after a series of line-up battles, drew rave reviews and live shows induced states of feral rapture. Mystifier’s driving belief in metal’s darkest, most persevering forces is a boundless resource.

“I’m an occultist,” says Beelzeebubth. “I have always been very interested in the mystery about the truth about our existence. I have kept my eyes opened during the night to see in the darkness, and I am devoted to bands that wrote their lyrics about it, such as Slayer, Venom, Possessed and Cirith Ungol. My imagination went from Heaven to Hell.”

“In Brazil,” adds Diego, “Satanism was a rebellious movement. If you look at the Brazilian bands that stood out at the time, everybody was from a poor background. So that condition of being poor and living a very difficult life, a dangerous life, a very violent life in the slums, that gave us the feeling of rebellion against all that was considered ‘right’.

“That includes the church and the government, so the Satanism was a symbol to be against the system, to be against the ‘good people’ who actually were not good – the rich ones who wanted to dominate and enslave the poor people. It was a symbol of justice for us, to represent our fight.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer 339 (August 2020)

Scarborough, one of Britain’s original seaside resorts, does not fit the mental image of a hub for black metal in the UK. Far from the Fens of East Anglia that birthed, well, Fen, or the Peak District where Winterfylleth snap their album covers, Scarborough has nonetheless played host to an influx of kvlt visitors in recent years. Between the establishment of Fortress Festival and the emergence of Ante-Inferno (whose drummer, Gary Stephenson, is Fortress’s head honcho), the mesh of arcades and chippies that make up ‘Scarbados’ has provided an unlikely backdrop to the creation of the band’s full-length miserablist missive, Death’s Soliloquy.

“I found myself becoming increasingly preoccupied by death and of all the circumstances, thoughts and emotions surrounding death,” details frontwoman K.B., of the album’s concept, wherein Death itself tells the accounts of the various deceased. “I decided to dispense with any attempt at subtext and simply write about death from different perspectives: the last thoughts of a person before suicide, a terrible tragedy that ended the lives of hundreds of people at sea, the death and misery caused by war and atrocities, murder, decomposition… really negative and discouraging topics that were plaguing my thoughts continually.”

Death’s Soliloquy is a noticeably dejected album. It’s a highly melodic piece of black metal, and not incapable of surging moments of vitality, but it often seems to funnel those melodies towards despondency and melancholy in the extreme, creating a miasma of depression and loss.

“At the beginning, I wanted a sound that was much more brutal and primitive, like Bestial Mockery and Blasphemy,” she says of their musical evolution towards a grand bleakness. “What we do nowadays is far more melodic and layered, but I feel it still carries many of the emotions and atmospheres those sorts of bands create: hatred, anger, barbarism and disgust. But those sorts of feelings are imbued with the kinds of textures you may see in depressive and atmospheric black metal bands, textures that wrap themselves around you and take you somewhere else - whether that’s outside of yourself or further into yourself, I guess it depends on the listener.”

K.B.’s vocal performance in particular is one of abject horror, coming from the throes of a torment you don’t need to be told about to detect from the record.

“The key drive was to create a sense of anguish and uncertainty,” she states. “I’d say my intention was that there be no resolution, but that doesn’t mean the catharsis isn’t there. Producing such tormented music probably has had a healing effect on me, even though my only intent was simply to express those feelings, perhaps even wallow uselessly in them. But perhaps there is always a semblance of hope, no matter how bleak things become.”

Between the release of 2022’s Antediluvian Dreamscapes and Death’s Soliloquy, K.B. also came out as a trans woman. While choosing not to place that at the forefront of the album’s narrative and feeling that it manifests more subconsciously, the whirling, disorientating mass of emotions and internal chaos is something she recognises within the album today as chiming with that experience.

“I’m not sure I really made any conscious effort [to write about my experience transitioning], but the theme is there. The maddening dysphoria, these feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred, of being unable to find yourself, or being disgusted with what you find when you look at yourself, and of course, thoughts of suicide and self-harm. It’s indirect and told through the perspectives of imaginary figures, but the consequences of it are laid bare - the depression, anger and absence of hope – all of which are in perfect harmony with the language and expression of black metal.”

Being transgender in black metal is still highly uncertain territory. In 2017, current Sonja bandleader Melissa Moore was unceremoniously kicked out of USBM act Absu, allegedly on account of her gender transition.

“It’s difficult to speak about openly, and just to be clear, this is the first time that I have ever spoken about it openly,” K.B. says on fears of conservative attitudes from some of her peers. “I have no social media presence, so it’s not like I’m constantly popping selfies and snippets of my life up on the digital space for all to see. I like to keep to myself, so the prospect of exposure has been pretty fucking terrifying, especially as you can literally see my transition taking place in the photos that accompany our albums.

You’re always waiting for the abuse and mockery to come your way, wondering whether people in the scene will take you seriously or instead view you as some sort of antithesis of all that black metal represents. Of course, anyone who thinks that of me can go fuck themselves.”

With that attitude, the throughline of transformation in Death’s Soliloquy really takes shape.

“I think it’s worth noting that, for all the changes you go through, you’re not actually altering who you are; you’re just better expressing and externalising the person you have always been,” she says. “You could liken that to our collective transition as a band, from our starting point to today. Sonically we have come a long way from our origin, but the essence of what we are has stayed the same.”

Death's Soliloquy is out now. Ante-Inferno tour the UK with Ultha in April.

Deafheaven have re-embraced black metal with new single Magnolia.

The track, released today (January 27), is the first single of upcoming album Lonely People With Power, which will come out on March 28 via Roadrunner Records.

Listen to the song and see the new album’s artwork and tracklisting below.

Lonely People With Power will follow 2021’s Infinite Granite, which saw Deafheaven stray from their usual blackgaze sound and use almost entirely melodic vocals and clean guitars.

In a three-star review, Metal Hammer’s Christina Wenig praised the beauty of the California band’s new songs but criticised their lack of intensity.

“Remember the rush of blood to the head you felt when [2013 song] Dreamhouse kicked in?” she wrote. “That won’t happen here. And it’s not because [vocalist] George Clarke switched from his trademark shrieks to clean vocals and whispers – a bold, if not necessarily always a good move. It’s because somewhere along the way, Deafheaven have lost some of the intensity that had previously made them irresistible.”

Deafheaven formed in 2010 and released their debut album, Roads To Judah, in 2011. 2013 follow-up Sunbather made the band cult darlings, drawing rave reviews as they brought the blackgaze sound, pioneered by the likes of French band Alcest, to American audiences.

In 2019, the song Honeycomb, from fourth album Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, earned Deafheaven a nomination for Grammy Award For Best Metal Performance.

The band say that Lonely People With Power will mark their “most ambitious release yet”. It was produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Nine Inch Nails, St Vincent, M83) at EastWest Studios in Los Angeles and will feature guest vocals Jae Matthews of Boy Harsher and Paul Banks of Interpol.

Deafheaven have several US and European festival dates set for 2025 and say that they will announce tour dates to support their new album “in the coming days”. Get details of all current live plans via the band’s website.

Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power

01. Incidental I
02. Doberman
03. Magnolia
04. The Garden Route
05. Heathen
06. Amethyst
07. Incidental II
08. Revelator
09. Body Behavior
10. Incidental III
11. Winona
12. The Marvelous Orange Tree

Over 40 years since Venom coined the phrase "black metal" and spawned metal's most infernal subgenre, it continues to thrive. Although many of its forces are now reaching venerable veteran status - hell, even Cradle Of Filth have passed the three-decade mark - the genre continues to thrive thanks to a steadfast dedication from both listeners and musicians to crafting their own spiky niches from the void.

2024 then, is representative of how the dials in black metal continue to shift. With even old school forces like Rotting Christ and Trelldom pushing boundaries and (relative) newcomers like Witch Club Satan, Hulder, Oranssi Pazuzu offering entirely new spins on the genre, it's no wonder that black metal is still a massively influential force in the extreme metal sphere. That in mind, here are the 10 black metal records that showcase the very best 2024 has to offer...

10. Hulder – Verses In Oath (20 Buck Spin)

In taking her name from Scandinavian folklore, it was always a safe bet that one-woman black metal project Hulder would err more on the side of fjord-and-forest dwelling second wavers than the generally more progressive, post-black metal stylings of her countrymen.

But there's no mindless lip-service here; her second album, Verses In Oath is a stunning and oft-cinematic blast of blackened fury, incorporating elements of ambience and even acoustic folk to develop her own voice within the black metal sphere. Only two albums in, Hulder has already staked her claim as one of black metal's exciting new acts. Rich Hobson

9. Folterkammer – Weibermacht (Century Media)

Black metal in 2024 is a broad church - not least because some of its inhabitants seem hell-bent on setting the whole thing ablaze. Even with that in mind, there's little that sounds like Folterkammer's Weibermacht. The second album from the New York based group, Weibermacht fuses the frosty blastbeats and shrieks of black metal with operatic vocals and femme-dom lyrical content that puts a whole new spin on the imperiousness of black metal.

With Imperial Triumphant's Zachary Ezrin and exceptional vocalist Andromeda Anarchia in their ranks, Folterkammer are representative of how black metal is still evolving 40+ years on from its inception, incorporating core ideals of the genre whilst creating something utterly bewitching. Rich Hobson

8. Zeal And Ardor – Greif (Redacted)

Zeal & Ardor may have inspired a million headlines in the late 2010s by making “black metal meets spirituals” music, but that catch-all is long since behind the Switzerland/US outfit. On fourth album Greif, more than ever, Manuel Gagneux and the boys were fascinated with the sounds in between snarling metal and crooning soul.

This resulted in curiosities like Thrill, which proceeded from a bouncy, pop-punk-flecked riff to melodeath guitar leads. Elsewhere, Fend You Off built a bold metal song around a delicate, chiming melody, whereas To My Ilk eschewed rock entirely, offering two minutes of loungy elegance. Now a decade deep, this band seem to have no shortage of ideas in their back pockets. Matt Mills

7. Ante-Inferno – Death’s Soliloquy (Vendetta)

Black metal isn't exactly known for its cheery disposition, but even by the genre's standards Ante-Inferno's Death's Soliloquy is bleak. An exploration of "madness, mental illness, death obsession and suicidal despair", the Scarborough, UK band's third album leans hard on the grimmest of subjects. It's also gorgeous.

A maelstrom of melodic black metal, Death's Soliloquy evokes the sheer beauty and terror of a natural disaster, crashing waves of blast-beats and anguished howls that connect to some inner sense of abject horror at the heart of the human condition. Rich Hobson

6. Oranssi Pazuzu – Muuntautuja (Nuclear Blast)

Calling Oranssi Pazuzu a black metal band actually feels reductive. For almost two decades now, the Finnish enigmas have dealt a disorienting strain of music that mixes metal, krautrock, prog, folk and psychedelia. The concoction has seldom felt more potent than it did on Muuntautuja.

On album number six, the mind-melters added even more to their sonic cocktail, pulling from noise music and even hip-hop group Death Grips. Contrasting all that abrasiveness, though, were some of the most accessible drum parts of their career. As a result, its eight songs would have you bobbing along as you’re dragged ear-first through Hell itself. It was a dissonance so powerful that it made the album a borderline addictive experience. Matt Mills

5. Trelldom – …By The Shadows… (Prophecy)

Gaahl isn't one to rush things, especially when it comes to Trelldom. His experimental black metal project have been wailing in the ether since 1992, but the 17-year wait for a new album had many convinced the project may have been left gathering dust with so many other Gaahl projects to contend with. But then, that's just how Trelldom like things: unexpected.

Their fourth album arrives in a haze of psychedelic-hued, jazz-adjacent swirls that are innovative even by their own lofty standards. Noir-ish crooners like Exit Existence clash with squalling, wailing sax on Return The Distance, while Between The World is an occult reference away from being funereal doom. It's a sublime mix, and shows that while the likes of Imperial Triumphant and Falterkammer are leading the way for innovation in black metal, they're by no means the first to tread the path. Rich Hobson

4. Witch Club Satan – Witch Club Satan (Lost And Found)

Hailing from Norway, there's more than a whiff of the Norwegian black metal masters to newcomers Witch Club Satan. Musically, they offer no-frills, oh-so thrilling blasts of second wave black metal that traces its lineage back beyond Mayhem and Emperor to the likes of Motorhead and GBH, but there's also an added layer of spikiness and fury that makes the group's self-titled debut electric.

With songs like Fresh Blood, Fresh Pussy, WCS nail their provocateur tendencies to the mast, each of the album's 12 songs trading in utterly apoplectic assaults on the senses that, even when they're not going 100mph, as on tar-paced Steilneset or the surprisingly sublimely melodic Mother Sea, hits like a bulldozer. Rich Hobson.

3. Rotting Christ – Pro Xristou (Season Of Mist)

When Rotting Christ started releasing albums in the early 90s, black metal had evolved into a global force. Scandinavia might've grabbed the headlines, but fertile scenes everywhere from Brazil to Australia and the UK ensured even the most kvlt band was connected to a wider force. The genre's fields have only grown more populated over the past 30 years, but Pro Xtristou proves the Greeks are still one of the most iconoclastic and distinctive acts in black metal.

Their fourteenth album refines the slower, more epic songcraft the band showcased on 2016's Rituals, stripping away some of the more frenetic stylings of its successor - 2019's The Heretics - to craft something that has an instant impact and befits their veteran status. Rich Hobson

2. Alcest – Les Chants De L’Aurore (Nuclear Blast)

Alcest’s relationship with blackgaze has weathered more ups and downs than Homer and Marge Simpson. Architect Stéphane “Neige” Paut basically invented the style on the EP Le Secret, but has repeatedly eschewed it for post-rock or heavier sounds. Les Chants De L’Aurore marked at least the third reunion between band and genre, following predecessor Spiritual Instinct pursuing a more wholly metal path, but also proved that nobody wields it better.

From the bouncy Flamme Jumelle to the mellow and bittersweet L’Adieu, Alcest reclaimed their throne as the kings of blackgaze, returning emotional richness to what so many imitators reduced to “screaming over delay pedals”. Welcome back Neige, and we look forward to welcoming you back again in two albums’ time. Matt Mills

1. Ihsahn – Ihsahn (Candlelight)

In metal, two kinds of people release self-titled albums: people debuting, or people desperate to convince you they’ve redefined themselves à la Metallica in 1991. Thankfully, the maverick Ihsahn fell through the cracks and presented what may genuinely be his definitive work.

The man born Vegard Tveitan has been fascinated with the interplay between metal and classical since the early Emperor days, and here that relationship got hyper-focussed upon and perfected. He didn’t just plop strings on top of black metal songs like so many do – he made the cinematic and the aggressive one, writing extreme songs using chord progressions that John WIlliams and Jerry Goldsmith employed when composing. The album’s extended version, which offered classical instrumental takes on every track, only reaffirmed how nuanced a job Ihsahn had done. Matt Mills

It should be pretty hard to confuse a metal band with a soul singer. However, when both of those things have the exact same name, those waters get much, much murkier.

Last week, it was reported that fans of the soul/jazz musician Celeste had mistakenly shown up at the show of some experimental black metal aggressors, also called Celeste. The story made national headlines and everyone had a bit of a laugh at the poor, duped fans, who travelled about 100 miles to get unexpectedly brutalised with riffs.

However, perhaps these two seemingly disparate artists have more in common than anyone’s given them credit for? So, we reached out to Celeste (the metal one) to see if they had a favourite song by Celeste (the soul one). Surprisingly, they did. And this is what they said.

“After diving into her discography a bit, I’d pick A Kiss as my favourite,” came the reply from vocalist/bassist Johan Girardeau. “It’s probably one of the saddest tracks she has, and that fits pretty well with the vibe we go for with Celeste. There’s this beautiful melancholy in it that resonates, even if our music styles are worlds apart.”

Girardeau continues, going so far as to call for a collaboration between the two identically named artists. “Actually, her type of voice could work surprisingly well with our music in a feature – maybe that’s the perfect way to wrap up this whole mix-up and give fans what they deserve!”

Until that “Celeste feat. Celeste” crossover rocks up, the band have a new EP, last year’s Epilogue(s), for you to wrap your ears around. Meanwhile, the singer recently put out a new song called This Is Who I Am, the title theme of Sky TV series The Day Of The Jackal. Her sole album, Not Your Muse, came out in 2021 and a recent press release said she is currently “prepar[ing] to tell the next chapter of her story”. So watch this space.

When Sólstafir released the title track of Hin Helga Kvöl as the album’s lead single, it was met with a collective “Fucking hell!” The scrappy black metal cut looked back at the Icelanders’ extreme roots for the first time since their 2002 debut album, Í Blóði Og Anda. It was an approach that, in the 22-year interim, had become overwhelmed by a windswept post- rock tone, as majestic and massive as the mountainous landscapes that inspired it.

However, any hopes of album number eight being a full metal comeback were swiftly dashed by other, more atmospheric snapshots getting released. The few remaining purists still haranguing Sólstafir to this day were obviously disappointed, as has been their default setting for a long time now. For everyone else, the title track holds a key role in a record that, across nine tracks, examines the four-piece’s past, present and future with beauty and depth.

Every shade of Sólstafir comes through here. Nú Mun Ljósið Deyja is another rampage of speed and fury, whereas Sálumessa is a spacious giant, frontman Aðalbjörn ‘Addi’ Tryggvason’s vocals echoing over slow, solemn guitars. Vor Ás and Freygátan touch similar levels of grace, albeit condensed into tighter structures tailor-made for live shows. Blakkrakki, on the other hand, barges into Motörhead and AC/DC reverence, its simple cries of ‘Blakkrakki! Blakkrakki!’ transcending language barriers with their undeniable catchiness.

Later, Kuml sees Sólstafir crescendo in their most ambitious mode. The finale defies genre – slickly following rhythmic, Nordic chanting with keys, barrelling chords and prog rock saxophones – to announce that Hin Helga Kvöl isn’t just a retread through past glories. Two decades after shedding their punk and black metal shackles, the band still have new ideas to explore. And, even more impressively, they can fold the result into their current soundscape without any issue at all.

Hin Helga Kvöl is out this Friday, November 8, via Century Media

Venom’s 1982 album Black Metal is one of the most influential records in history, detonating a chain reaction that would result in thrash, death metal and, of course, black metal itself – even if it was roundly mocked at the time. In 2011, Venom singer and bass-bludgeoner Cronos looked back on the making of a twisted masterpiece.

It may feel like the genesis of heavy metal should have been sparked when a lightning bolt hit a mountain, but in reality, the birth of the song Black Sabbath would not have made for a great fly-on-the-wall documentary. As momentous as this event was, something that happened over a period of several weeks punctuated by many arguments over who was making the next round of brews and interminable conversations over exactly which take of the line ‘Oh, no, no! Please God help me!’ was the most convincingly terrifying and how loud the bell should be in the final mix, would not have made for great cinema.  

This is one of the reasons why full credit should be given to Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant, the mainstay of extreme metal pioneers Venom for refusing to mystify the making of their iconic second album, Black Metal, in 1982, no matter how influential and important it went on to become. He’s quite candid about what is arguably the most important album in the birth of extreme metal ever recorded.

“We had no idea what we were doing was going to become such a big thing. So many bands were in the studio at the same time as us. How the hell could I have presumed that it would be my band who would be the lasting name? We weren’t trying to be the next Iron Maiden or the next this or that. We just wanted to do what we enjoyed. You had a band like [fellow Geordie NWOBHM outfit] Tygers Of Pan Tang always dropping Purple references; you know, ‘We want to be the next Deep Purple.’ Well, Venom never did that. We never said that. We said, ‘We are now, we are new, we are Venom.’

Venom formed in Newcastle in 1979 and coalesced into their early classic lineup of Cronos on bass and vocals, Tony ‘Abaddon’ Bray on drums and Jeff ‘Mantas’ Dunn on guitar the following year. There were several key environmental factors at work during this unholy conception.  Newcastle in the late 1970s was a hard bitten, industrial city, destabilised and depressed by high unemployment and a profound lack of meaningful choice available to the majority, working-class inhabitants who lived there. It was a city where you “put on your father’s clothes when you were old enough and then went and did his job”.

Except, according to Cronos, “That wasn’t an option in 1979 – there were no jobs left.” Everything from the dark Satanic Mills of the English industrial revolution  to the once-mighty ship yards had been forced to shut up shop, leaving most of the erstwhile sons of toil signing on and pissed off. The city was, in many respects, similar to Birmingham, the home of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and half of Led Zeppelin, all favourite groups of the bassist. Except a decade later, many young Geordies had fallen under another spell as well as metal:

“Growing up in the 70s in the north of England, punk meant everything to me. The whole industry was dying, the ship- yards, everything. There was no future. There was no hope. Punk music was a way for the real people in this country to get a voice. It was the great unwashed getting a say for once, shouting, ‘Fucking hell, we’re not happy about this.’”

Seeing his desire to be in a metal band as a mission, he was drawn to work with Abaddon and Mantas simply because they struck him as the only people he had met who were as driven as him. Their chops were the last thing on his mind. And in return, the other two were keen to work with Cronos because he had access to a studio. Ironically, the only place they had played with any great regularity before they recorded their debut album, Welcome To Hell, was a church.

“Our practise room was a church, our first ever gig was in a church and our first demo was recorded in a church – I’ve still got the tapes; we sounded fucking terrible,” he says with a laugh. “There was this Methodist vicar who liked the idea of putting a few bob in his pocket, so we would set up on the altar just in front of the pulpit and away we went. The Vicar used to let us in and then fuck off. So we ransacked the place basically... ha ha ha! I’ve still got some of the big old candles and crucifixes that we nicked off him.”

Another influence on Black Metal was a feeling that they’d been misled by their record label, Neat, during the recording of their debut; an experience they were keen not to repeat. The frontman had worked overtime at the studios where he worked for months until he could afford to pay for a heavily discounted three-day period when it wasn’t in use. After blagging help and tape they were ready to roll. There was just one problem.

“We recorded Welcome To Hell in three days and they were just demos,” says Cronos. “We thought that if the label liked them we’d be given a green light and we’d have the chance to record them properly as a great new album over a week or so. But then when the record company heard the tapes they said, ‘No, we like it the way it is, we’ll put it out like that.’ We must have looked horrified... there were timing issues, there were tuning issues but they just said, ‘No, it goes out like that or not at all.’ They had our arms forced up behind our backs because there was no way in hell we were going to turn down an album. No fucking way at all. There was that kind of feeling, ‘Fucking hell. We’re going to blow this before we’ve even started.’”

The following year Venom still had everything to prove and the little that they had achieved to lose. The fact that their biggest supporter in the press, the legendary Geoff Barton, described Welcome To Hell as having “the hi-fi dynamics of a 50-year-old pizza”, really showed that they had their work cut out for them... and this is where Cronos’s tenacity revealed itself fully for the first time.

“We knew we had to record this one properly,” he says. “We knew what kind of tricks might be played on us, so we made sure all those songs were nailed before we went into the studio. And for me, Black Metal is our first proper album, because Welcome To Hell is just demos.”

He laughs as he describes the sheer luxury that was offered them during the week-long extravaganza. “We got the chance to overdub some solos. We got the chance to redo some vocals. Welcome To Hell took three days to record and mix and Black Metal took seven days. But we had our shit down so tight we knew all we had to do was to get a sound on the kit and a sound on the back line and BANG!, just nail the fucker.”

Black Metal opens with a literal assault on the listener. There isn’t even a run-in groove on the original vinyl album – the first sound you hear is a horrible noise the second the needle hits the groove (if you’re listening to the original vinyl it does this anyhow). It seemed that punk nihilism, the heavy industry of the area, a real desire to shock the listener out of complacency and a vicious sense of mischief were coming together in a screeching sonic scree.

 “That is literally a chainsaw cutting into metal,” says Cronos. “Abaddon used to work in a steel factory. I was saying to him, ‘We really need to find this annoying sound to go at the start of the album.’ And he said, ‘Fucking hell, if you’ve ever heard metal grinding on metal, it’s a sound that will go right through you.’ We took huge chunks of steel into the studio, put them into a vice and away we went. It was a fucking incredible sound, menacing.”

This was simply one of many strategies that he was using to make the record lively, unexpected and unique. Cronos took a more literal approach to spooking out the listener on the track Buried Alive.

“I came to the studio with all these buckets of mud, sand and flour and we put some microphones inside some cardboard boxes in a stairwell. Then we got all these spades and slowly started filling in the boxes with the mud and soil. There were a load of guys into the studio when we did the whole, ‘We came into this world with nothing and with nothing we shall depart’ bit. They were doing the crying and whimpering as if they were at a real funeral, and the funny thing was we had to do this a lot of times because no one was whimpering or crying, people were actually trying to hold back laughter. And when we came back to listen to the tape the weird thing was that the actual laughter actually sounded like crying, and that’s what you can hear.”

Black metal as a genre would go on to mean many different things to many different people over the next three decades, but to Cronos it means exactly the same thing today as it did then. 

“It was our way of distinguishing our music from the run-of-the-mill heavy metal that was coming out back then. When people were telling me that rock was dead at the end of the 1970s, I couldn’t help but wish that most of it was because it was that fucking lame. ‘Black metal’ was coined because I wanted to describe how different we were to other bands of the time, even how different we were to most ‘heavy metal’ bands of the time.” 

The influence of Black Metal is so vast it can barely be measured. As well as providing the name and many of the conventions for one of the healthiest sub- genres of metal still thriving today, it also set the foundations for much of what we now call extreme metal, in particular thrash, death, speed metal.

If many in the UK sneered at a perceived lack of technical prowess in Venom, this was easily offset by their growing legion of fans in the US. And it really didn’t hurt that some of them were in bands such as Metallica, Slayer and Exodus.

But of course, if we had to boil down the significance of this album to one time and place it would probably be to Oslo in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Everything about Venom was sacrosanct to the second wave of BM, or the practitioners of True Norwegian Black Metal, from the lo-fi aesthetic, the Satanic imagery, the desire to alienate the listener and even the style of dress.

“I was sent early demo tapes by acts like Burzum and Mayhem,” says Cronos. “They reminded me of early Venom in that it was guys who cared more about the passion of the music than the accuracy of it. It reminded me of our first two albums and how I was 10 years earlier, that enthusiasm and hunger. Of all the bands who came up after Venom – not Metallica and not Exodus – they were the only ones who had that ‘looseness’, that punk rawness, the piss, the shit, the snot, the vomit that we had. I could hear it in those young Norwegian bands who were going Hell for leather. Those guys still cite Venom as a big influence but they need to take more credit for what they did. They evolved the sound. I just think it was a shame that it was overshadowed by that church-burning bullshit.”

He’s keen to point out that the influence can often be felt in unexpected places: “I think the lasting impact of Black Metal for me is that it has earned us respect in areas that you wouldn’t expect. When you hear someone like Dave Grohl say how important it was to him when he was in school then that’s a big deal. Also it’s further-reaching than you think. It’s like when you meet a lawyer in a suit and he’s asking you for a Black Metal shirt. The secret Venom fans. Those are the kinds of things that last because you realise how important it was for a lot of other people as well.”

But ultimately, the strength of Black Metal is its raw, ugly sound - the noise you make when you genuinely don’t give a fuck and have nothing to lose.

 “Absolutely. I think it’s about the intensity and conviction that you put into the recording. If you play with fire and vengeance you can get away with dodgy production because people pick up on the actual vibe of the performance in the studio and that’s how I think the first Venom records did OK. Because people weren’t going, ‘Oh I think there’s something wrong with the production,’ they were saying, ‘Fuck me!’ They got where we were coming from. They got the fact that we were young and full of ‘ARRRGHHHH!’”

Originally published in Metal Hammer magazine issue 225, November 2011

What if a black metal band swapped blastbeats and screaming for synthesisers
and crooning, then rehearsed on the set of a 70s Doctor Who episode? It’s a question no one has ever asked. Nonetheless, Zetra are beaming the answer into people’s brains, with their costumed, cosmic nonsense making them rising stars.

Since the pandemic, this synth rock pair have supported everyone from Godflesh to Ville Valo. They’ve graced countless festivals and inked a deal with Nuclear Blast – all this before they’ve even put out their debut album. That’s how much punters love their synthpop/ shoegaze/hard rock tracks, or are bewildered by their gigs with old TV screens and more chains than Hellraiser.

Unsurprisingly, Zetra keeps flowing oxygen to the duo’s winning formula. Their marketing statements are more in-character sci-fi gobbledygook, while their new songs are as ethereal and melodic as usual. The band’s sonic ingredients mix best on standouts such as Gaia, where their music grows just as batshit as their presentation. On top of barrelling rock’n’roll chords, the synths are loud enough to be quasi-symphonic. The vocals prove similarly bombastic when they cry, ‘Gaia’s on fire!’ Unto Others collab Moonfall guns for similar pomp, its industrial touches squealing like pinch harmonics, starting a six-minute odyssey with a boot out the door.

Other songs, like opener Suffer Eternally, feel held back from the maximalist majesty. The breathy, high-pitched vocals are overwhelmed during the chorus’s blasts of digital percussion. It weakens what, on paper, is an earworm hook. With guest singer Serena Cherry from Svalbard sounding disappointingly distant during Starfall and the guitars rarely shining through on Shatter The Mountain, it’s clear that every texture still needs time to find its place. When Zetra fully commit to sounding as outlandish as they look, maybe that’s when their masterpiece will be released.

Zetra is released this Friday, September 13

Breakout black metal stars Blackbraid have released a cover of Warriors by supergroup I.

The one-man project, helmed by Jon “Sgah’gahsowáh” Krieger, released their take on the track on Friday (August 16). It’s their first piece of music since they put out their latest album, Blackbraid II, in August 2023. Listen to the cover below.

Blackbraid released their self-titled debut album in 2022 and swiftly went viral. The band, based in the Adirondack mountains, write music about the beauty of the natural world Sgah’gahsowáh grew up around. Their lyrics also tap into Sgah’gahsowáh’s Native American heritage, bringing light to the atrocities the people have suffered.

“A lot of people don’t know our history, but it’s always been at the forefront of my mind,” Sgah’gahsowáh said in a 2022 Metal Hammer interview.

Blackbraid incorporate folk elements into their music, as Sgah’gahsowáh explained. “People are bored of a lot of the black metal tropes out there right now,” he said. “When it comes to Scandinavian black metal, I’m the biggest fan there is. But there comes a point in my mind where the dark, mediaeval type of black metal has just been done so much. It’s impossible for bands to make an album in that genre and not sound like all the rest.”

Blackbraid will tour mainland Europe in October, with dates announced for the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Tickets to the shows are now available.

I were a Norwegian black metal supergroup started in 2003. Their ranks included then-Immortal frontman Abbath, Enslaved guitarist Arve “Ice Dale” Isdal and then-Gorgoroth bassist TC King. They released one album, Between Two Worlds, in 2006 then deactivated later that year, due to members’ commitments to their other bands.

Abbath started a solo career after his Immortal exit in 2015. King appeared on the musician’s self-titled debut solo album, released in 2016.

Black metal singer/songwriter Myrkur will play with King Diamond at his next live dates.

Myrkur (real name Amalie Bruun) will join Diamond (Kim Petersen) and his band during his North American tour from October to December.

See the full list of dates below.

She’ll be contributing keys and backing vocals, according to a comment from Diamond, and support on the tour will come from thrashers Overkill and traditional metal act Night Demon.

Diamond says of what to expect during the shows: “This is Saint Lucifer’s Hospital, enter if you dare! We have been busy putting this ever-growing horror story together, and it’s still growing. I know the end of it, but how we will get there will be a long trip.

“There are so many characters, and so many unexpected things along this journey. It’s a crazy family on another timeline in 1920, where I experienced some hard times, and they have to come to our time to steal from us to survive.

“This is the most elaborate thing we have ever done, that goes for the stage production as well.”

Of Myrkur’s contributions, Diamond continues: “There will be additional backing vocals by Myrkur and she’ll be playing organ for songs that need it.

“There will be some horrific surprises taking place on stage, but we are not to be held responsible since we are on a whole different timeline in 1920. It was back at the time when medicine was going through a dark period with lots of testing on human beings in order to progress medicine.

“This is Saint Lucifer’s Hospital, also known as The Institute, enter if you dare!”

Diamond released his latest solo album, Give Me Your Soul… Please, in 2007. He’s currently working on a follow-up, tentatively titled The Institute.

Myrkur released her most recent album, Spine, last year.

King Diamond 2024 North American tour dates:

10/15/2024 Boeing Center at Tech Port. - San Antonio, TX
10/16/2024 Bayou Music Center - Houston, TX
10/18/2024 Andrew J Brady Music Center - Cincinnati, OH
10/19/2024 The Factory - St. Louis, MO
10/20/2024 The Midland Theater - Kansas City, MO
10/22/2024 Murat Theatre At Old National Center - Indianapolis, IN
10/23/2024 The Louisville Palace Theatre - Louisville, KY
10/25/2024 The Eastern - Atlanta, GA
10/26/2024 Duke Energy Center for the Arts - Mahaffey Theater - St. Petersburg, FL
10/28/2024 The Fillmore - Silver Spring, MD
10/30/2024 Kings Theater - Brooklyn, NY
10/31/2024 Roadrunner - Boston, MA *
11/02/2024 MTelus - Montreal, QC
11/03/2024 The Theatre At Great Canadian - Mississauga, ON
11/04/2024 The Masonic Temple - Detroit, MI
11/06/2024 The Agora Theatre & Ballroom - Cleveland, OH
11/07/2024 The Chicago Theatre - Chicago, IL
11/08/2024 The Riverside Theater - Milwaukee, WI
11/10/2024 The Fillmore - Minneapolis, MN
11/11/2024 Vibrant Music Hall - Waukee, IA
11/14/2024 Mission Ballroom - Denver, CO
11/16/2024 The Complex - Salt Lake City, UT
11/18/2024 Orpheum - Vancouver, BC
11/20/2024 Edmonton Convention Center - Edmonton, AB
11/21/2024 TCU Place - Saskatoon, SK
11/22/2024 Grey Eagle Resort And Casino - Calgary, AB
11/24/2024 Keller Auditorium - Portland, OR
11/25/2024 Moore Theater - Seattle, WA
11/27/2024 Fox Theater - Oakland, CA
11/29/2024 YouTube Theater - Los Angeles, CA
11/30/2024 The Theater At Virgin Hotels - Las Vegas, NV
12/01/2024 Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre - San Diego, CA
12/02/2024 The Van Buren - Phoenix, AZ
12/04/2024 REVEL - Albuquerque, NM
12/06/2024 The Factory In Deep Ellum - Dallas, TX

* No Overkill

Black metal collective Tribulation have announced their next studio album.

Sub Rosa In Æternum will come out on November 1 via Century Media Records.

The band have accompanied the news with the release of second single Tainted Skies. Listen to the new track and watch its music video below.

Guitarist Adam Zaars comments: “The old and the new. Tainted Skies is a fairly straightforward Tribulation song written by Joseph [Tholl, guitars].

“He gives the whole sound his own spin and takes us through murky depths and shadowy skies, from death to new life.”

The track listing of Sub Rosa In Æternum is yet to be released, but the album will feature recent single Saturn Coming Down.

When put out in June, the track revealed that Tribulation were pursuing a more psychedelic sound than their usual goth/black metal ways. The band have also shed their corpse paint, which had long been a key part of their appearance.

Sub Rosa In Æternum will be the first Tribulation album since Where The Gloom Becomes Sound in 2021.

It will also be the band’s second studio offering without founding guitarist Jonathan Hultén, following the 2023 EP Hamartia.

Hultén left Tribulation in 2020 to more fully pursue a solo career.

Before the release of Sub Rosa In Æternum, Tribulation will tour North America with progressive metal favourites Opeth. See the full list of announced dates below.

Opeth / Tribulation 2024 North American tour:

Oct 11: Milwaukee The Rave / Eagles Club, WI
Oct 12: Cleveland Agora Theater & Ballroom, OH
Oct 14: Toronto Queen Elizabeth Theatre, ON
Oct 15: Montréal L’Olympia, QC
Oct 16: Worcester Palladium, MA
Oct 18: Brooklyn Kings Theatre, NY
Oct 19: Pittsburgh Stage AE, PA
Oct 20: Washington, DC, Warner Theatre
Oct 22: Atlanta Tabernacle, GA
Oct 23: New Orleans Fillmore New Orleans, LA
Oct 24: Austin Emo’s Austin, TX
Oct 25: Dallas Majestic Theatre, TX
Oct 27: Denver Mission Ballroom, CO
Oct 29: Phoenix The Van Buren, AZ
Oct 30: Los Angeles YouTube Theater, CA
Oct 31: San Francisco The Warfield, CA

Masked black metal champions Gaerea have returned with new single Hope Shatters.

The track, released today (July 16), is the Portuguese quintet’s second new song of 2024, following April’s World Ablaze.

Watch the music video below.

Gaerea’s unnamed vocalist comments: “Welcome to the urban abyss. Where dreams turn to rust.”

The band have also announced that both Hope Shatters and World Ablaze will appear on their next studio album Coma.

Coma will come out on October 25 via Season Of Mist.

The release will be supported on a tour of North America with Swiss avant-garde metal collective Zeal & Ardor.

The run will start on November 23 at Union Transfer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and wrap up on December 18 at Studio At The Factory in Dallas, Texas.

Tickets go on general sale on Friday (July 19) at 10am local time.

See the full list of dates below.

The album art and track listing for Coma are also available below.

Ahead of the release, Gaerea will perform in Europe with Behemoth. They’ve also planned a string of European festival dates for the summer.

Coma will be the outfit’s fourth album, following its critically acclaimed predecessors Unsettling Whispers (2018), Limbo (2020) and Mirage (2022).

Gaerea’s vocalist explained the band’s creative process in a 2022 Metal Hammer interview.

“We write albums as if they were film scripts,” he told journalist Jonathan Selzer.

“It’s the way I imagine all of these worlds.

“Each of the songs on Mirage is a specific episode in different people’s lives, and I have all the shots as if it was a music video in my head.

“It’s how I see this band, and it really bleeds through on all our visuals and how we present ourselves.

“I can see the whole movie in front of my eyes, and it’s what makes it authentic for me.

“If I can see all the details of these lyrics, then these songs, the art and the scenarios are real.”

Gaerea – Coma track listing:

The Poet’s Ballet
Hope Shatters
Suspended
World Ablaze
Coma
Wilted Flower
Reborn
Shapeshifter
Unknown
Kingdom Of Thorns

Gaerea 2024 North American tour w/ Zeal & Ardor

November 23 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
November 24 – New York, NY @ Le Poisson Rouge
November 25 – Allston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall
November 27 – Montreal, QC @ Le Studio TD
November 28 – Toronto, ON @ Opera House
November 19 – Detroit, MI @ The Majestic
November 30 – Milvale, PA @ Mr. Smalls Theatre
December 2 –   Indianapolis, IN @ The Vogue
December 3 –   Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall
December 4 –   Minneapolis, MN @ Varsity Theatre
December 6 –   Englewood, CO @ Gothic Theatre
December 7 –   Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge
December 9 –   Seattle, WA @ The Showbox
December 10 – Vancouver, BC @ Rickshaw Theatre
December 11 – Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom
December 13 – Berkeley, CA @ US Theatre
December 14 – Santa Ana, CA @ The Observatory
December 15 – Phoenix, AZ @ Crescent Ballroom
December 17 – Austin, TX @ Mohawk
December 18 – Dallas, TX @ Studio at The Factory

Alongside Cradle Of Filth, Norway’s Dimmu Borgir helped push black metal into a bold new era. Their third album, 1997’s Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, hitched the genre’s feral snarl to a dramatic new approach, helping draw up the blueprint for symphonic black metal. In 2008, frontman Shagrath and guitarist Silenoz looked back on the making of that landmark record.

The mid to late 90s was a transitional period for black metal. The media frenzy that had surrounded the church burnings and murder of Mayhem guitarist Euronymous by Burzom’s Vary Vikernes which had given the scene wider notoriety had fizzled out, and the genre found itself caught between holding onto its original, unyielding gospel and following the path of musical experimentation.

1997 was a pivotal year. The likes of Enslaved, Emperor, Arcturus and Sigh all put out albums that stretched the possibilities of black metal, although if you were looking for possible signposts for its future at that time, that year’s Dynamo festival in Eindhoven, Holland was a good place to start. Cradle Of Filth, riding on the critical and (relative) commercial success of 1996’s Dusk… And Her Embrace, were playing the main stage, alongside the likes of Marilyn Manson, Machine Head and Korn.

But playing on the second stage, given over for one day to black metal acts, were two bands from Oslo who would go on to blow apart the notion that native black metal was a purely underground movement with no hope of commercial success or recognition. One was Satyricon, whose 1999 album, Rebel Extravaganza, would bring a new, industrialised sensibility to black metal; the other, seen by some as Cradle’s arch rivals, were about to become the best-selling black metal band of all time: Dimmu Borgir.

Dimmu were due to release their third album, Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, but no one who saw them play at Dynamo were given much idea of what to expect, seeing as their keyboard player at the time, Stian Aarstad, had failed to arrive due to sickness. The band had, however, already made plans to step up from the underground, moving over from the British-based Cacophonous Records – who had put out Cradle’s 1994 debut, The Principle Of Evil Made Flesh – to German behemoths Nuclear Blast, and opting to record in Hypocrisy frontman Peter Tägtren’s Abyss Studio in Sweden, a fairly new operation at the time, but with a growing reputation for its sharp, super-professional sound. 

“We knew we would get flamed for signing to Nuclear Blast,” admits guitarist Silenoz, “but Dissection were on there along with a few other really good bands, so we thought, ‘Why can’t we?’ We still had that underground mentality, but once we started Enthrone…, things just opened up and we knew that we just couldn’t go ahead with that kind of behaviour anymore.”

“We always wanted to take the music to the next level,” says frontman Shagrath, “and we had so many problems with labels on the first two albums. It was such underground stuff and we just thought we had something more to give.”

Nuclear Blast had already been distributing Dimmu’s 1996 album, Stormblåst, when Shagrath and Silenoz contacted label founder Markus Staiger to discuss a closer collaboration. 

“The set-up was so professional,” recalls Silenoz. “We wanted to take the band to the next level, with a good label and good distribution, so that’s why we approached them in the first place.”

It was also the band’s idea to record the next album at Abyss. As Shagrath remembers, “The reason we went to Peter in the first place is that we heard the Dark Funeral album, The Secrets Of The Black Arts, and we thought, ‘Fuck, this is a killer album and a killer production.’”

“We wanted to do something that gave our material justice,” Silenoz continues. “The sound on the Stormblåst album didn’t come close to what we wanted. Peter had only recorded three albums there at the time, so it was a gamble, but then we’ve always been taking gambles. Sometimes you do right and sometimes you do wrong. This one I think we did right.”

The result was both a huge evolutionary leap not just for the band, then still seen in the symphonic shadows of Cradle and Emperor, but for black metal as a whole, and it caused a storm of debate. The first sign that, this time around, Dimmu meant business, was the cover art. Gone was the ornate, art-nouveau-gone-necro logo of yore, replaced by sharp, no-nonsense lettering, and rather than a vague, environmental setting, what stared out at you was the figure of a priest from some arcane order, still swathed in mystery, but now also much more direct.

Where Stormblåst and Dimmu’s 1994 debut, For All Tid had been beset by flat, weak productions, Enthrone Darkness Triumphant was steeped in spacious grandeur from its very first moment. The rich, ominous strings leading into opener Mourning Palace gave rise to venomous, authoritative vocals, no longer the feral, gnashing scrabble of yore but rather a towering, apocalyptic sermon (this was also their first album with English lyrics) amid giant keyboard cadences that had outgrown their earlier, neo-classical leanings, and arrangements given room to unfurl in splendidly imperious style. This was black metal stepping out of the shadows and into new realms of expansive clarity. From the parping rush and spiralling-off-the-tundra keyboards rampaging through Spellbound (By The Devil), with its cavernous refrain, to the cinematic battle cry of In Death’s Embrace and the careering, swirling velocity of Tormentor Of Christian Souls, Enthrone Darkness Triumphant redefined symphonic black metal on Dimmu’s own terms, its sweeping majesty bringing in a level of ambition that had never been part of black metal’s psychological make-up.

“That album was when we truly shaped the actual sound of Dimmu,” says Shagrath, “because on the two previous albums I don’t think we communicated that much. Before we wrote all our parts individually, but this time around we wrote all the parts together. I think using keyboards the way we did, we didn’t feel like we had to do things within limits, and we still don’t think that’s good for a band. We opened up a new territory and used the keyboards as a way of writing songs, like people use a piano to write songs and then they finish it. It made the sound bigger, and it wasn’t as tunnel vision as it was on the first two albums. We felt we were working on something more unique.”

Peter Tägtren, however, needed some initial convincing. “He was very suspicious about us at first,” Shagrath remembers. “He’d heard Stormblåst and he thought, ‘Do they want me to record it like this?’, and once we started working on the album together, he was like, ‘Fuck yeah, this will be amazing.’ In the recording sessions, everything went so smoothly, there were no complications.”

“Peter still uses it as a reference when he records other bands,” laughs Silenoz. “After that, so many people went to Abyss to record their albums!”

If Dimmu needed any reassurance that they were on the right track, they got all that and more when Markus Staiger heard the first output from his new signings.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” enthuses the label boss. “The first track I heard was A Succubus In Rapture, which is the mellowest song on the album, but I knew: this album will be massive. Then I got the final album and I just could not believe it! It electrified me through my whole body. I said to myself, ‘I don’t know how much we can sell of this album, but let’s do everything to make this as big as possible.”

“Yeah, he was very surprised when he heard the new tracks for the first time,” Shagrath laughs. “He totally freaked out. He threw stuff around in his office and just went totally crazy. Markus was so into the album that he pushed it much more than some of the other bands on the label. When you have your label boss as one of your biggest fans, then it helps a lot.”

Enthrone… proved to be the band’s major breakthrough, catapulting them from a cult act into standard bearers for a genre many felt was too insular to get any mental foothold on. The album’s ornate, visceral immediacy was impossible to ignore, and where Stormblåst sold 20,000 copies, its successor leapfrogged Markus’s projection of 50,000 and ended up selling a previously unheard of figure in the region of 300,000. Of course, not everyone in Dimmu’s circle was happy for them. Black metal never aspired to mass market acceptance…

“There were a lot of bad vibes with some of the local bands in Oslo saying it was crap,” notes Shagrath, “but we got so much response from people all around the world, and that’s when we started to tour a lot more and get attention from people.”

An undoubted turning point in the band’s fortunes, many have now come to regard Enthrone Darkness Triumphant as the band’s masterpiece. Dimmu are a little more ambivalent about it in retrospect, if only because they’re always looking ahead.

“I understand why people think it’s our masterpiece,” says Silenoz. “They heard that first, and it’s natural that what you hear first from a band is going to stick in your mind. It has a lot of different, dark emotions. You have sadness, catchiness – every song represents part of the future sound of Dimmu.”

After the release of Enthrone…, Dimmu further split opinion among black metal fans, growing more monstrous with every release. Having brought in Mustis on keyboards, Shagrath enlisted the mega-lunged talents of ICS Vortex as guest vocalist on Enthrone…’s follow-up, Spiritual Black Dimensions, turned both the threatricality and tempo up and blew yet more minds. 2001’s Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia, packaged resplendently with a naked torso wrapped in barbed wire, saw yet more line-up changes, with Galder brought in on guitar alongside former Cradle drummer Nick Barker, while Fredrik Nordstrom took over from Peter Tägtren on knob-twiddling duties.

The most notable change, though, was the introduction of a full orchestra, bringing a new level of bombast that set them up for what remains their most successful album to date. Death Cult Armageddon not only broke them on MTV, its flagship track, Progenies Of The Great Apocalypse ended up on the soundtrack to the Hellboy movie. By this point, Dimmu were in a black metal league of one, well on their way to breaking America with the rougher-edged 2007 album, In Sorte Diaboli blowing yet another tempest into to their sails.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 189

Anthrax bassist Frank Bello will play with Satyricon during their upcoming European tour.

The Norwegian black metal heavyweights are about to play their first tour in five years – starting at Sweden Rock in Sölveborg from June 5 to 8 – and posted a photo to Instagram yesterday (May 28) showing their new live lineup.

Bello is visible second from left, next to band lynchpins Sigurd “Satyr” Wongraven (vocals) and Kjetil-Vidar “Frost” Haraldstad (drums).

The full list of dates this lineup will play together is available below.

Satyricon comment: “There is smoke in the chimney at the Satyricon HQ every day.

“Next week we will fire up the engine again, starting at Sweden Rock and Mystic Festival. From there we go to Hellfest, Tons Of Rock, ARTmania Festival, Grieghallen/Beyond the Gates (two nights in a row), Brutal Assault, Hellsinki Metal Festival, Alcatraz Festival, Bloodstock Open Air and finally Næstved Metal Fest.

“In November we come to Latin America.

“As you can imagine, we look immensely forward to seeing all Satyricon Ultras across the world again. If we’re not playing anywhere near you, maybe you will travel to see us, if not we will meet later some day.

“This is going to be THE summer!”

Bello, who joined Anthrax in 1984 to replace original Dan Lilker, recently sat out a tour with the thrash metal favourites due to personal reasons and was replaced by Lilker.

Lilker commented at the time: “I’m really looking forward to jamming with Anthrax again.”

He jokingly added: “When we parted ways back in 1984, they told me to stick around because they might need me in 40 years.”

Despite his upcoming dates with Satyricon, Bello continues to play in Anthrax and is expected to be a part of the New Yorkers’ impending 12th studio album.

Bello is also anticipated to perform with Anthrax yet again at their next show at Louder Than Life in Louisville, Kentucky, on September 27 and to join the band as they tour Europe with Kreator and Testament at the end of the year.

To see the full list of upcoming Anthrax shows and buy tickets, visit the band’s website.

Satyricon 2024 tour dates:

Jun 05–08: Sölveborg Sweden Rock, Sweden
Jun 08: Gdansk Mystic Festival, Poland
Jun 28: Clisson Hellfest, France
Jun 29: Oslo Tons Of Rock, Norway
Jul 26: Sibiu ARTmania Festival, Romania
Aug 02–03: Bergen Beyond The Gates, Norway
Aug 08: Jaromer Brutal Assault, Czech Republic
Aug 09: Kortrijk Alcatraz Festival, Belgium
Aug 10: Helsinki Hellsinki Metal Fest, Finland
Aug 11: Walton-On-Trent Bloodstock Open Air, UK
Aug 29–31: Næstved Metal Fest, Denmark

Even in a scene as boundary-pushing as black metal, Witch Club Satan are radical. While their sound is rooted in raw chaos, it’s fuelled by a unique and powerful perspective: female rage. The Norwegian trio take inspiration from injustices aimed at women over generations, reclaiming words that have been used to diminish them – ‘witch’, ‘hysterical’, ‘whore’, among others – to find empowerment within themselves. “I feel that black metal is a really feminine genre,” says Witch Club Satan drummer Johanna Kleive. “Because women have screamed throughout history. Many people who have seen us perform tell us it feels like we scream not just one woman’s scream, but every woman’s scream.”

The three words that make up the name Witch Club Satan all carry meaning, though it’s the third and final word that’s most associated with black metal. “Satan, for us, represents a kind of joker figure,” says guitarist Nikoline Spjelkavik. “It represents rebellion and freedom.”

Formed at the start of 2022 and hailing from different parts of Norway, the trio – completed by bassist Victoria Røising, with all three sharing singing duties, like
“a three-headed troll, as we say in Norway” – met via theatre school. They initially had the idea for a project that combined music and theatre. "We knew there was potential in the energy of the three of us,” Victoria says. “After two years of lockdown, we had this explosion that we needed to get out somehow. We found there was only one way to do it, and that was black metal.”

There was just one problem – they didn’t know how to play the instruments. Johanna had some experience in playing percussion, but they were otherwise starting from scratch. Yet in true black metal style, they didn’t let that stop them, and taught themselves to play. “That is also an act of feminism,” Victoria says. “Doing something that we don’t know, that we’re not really good at, and still having confidence. That feels not typical for women, especially women in their 30s.”

Both Victoria and Nikoline grew up listening to black and extreme metal, and felt it was an important part of their identities. “Coming back to it as an adult has been a bit like discovering myself and my identity again,” says Nikoline. “It feels good to use that energy again,” adds Victoria. For Johanna, whose upbringing was soundtracked by jazz and classical music, it was a whole new field to explore. “I had to learn from this genre, and learn how to find my voice in it,” she explains. “Suddenly I realised it has everything to do with me, and the girls as well.”

Witch Club Satan have caught the attention of some of black metal’s leading lights. One person who has been following the band since the beginning is Mayhem bassist and co-founder Necrobutcher, whom Johanna refers to as a “mentor”. “We sent him our first demo and he was like, ‘This is the most primitive thing I’ve heard since the 80s,’” laughs Nikoline. “I think he thought it was so bad in a way, but so pure that he could recognise himself in that,” says Victoria. “He gave us the courage in the beginning to do this,” Johanna adds. “He said: ‘The black metal scene needs you.’”

Witch Club Satan’s self-titled debut album was released, fittingly and deliberately, on March 8, 2024 – International Women’s Day. It was co-produced by former Satyricon/Celtic Frost guitarist Anders Odden and was released independently, without a label or management – something that was vital for the band. “We’re open to different forms in the future,” explains Victoria, “but it was really important for this first album to be us and our project, and to define what we are without any outside influences.”

The record itself is a dense, multi-layered whirlwind of blastbeat-laden black metal, eerie spoken word mantras, and moments of ethereal respite, like the beautiful Mother Sea. The feminist angle is clear, with songtitles such as Birth, Wild Whores, and Fresh Blood, Fresh Pussy. “To be angry women is still very radical for some,” says Victoria. “For me it’s been a challenge. But it’s really freeing, and it’s important to use the anger for something you believe is a good thing.” “We want to understand what’s inside a woman when she’s not being kind and beautiful. We want to deconstruct and open what’s inside of her,” says Johanna. “It’s a big contrast between what you see in a woman and what’s inside.”

A recurring theme throughout the album is the notion of exploring what it is to be a witch, both on a personal and historical level. The band describe themselves as practising witches, explaining that it means different things to each of them. “I think we all agree though,” Nikoline says, “that we find music to be magic.”

The trio researched old witch trials in their local area. The song Steilneset refers to the Steilneset Memorial monument in Vardø, Norway, which commemorates the trial and execution of 91 people for witchcraft in the 17th century. “The historical witch trials were really brutal in Norway,” says Victoria. “We feel that the spirits of these witches have somehow come to us. They are telling their stories through our lyrics.”

“We all feel like if it was hundreds of years ago, we might have been ones that were picked out as witches,” says Nikoline. “Being loud and clear and in contact with nature. So the more we read about it, the more eager we were to speak the words of these women. To really try to hear them, what they would think and say in society today, what they would stand for.”

Witch Club Satan are certainly not afraid to stand up for what they believe in politically. Mother Sea is about environmentalism, a prayer to the earth to forgive humanity for what it has done to nature. They have dedicated their song Black Metal is Krig to the crisis in Gaza, while Hysteria calls for listeners to “wake up” to the world around them. “We really feel like there’s a slumbering going on,” says Nikoline. “You hear that 10,000 kids are killed and you kind of snooze your alarm. We’re all very moved by what’s happening in Gaza, we’re not afraid of using the Palestinian flag at our shows. If you’re making art at this time you have to address the global, you have to show where you stand: that you stand for all human lives and no one should be oppressed.”

Nor are Witch Club Satan afraid to take on metal’s established hierarchy. They spoke out against Pantera playing at Oslo’s Tons of Rock festival in 2023, due to Phil Anselmo shouting “white power” and making a Nazi salute at a concert in 2016. With depressing predictability, it resulted in them being called “fucking feminists” and “woke” online, and even receiving actual death threats.

“The feeling that music should be unpolitical to me feels impossible,” says Nikoline. “If you have a microphone and amplifiers, it’s powerful. To me, music can never be divided from politics. At its core black metal is punk music; that’s how we see it.” They didn’t pay much attention to the Pantera backlash (“We like that people have strong opinions about us,” says Nikoline). What was more interesting, they say, was when people began to challenge them with regards to the bands they cite as inspiration.

“People say things like, ‘What about Mayhem? They have had some really problematic political statements’,” says Victoria. “And that is true. Of course it’s important to give people another chance, to allow them to change. But then they have to be clear that change has happened.” For Witch Club Satan themselves, it’s important to address black metal’s connections to the far right and Nazi imagery and ideology.

“It’s not really been spoken seriously about,” she says. “It’s left out of the history. It’s problematic, and that’s important for us to say. We want this project to be really transparent, not only with our feminist statements, but humanism in general.” “This is a liberation project in many ways,” Nikoline says. “And it has to be everyone’s freedom that we fight for.”

The trio’s backgrounds in the performing arts are an important part of what Witch Club Satan do. Nikoline and Victoria run their own company, Lost And Found Productions, which specialises in experimental theatre. “People wondered if we ‘meant it’, or if we were doing an art project,” says Nikoline. “To us, theatre is serious business. It’s an art form that’s more real than life itself.”

While their ritualistic live shows take inspiration from the aesthetics of black metal, they also unfold into a universe that’s all their own, complete with an act structure, blood, gore, costume changes (including nudity), and allowing themselves in a feminist fashion to be really, really ugly. “Like monstrous figures,” explains Nikoline. In keeping with their inclusive nature, Witch Club Satan are planning to build a whole community for fans and like-minded people to congregate – the ‘Club’ part of their name. They are even writing a manifesto to embody their perspective and ideas.

“As well as our concerts,” Nikoline says, “we do sabbaths or meetings with people where we do different things like sing together, have meals together, commemorate witches from the local area. We try to make it a meeting place. And we will continue this and open an organisation you can be a member of. It’s exciting. It’s for anyone who’s interested!” Johanna smiles as she sums up their ambitions. “We want to create a movement of witches.”

Masked black metal outfit Gaerea have released a new song called World Ablaze.

The ostensibly standalone single is accompanied by a fiery music video, and is one of the Portuguese band’s most concise tracks to date, accelerating from an acoustic opening to blast-beating extreme metal in three-and-a-half minutes.

Gaerea, whose members are all anonymous, have commented on the themes of the new song.

“World Ablaze tells the story of a man who has lived all his life inside a cage,” they say.

“He knows that one day he will be set free and experience the world with its true colors. Unfortunately, he also knows that day will be his last hours alive.

“It’s a song about desire, hope and freedom. A dance between life and death, hope and despair.”

Gaerea formed in 2016 and released their full-length debut, Unsettling Whispers, two years later via Transcending Obscurity Records.

The album received critical acclaim and was a cult hit on the music service Bandcamp, with reviews praising the band’s experimentation with death metal and post-metal textures.

Gaerea subsequently signed to Season Of Mist (home of Mayhem, Septicflesh, Rotting Christ and more), with whom they’ve released two further albums: Limbo (2020) and Mirage (2022).

Metal Hammer named Mirage as the fifth-best black metal album of 2022 at the end of the year.

Journalist Matt Mills wrote: “Gaerea already have a reach well beyond the borders of black metal, and this album will only spread that popularity even further.

“Accessible and eclectic without compromising on the essence of extreme music, it’s hard to think of a metalhead who won’t be won over by Mirage.”

Marketing materials state that World Ablaze is a standalone release, but Gaerea’s Spotify profile says that the band hope to release their fourth album this year.

Until then, Gaerea will spend this summer touring Europe with Wolves In The Throne Room, plus playing select shows with Behemoth and Testament and performing at festivals. The full list of dates is below.

Gaerea 2024 tour dates:

May 02: Kopervik Karmoygeddon Metal Festival, Norway
May 16: Copenhagen A Colossal Weekend, Denmark
May 17: Leipzig Hellraiser, Germany
May 18: Warsaw Proxima, Poland
May 19: Krakow Kamienna 12, Poland
May 20: Budapest Analog, Hungary
May 21: Vienna Arena, Austria
May 22: Munich Feierwerk, Germany
May 23: Parma Campus, Italy
May 24: Lucerne Schuur, Switzerland
May 25: Hoogeveen Graveland Festival, Netherlands
May 26: Bruges Cactus, Belgium
May 28: Limerick Dolans Warehouse, Ireland
May 29: Dublin Opium, Ireland
May 30: Bristol The Fleece, UK
May 31: London Earth, UK
Jun 01: Glasgow The Garage, UK
Jun 02: Scarborough Fortress Festival, UK
Jun 04: Bochum Zeche, Germany
Jun 05: Frankfurt, Germany
Jun 06: Hamburg Grunspan, Germany
Jun 07: Berlin, Germany
Jun 22: Kilkim Zaibu, Lithuania
Jul 05: Kalmar Metal Theatre Festival, Sweden
Jul 06: Emmen Pitfest, Netherlands
Jul 20: Frýdek-Místek Dark Session Fest, Czech Republic
Jul 21: Warsaw Progresja Summer Stage, Poland
Jul 23: Kosice Kulturpark, Slovakia
Jul 25: Tolmin Tolminator, Slovenia
Aug 01: Transylvania Rockstadt Extreme Fest, Romania
Aug 08: Kotka Dark River Festival, Finland
Aug 30: Volos Golden R Festival, Greece

Get tickets.

As the frontman of Emperor, Ihsahn rose to prominence in a black metal scene laced with screaming and violence. Since then his music has only grown more progressive, symphonic and melodic. He tells Prog about his latest release, the self-titled album that pursues a cinematic atmosphere.

It’s a frigid January when Prog calls Ihsahn. Outside, our hometown of London is enduring a particularly harsh winter, with temperatures hovering below freezing and ferocious winds only strengthening the bite of the chill in the air. 

However, we’re on the phone with a progressive metal musician who’s lived his whole life in Norway: we don’t get any sympathy. “It’s around 0 ̊C?” Ihsahn asks rhetorically, sat in his home while wearing a jet-black turtleneck jumper. “That’s springtime!”

He grew up looking the extreme potential of Norwegian nature dead in the face. When standing right outside the farm he was raised on in the rural town of Notodden, he could see snow-capped mountains and ice-cold rivers. Indoors, he spent most of his time shielded from the elements playing piano and guitar, inspired by the majesty of such metal icons as Iron Maiden and Twisted Sister, alongside swelling soundtracks composed by Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams.

“There weren’t really neighbouring kids,” the now 48-year-old maverick remembers, “so music became a big part of my free time. I got my first guitar, electric organ, played the bass with my feet and would do jam sessions with myself.”

From those origins as an isolated child in middle-of-nowhere Scandinavia, Ihsahn has grown into one of the most idolised solo artists in prog metal. After he first found notoriety as the frontman of Emperor – who redefined the typically furious black metal subgenre with soundtrack-esque keyboards and Maiden-inspired harmony – he’s continued to push boundaries under his own name since 2006.

And nowhere is his ever-adventurous spirit better encapsulated than on his new, eighth album, which is very deliberately and fittingly self-titled. “It’s the stuff that I feel I am best at,” Ihsahn says to summarise the record. “If you were to draw a straight line from the beginning of my career up until now, the common denominator would probably be black metal singing with dual guitars and orchestral elements. In that perspective, I thought I’d focus on those core elements.”

The word ‘focus’ undersells it. Ihsahn is the most definitive yet progressive work the artist’s ever done. The two-disc, 100-minute LP is a story of two halves. The first re-explores Ihsahn’s classic extreme metal energy, yet proves its prog credentials with its proudly unconventional approach to melody. Rather than rely on typical rock’n’roll chord progressions, the songs eviscerate the rulebook and turn to the kind of composition that Ihsahn’s film-scoring favourites preferred to use.

“I tried to focus more on the scales and harmony structures typical of film music,” he explains. “That was the atmosphere I was going for. I had to take a theoretical approach to study that, because unless you’ve analysed it, it seems very random – especially for someone who’s self-taught and comes from a very Iron Maiden, very diatonic background.”

Meanwhile, Ihsahn’s latter half is exclusively orchestral, pulling the strings from each track on disc one and letting them consume the foreground. The result is a juxtapositional symphonic prog opus. While the ‘metal’ version of single Pilgrimage To Oblivion begins with all-guns-blazing aggro, blastbeats and screaming, its purely classical counterpart is the opposite: ominous, dynamic and tense. The melodies are inarguably the same, yet the emotional odysseys often end up being vastly different.

Tethering the halves together is an appropriately cinematic concept. Ihsahn weaves a narrative with a monomythical hero, inspired by the writing of US scholar Joseph Campbell, battling the norms of culture to forge his own identity. It’s a journey starkly similar to the musician’s own.

Ihsahn has always been the rebellious type. After his early days making music as a lone youngster on a farm, he met guitar player Tomas ‘Samoth’ Haugen aged 13 at a local blues festival. The pair bonded over an appreciation of classic black metal bands like Bathory, and formed their own to continue that lineage: Emperor.

The duo quickly got swept up in a movement of fellow Norwegian black metal artists, from Mayhem to Darkthrone, and the scene revolutionised heavy music with new forms of melody – alongside, in Emperor’s case, symphonic grandeur. The movement also found controversy with its violent antics. Samoth was briefly imprisoned in 1994 for burning down a church; ex-Emperor drummer Bård ‘Faust’ Eithun was found guilty the same year of murdering a gay man.

Ihsahn refrained from such savage extra-curriculars, however, favouring sonic rebellion. “My role as a part of the black metal scene is probably exaggerated, because I was the visible frontman in one of those bands,” he says today. “In many ways, I was just the nerd making music.”

As Emperor resumed, the frontman assumed more and more songwriting duty, to the point that their swan song, 2001’s Prometheus: The Discipline Of Fire & Demise, was composed entirely by himself. Its complexities were deemed too esoteric and far removed from typical black metal by his bandmates, and their growing musical differences necessitated a break-up. 

Samoth and drummer Trym Torson stayed put in the genre with a new band, Zyklon, while Ihsahn ploughed forward with his much more progressive solo music. “I was 15, 16 when the band started, and we ended Emperor when I was 25, so I was still pretty young,” he reflects.

“There were quite big leaps between the albums and where it was heading. You change so much: I had a need to go in a more experimental way. Listening to Prometheus..., because it’s not that accessible, it almost seemed like a ‘fuck you’ of an album. I didn’t want anyone else to dictate what Emperor should be like from the outside.”

Starting with 2006’s The Adversary, Ihsahn’s solo career began to draw from much more avant-garde influences. Even more melody and accessible singing was brought in, as was spacious, catchy, Judas Priest-like riffing. Then came the ambient textures, noise, saxophone, the instruments and chords of classical music.

Despite his ongoing fascination with aggressive sounds and screaming, Ihsahn has always been a progressive adventurer. He also finds it baffling and infuriating when contemplating why his black metal peers stopped pushing against the audial grain almost 30 years ago. “I ended up doing the most extreme music I possibly could at 16,” he remembers.

“We all had that, pushing music forward. Why would you stop pushing forward when you get an opportunity to continue? I get this a lot: ‘Why do you do more experimental stuff?’ I’m thinking, ‘Why didn’t more people continue that journey? Why did they stop at fucking 18?’

“There’s nothing wrong with it. You can’t take away from Motörhead or AC/DC for being what they are. But I always found it much more interesting with Radiohead. Their response to OK Computer – one of the most successful and best rock albums ever – was Kid A and Amnesiac. I wanted that developing, chameleon style.”

Even though Ihsahn reformed Emperor in 2006 and the band regularly tour, they are yet to make any new music together, nor do they have any intention to. Instead, the multi-instrumentalist is much more fulfilled composing for the future than for nostalgia’s sake. He’s been progressing what heavy music can get away with for three decades now, yet, as his time with Prog comes to a close, he declares he’s “only just scratching the surface” of his capabilities.

“With every album I have tried to take another step; with Ihsahn, I took about 10 steps,” he says. “The biggest gratification is, closing in on 50 and having done this for a very long time, to find myself in a situation where I’m so fired-up and excited. There’s a realisation that I could set the bar much higher than I did previously and work my way through it. It’s just made me even more excited to do the next one.”

Vegard Sverre Tveitan helped change the course of metal while he was still in his teens. The man better known to the wider world as Ihsahn was the vocalist, guitarist and keyboard player with black metal standard-bearers Emperor, whose landmark debut album, 1994’s In The Nightside Eclipse – released when Ihsahn was just 18 – brought a frosty grandiosity to this harshest of genres. 

Derided in many quarters at the time, both Emperor and the scene to which they were central are viewed as hugely influential today. Unlike Emperor guitarist Samoth and drummer Faust, who were convicted of arson and murder respectively, Ihsahn steered clear of direct involvement in the criminality and violence that gave black metal its initial notoriety. 

He remained with his hand on Emperor’s creative tiller until they disbanded in 2001 following their fourth album, Prometheus: The Discipline Of Fire & Demise (they subsequently reunited in 2006, though purely as a live band). For the last 18 years, he’s ploughed a unique furrow as a solo artist, incorporating elements of prog, jazz and pop into his expansive, inventive music. 

His latest, self-titled album is the closest he’s come to returning to his extreme metal roots since the Emperor days, though, in typical Ihsahn fashion, it’s accompanied by a companion album, an entirely orchestral reimaging of the same songs. 

“Music’s an addiction and it has been for as long as I can remember,” he says in his measured and thoughtful way. “I know that sounds pretentious, but it truly feels like it’s a blessing that in many ways I never felt like I had a choice.”

What was your earliest exposure to music? 

“Records would be played and my grandmother had a piano at her house. I showed an early interest and started taking lessons when I was about six or seven. As far as heavier music goes, I grew up on a farm and the neighbour’s twins were two years older than me. When they started school they came back and sang We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister to me. I was immediately a fan even though I hadn’t heard the actual track.” 

Was it a working farm and was that your parents’ occupation?

 “My mother worked at the bank and my father was a police officer but also worked the farm with my grandparents. He was bound to take over the farm, and they always thought that I’d take over after him.” 

Were you quite isolated growing up? 

“I was 10 or 11 when I got my first electric guitar and I had one of the old electric organs with built-in rhythms. There were no other kids around after school. I had to take a bus, so much of my time was spent jamming alone. For some strange reason my mother brought home a four-track recorder, so even at 11 I was tracking drums from the organ, recording bass parts and then recording guitar parts. I was putting music together like a puzzle.” 

How big a turning point in your life was meeting your future Emperor bandmate, Samoth? 

“Oh, hugely. I’d tried to join local bands but they didn’t want to go anywhere. [Hometown] Notodden had a blues festival and I met Samoth at a seminar where they got kids to play these blues standards together. He was a year older, in a band with guys who were 15 or 16. I was 13 so in my head he was playing with grown-ups - they came to rehearsal on mopeds! They needed a guitarist and I had long hair and my denim jacket with Iron Maiden patches, so I joined their band.” 

By the time Emperor formed, how aware were you of something developing in Norway? 

“At that time there really wasn’t. In the death metal days before Emperor, we were in touch with Ivar [Bjørnson] and Grutle [Kjellson] from what would become Enslaved. We would go to where they lived by bus and play their youth club. Then we started going to [Mayhem guitarist/black metal central figure] Euronymous’s shop [Helvete, in Oslo] and there was this very similar collective influence from the old Bathory stuff. Darkthrone very early on switched from a death metal style to more old-school black metal stuff, but it was this gradual thing.” 

With the stage names and corpsepaint were you almost playing characters, like a more evil Kiss? 

“When you’re doing music, it’s an artform that kind of uses you. Performing and everything, in some ways you’re a medium, you’re physically part of it. I guess it feels natural to distance it from the private, everyday part of who you are. Especially when you’re young and trying to convince yourself more than anyone else, you try to make yourself into this character you want to be. Pre-internet we only saw this one picture of Quorthon with the pentagram and this one picture of Tom G. Warrior with the bullet belts. It felt very natural to go that route, to really live it. 

“And it wasn’t like we did other things and then played in a band too. It was 24/7. Going to sleep wasn’t in the mentality of black metal. With social media these days you get so close to the artist, which is not necessarily a good thing. It’s almost like a counterpart when you see bands like Ghost or Sleep Token maintaining that distance between artist and music. I’m not sure if people would have connected to our early albums if they’d had this image of spotty teenagers!” 

You adopted corpsepaint early but got rid of it quickly too. Were all the extraneous things surrounding black metal a distraction from the music? 

“They were of course, but I think a lot of the aesthetic and mentality of black metal, what attracted us in the first place, was this non-collective thinking. It was very much based on individuality. We were one of the first bands to adopt the full-on corpsepaint at live shows and also one of the first to leave it behind, because it so quickly became just… a thing. And we wanted to keep evolving and moving.” 

Did you feel a bit apart from the church burnings and violence and everything that went alongside the music in black metal? 

“I’m not sure I felt apart. I was very fortunate to not get involved in any of it in that respect, but I think we were all very consumed with the whole thing. The attention it got. All the negative attention and our local community’s reaction to it, it became fuel to the fire. It exaggerated this feeling of ‘us and them’. So I felt involved like that and in my band there were of course consequences. 

“And you can’t really deny that it kind of validated the seriousness of what we were doing. I heard someone talking about young rap artists these days who start doing criminal activity to give credibility and validity to the things they’re singing about. It’s a very strange teenage thing, some kind of rebellious wish to have power and be taken seriously. To be dangerous. Because when you’re a teenager you’re also so vulnerable. We don’t have to psychoanalyse it all but as a grown-up I think it’s much easier to see how this happened.” 

With that ‘us and them’ mentality, did you feel a sense of belonging to something bigger? 

“Yes and no. Personally, I felt I was connected with the phenomenon, the movement and the whole philosophy. On a more practical level, it was always Samoth who had the network. Every connection we had to all the other Norwegian bands and Euronymous’s shop, that was all him. I was more the nerd tagalong, taking more responsibility for the musical side of things. It’s just my personality. I never got the whole collective thing, which probably goes back to growing up on the farm. When I went to school, I felt like everybody had the rulebook of what was right and wrong, who’s who, and who’s important in the hierarchy. I didn’t get that memo. I’ve come to realise that’s just me.”

Emperor and black metal were derided by much of the mainstream metal press. Do you feel vindication when Emperor are now seen as such an influential band? 

“The major metal magazines absolutely slaughtered our first albums. And then I’ve seen these stories 25 years down the line with the first Emperor album put next to the first Black Sabbath album. I learned very early that you have no control over what people think; the only thing you can trust is your own motivation. If you put your happiness in someone else’s hands, if that’s what controls whether you feel good or bad about yourself, you’re kinda fucked. 

“But then as a consequence I’m not in a position where I can really take in all the positive stuff either. All the external things - the controversy from the beginning and now the feedback based on nostalgia and stature or any sort of cult status - it all becomes part of the same thing and it’s hard for me to connect to either. It’s like I split off those two perspectives early on. Mostly it’s a good thing.” 

It must be gratifying, though, when other musicians say they admire what you’ve done or that you inspired or influenced them? 

“Absolutely, because I know what music has done for me in my life. I know how much artists like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest meant to me, the hours I spent playing along to those records. It’s like they were mentors even though I didn’t know them. If music that I happen to be a part of had a great impact on someone’s life, or if they started playing an instrument because of that, that’s an amazing compliment.”

How did you feel when Emperor split up in 2001? 

“It came to a natural end and we knew. We said, ‘We’ll make one last album then call it quits.’ We were creatively in different places but me and Samoth were proud of the integrity and uncompromising nature of what we did. I think that’s much of the reason why the live shows that we do now still resonate. People trust the format.”

 Was going solo a leap of faith because it succeeds or fails on you? 

“Again, it felt like a natural step. Maybe it was coming to terms with how I work best - going back to all those hours when I was 12 years old, putting together my puzzles. It’s probably some kind of Jungian psychological trauma that stuck with me! Ha ha! I wanted to give myself three records before I played anything live. That’s why all my first albums start with an ‘A’. I set out to do three records to build a new foundation rather than picking up where I left off with Emperor.” 

A while ago you were given a cultural award from the Notodden Municipality. Was it weird that this rebellious black metal kid was now a pillar of the community? 

“Yes, but my wife Heidi was in charge of all cultural works for youths in the area - I was just involved on the teaching side of things. It was easier to give it to me as somebody ‘famous’ to bring attention to the work. I’m sure it was all good intentions but it was embarrassing getting an award for something I didn’t do. It was all my wife’s work!” 

You worked with your wife in Peccatum and she’s had input into your solo work. Is music a big shared part of your relationship? 

“For sure. She’s my secret sparring partner for everything. She’s my best friend and she doesn’t care about any of that outside stuff either. And it is a family affair. I’m a musician, Heidi’s a musician, my youngest brother-in-law, Einar from Leprous, is doing quite well for himself. My mother-in-law is a classical vocal teacher, our kids have been part of that - they’re now getting grown up and starting their own careers in music. It’s an extended family thing as well with bandmembers and crew who become almost like family. It’s a nice culture to be in and to see extend to the next generation as well.” 

Is there anything the next generation could do that would shock the black metal generation? 

“I have been wondering. I hope my kids don’t have to be part of it but what’s the next shocking thing? There was something every decade since Elvis and his hips. People said it can’t get any worse than punk. But since black metal, what’s the next dangerous thing?” 

Your new album is called Ihsahn. Is that a statement in itself? 

“Not necessarily. This is my eighth solo record and there’s a lot of complexity with two different versions of the album, two parallel storylines, there’s a lot of interweaving things. It’s probably the most complex thing I’ve ever done, so it was hard to find a title that would capture all of what it’s about. The themes are core human existential crisis stuff. At the heart of it musically is the extreme metal ensemble but also the full-on traditional orchestra. I’ve been blending these elements since forever, but for a challenge I wanted to write the orchestral side so it’d work within the whole and stand on its own.” 

Is it important to you to keep challenging yourself like that? 

“Oh yes. I have no classical education at all so it was super-hard, but these days you literally have a symphony orchestra at your fingertips and all the other tools you can possibly imagine. I want to add something more to my toolbox and do stuff that I don’t know how to do so I’m slightly uncomfortable going in. I’m so fortunate to have been able to do this throughout my entire life and I want to be as excited going in to make an album now as I was when I was 16.” 

What would 16-year-old Ihsahn think of your music and career? 

“It would be impossible to imagine. The ambition had nothing to do with fame and fortune or prestige or acceptance or money. It was just this intense driving force to fulfil this musical idea. But there’s been stuff like coming back in 2006 [with Emperor] and headlining Wacken Open Air in front of 80,000 people. Whitesnake were playing before us! If someone had told me as a kid that yeah, you’re going to befriend Rob Halford and you’ll see Deep Purple and Whitesnake around you when you’re performing and people will want to build you custom guitars - I’d have died of a heart attack at 10 years old!”

Ihsahn's self-titled new album is out now via Candlelight. Metal Hammer have teamed up with Ihsahn for an exclusive cover bundle, which includes a copy of the new album on cassette. 

Order your bundle here

In the UK for the long Bank Holiday weekend and looking for some great new metal bands to get stuck into with all that lovely time off? Or are you gonna be stuck at work the whole time and just desperately need some new music to see you through the grind? Whatever you status over the next few days, we've got some killer young, heavy bands deserving of your attention. Enjoy!

Lake Malice

Lake Malice are standing in the stairwell of Camden’s Black Heart, about to play their first ever, sold-out, UK headline show. And, despite supporting the likes of Skindred, Vended and Enter Shikari in the past, they’re nervous. “It feels weird to play our own show,” vocalist Alice Guala admits. “These people are here for us? That’s fucking nuts!” Alice and kindred spirit/guitarist Blake Cornwall formed Lake Malice in 2021, the pair bonding online over a love of metalcore as well as alternative pop artists such as Ashnikko and Charli XCX.

Those influences show up in their songs, which mix glitchy electronics, virulent screams and towering melodies, their lyrics drawing on a combination of Alice’s life experiences and the art that inspires her – be it the scathing Bloodbath addressing toxic relationships, or Mitsuko, whose revenge fantasy video takes visual cues from Stranger Things. “There’s a metal influence that’ll always be there because it’s our background,” Blake explains. “But we find ourselves listening less to traditional metal bands and more to bands that just sound heavy. There’s more freedom to experiment.” And experiment they do. Fusing elements of hyperpop, trap and metalcore, Lake Malice are an invigorating prospect, from the pulsating Magic Square to mosh anthem Stop The Party. 

“The gap between pop and metal is getting smaller,” Alice says excitedly, considering the increasing profile of up-and-coming metal artists like Spiritbox, who recently collaborated with hip hop star Megan Thee Stallion. “It feels like it used to be when Jay-Z worked with Linkin Park.” From creating sci-fi and horror-styled music videos to putting on high-energy live shows, the pair’s aim is to make sure people are electrified by everything they do. “When a song makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, it’s so fucking powerful,” Blake says. “I want that.

Laang 

Laang describe themselves as “black metal from Taiwan based on the trauma of a survivor”. Taiwanese singer and guitarist Haitao Yang started the project in 2018, 18 months after he was declared medically dead; he was shot in the head during an attempted carjacking. “I was in the US at the time,” Haitao, now based in Tennessee, tells Hammer. “I was returning to my car in a car park, and  there were two people standing next to it I didn’t know. I just remember one of them walking towards me and then I was on the ground. I couldn’t feel anything. It just felt very cold, very numb.”

Haitao had a history of making metal before Laang. He lived in Taiwan until he was seven, when his family moved to Norway, and he ended up in some black and power metal projects. However, Laang’s more personal, cathartic black metal taps into Haitao’s Taiwanese identity via instruments such as the erhu (a two-stringed bowed instrument), while the synths and vocals carry the urgency of melodeath. It’s a combination that, together with the incredibly evocative backstory, is seeing the band resonate across the extreme metal underground. “I’ve had people with similar experiences approach me on tour or on social media, saying they really appreciate having something that allows them to not suffer in silence,” Haitao says. “Seeing that this is helpful for other people is really rewarding, and I think that’s probably the most that I could hope for.”

Guilt Trip

It's amazing how much a name change can impact a band. “When we started taking things seriously, we thought, ‘Let’s get a decent name’,” explains Jak Maden, guitarist with fast-rising hardcore quartet Guilt Trip. “We were originally called Mos Eisley! I don’t think it would have done us any favours... Although, we could have toured with Bossk.”

Since then, the Manchester crew have gone all-in, taking their music from a fun hobby to a serious concern, and become one of the UK’s most exciting metallic hardcore bands. They’ve graced the stages of numerous festivals, supported Malevolence on a sold-out UK tour, and even released new album Severance on Malevolence’s record label. Jak describes it as “metal enough for metalheads and hardcore enough for hardcore heads” – and he’s bang on. 

Guilt Trip might lean towards ’core, but there are plenty of beefy riffs and hooks that will appeal to a wider audience. From the artwork to the lyrics, Severance is also awash with biblical references, and questions of faith sit alongside traditional hardcore themes of surviving in the face of adversity. But make no mistake, Severance is not a clergy-approved sermon with guitars in the background – it’s a pit-igniting monster. Is Jak bothered about being seen as a Christian band? “Our current hoodie depicts Saint Michael defeating the Devil,” he explains. “I don’t think anyone who sees it will think, ‘Oh that’s a Christian hoodie.’ It’s just hard!

Knife Bride

The mission statement for Brighton’s Knife Bride was a simple one: “We just wanted to do something heavy,” explains vocalist Mollie Buckley, with the five-piece drawn to metal’s drama. “It’s always made me feel things that other music couldn’t.” They described their first few singles as “slut metal” but the release of debut EP Don’t Dream Too Much in August saw them embrace “nu gothika”.

“It was less about a shock factor, more cathartic party about creating something beautiful that people could escape within,” says Mollie. The music is wonderfully outrageous. Inspired by everything from Bring Me The Horizon to Kate Bush, there’s a fearlessness to Knife Bride’s cinematic sound, and their Sacrifice/Surrender lyrics tackle everything from love and revenge to how the streets aren’t safe for women. Plus, every Knife Bride track delivers a hefty dose of empowerment. “This band is about championing strong emotions,” Mollie explains. “It’s important to talk about serious experiences, but it’s just as important to create a safe space to dance.”

Did M. Night Shyamalan put together this tour package? Because all three of the bands who’ll siege London’s Islington Assembly Hall tonight play black metal with a twist! From Enslaved’s prog/black explorations down to the Wild West detours of Wayfarer, genre constraints are not on the guestlist, and this 900-capacity club is filled early by crowds hungry for sonic deviations.

In that vein, Wayfarer are the perfect first course. The four-piece caught a plane from Colorado to open this tour, but they’re more infatuated by steam trains and other images from turn-of-the-20th-century USA. It’s a fascination that infests their music as well: this evening’s songs, most taken from last year’s American Gothic, flaunt a twanging guitar style usually reserved for westerns and Ennio Morricone scores. Factor in the grooving drums and throaty death metal vocals and some may challenge if this lot are black metal at all. The correct response, of course, is who cares? They’re still heavy and innovative as fuck.

Next, Svalbard contrast black metal’s rage with the sensitivity of shoegaze. It’s a juxtaposition that – on such magnificent records as When I Die, Will I Get Better? and 2023’s The Weight Of The Mask – makes for gorgeous yet cathartic songs. Tonight, however, the fury is fully present, standouts like Clickbait snarling “Fuck off!” at full force, whereas the mix muddies the Bristolians’ shimmering guitar tone. Singer/guitarist Serena Cherry is able to pull beauty from the sonic quagmire during Open Wound, with her vocals being suitably melodic, tender and fluttery. But, beyond that, this is a showcase where white-knuckle intensity overwhelms emotional vulnerability.

When it comes to experimenting with black metal’s DNA, Enslaved are the kings. As far back as their 1994 debut Vikingligr Veldi, the Norwegians were pushing against the genre’s conventions with synths, Old Norse lyrics and enormous suites. 30 years later, the vikings spearheaded by guitarist Ivar Bjørnson and bassist/vocalist Grutle Kjellson are promoting album number 16, entitled Heimdal, which ventured into styles as far-flung as thrash, krautrock and space rock. That brutal dynamism is on show instantly, with opener Kingdom charging from extreme metal verses to more graceful, meditative choruses. Forest Dweller dabbles in groove and acoustic territories, before Congelia has its abrasive riffing tempered by violins from guest performer Jo Quail.

Though cuts from Heimdal and 2020 predecessor Utgard dominate the set’s first half, Enslaved then pilot their longship to more nostalgic material. Frost and Loke are far more direct black metal bludgeonings, but Allfǫðr Oðinn (from the 1992 Yggdrasill EP) reiterates via its contorting riffs that this a band who’ve always had a progressive worldview. Enslaved’s lifelong voyage to stand out from their genre continues unabated, and they still sound as explosive as they did when they started.

Enslaved setlist – Islington Assembly Hall, London, March 6

Kingdom
Homebound
Forest Dweller
Sequence
Congelia (featuring Jo Quail)
Frost
Loke
The Dead Stare
Havenless
Heimdal

Encore:
Isa
Allfǫðr Oðinn

Emperor frontman and solo artist Ihsahn has spoken about the “us and them” mentality which fuelled the Norwegian black metal scene in the 90s.

The singer/guitarist (real name: Vegard Tveitan) co-founded Emperor with guitarist Samoth (Tomas Haugen) in 1991, and their band became part of the “black metal inner circle” – also composed of Mayhem, Darkthrone and more – centred around the Oslo record shop Helvete. 

Some members of the inner circle committed heinous and infamous acts of violence. Ex-Emperor drummer Bård “Faust” Eithun committed murder in 1992 and Varg Vikernes killed his Mayhem bandmate, Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth, the following year. Both men were sentenced to 14 years in prison in 1994 for murder and arson.

Samoth was also jailed for arson that year, following church-burnings committed by him, Vikernes and Eithun.

Now, talking exclusively in the new issue of Metal Hammer, Ihsahn has reflected on his place in the black metal scene and his attitude towards the church-burnings.

“I was very fortunate to not get involved in any of it in that respect, but I think we were all very consumed with the whole thing. The attention it got,” the musician says.

“All the negative attention and our local community’s reaction to it, it became fuel to the fire. It exaggerated this feeling of ‘us and them’. So I felt involved like that and in my band there were of course consequences.”

He continues: “And you can’t really deny that it kind of validated the seriousness of what we were doing. I heard someone talking about young rap artists these days who start doing criminal activity to give credibility and validity to the things they’re singing about.

“It’s a very strange teenage thing, some kind of rebellious wish to have power and be taken seriously. To be dangerous. Because when you’re a teenager you’re also so vulnerable. We don’t have to psychoanalyse it all but as a grown-up I think it’s much easier to see how this happened.”

In the same interview, Ihsahn also remembers Emperor’s earliest albums being “slaughtered” by the contemporary metal press.

“The major metal magazines absolutely slaughtered our first albums,” he said. “And then I’ve seen these stories 25 years down the line with the first Emperor album put next to the first Black Sabbath album.

“I learned very early that you have no control over what people think; the only thing you can trust is your own motivation. If you put your happiness in someone else’s hands, if that’s what controls whether you feel good or bad about yourself, you’re kinda fucked.”

Ihsahn initially disbanded Emperor in 2001, before going solo in 2006. Emperor have reunited on multiple occasions since, most recently in 2016, and continue to tour. However, they haven’t released a new studio album in 23 years.

Samoth continues to perform with Emperor, and Eithun has made appearances with them as a guest live member in 2014 and 2021.

Ihsahn’s self-titled solo album is out on February 16 via Candlelight.

The new issue of Metal Hammer is available to buy now.

It features an interview with cover star Bruce Dickinson about his long-awaited solo album, The Mandrake Project, as well as a review of Sleep Token’s landmark show at London’s Wembley Arena, the metal bands we think you should watch in 2024 and much, much more.

Texan black metal band Martyrdom have issued an apology after footage of a pig’s head being thrown around in their moshpit went viral.

The band performed at the White Swan venue in Houston, Texas, on January 19, supporting the hardcore acts Devoured Trachea and Accosted.

That evening, a brief video was uploaded to X (formerly Twitter) by user @SALVIATALKSHOW, depicting what appears to be a pig’s head being thrown into a mosh pit.

“there is a pigs head in the swan,” the user wrote as a caption.

They later added: “its real and it stinks”

The footage went viral and quickly proved controversial, with several observers criticising the act.

“this is how new diseases start,” one reply says.

“tbh i would've cried if that touched me,” states another.

Another user replies: “biggest yikes from me on this one personally”

However, others reacted more positively to the stunt, alluding to the fact that other black metal bands, such as Watain and Mayhem, have previously used pig’s heads and pig’s blood as part of their act to generate shock value.

“Dude that’s just so black metal 😂” one user argued.

Amid the controversy, Martyrdom issued an apology, seemingly confirming that the head was thrown around during their performance and that it was real.

The band apologised “to anyone who was harmed by our act”, especially vegans and those who objected on religious grounds, as well as the White Swan venue.

Whether the pig’s head was brought to the venue by the band or fans remains unclear.

Martyrdom’s full apology (via Lambgoat) reads:

“Hi everyone

“we just want to start off by saying we are incredibly sorry to anyone we offended with our actions and gimmicks on stage.

“We are a black metal band, and as part of it, we try to add a little bit of imagery and shock value to our set. Unfortunately our acts has gotten carried away and way out of hand, offending many and even harming some.

“We want to apologize to any vegans, Muslims, or other minority groups we may have offended, and to anyone who was harmed by our act.

“Most importantly we want to apologize to the White Swan, and Harry, the sound guy, specifically. thank you so much white swan for giving us the opportunity to play there.”

Martyrdom have announced more Texan shows for 2024, which will take place in Austin on January 27, Pasadena on February 10 and Houston on March 9.

All ages will be welcome, but severed animal heads presumably will not.

It's been five years since Ihsahn’s last album, Ámr, but the prog metal maverick is compensating for the dry spell with some of his most complex material yet. The Emperor leader’s eighth full-length solo record (handily titled Ihsahn) will be a 100-minute double album that casts him back to his symphonic black metal origins: one half heavy, and the other orchestral interpretations. 

Chatting to Hammer, the multi-instrumentalist reveals that the string-backed songs are already being called “the Emperor album that was never recorded”. 

Why have you made a double album of avant garde metal and orchestral music? 

“I like to experiment, find new angles to attack the album format. Sometimes it’s more basic, sometimes it’s more out there. This time, I wanted to really play to my strengths, and I’ve been blending soundtrack-like elements with extreme metal since the beginning of Emperor. My ambition, going into this album, was to utilise that – go all in on the extreme, with an orchestral layer that raises the bar tremendously.” 

Is your history with metal and symphonic music why you wanted this album to be self-titled? 

“I was very ambitious going into this and I wanted this to be the quintessential Ihsahn album. I was building on my experiences and my strengths to push the envelope. This is the hardest, most complex album I’ve ever made. I’ve always loved orchestral music and soundtracks, and I’ve always wanted to dig deeper.” 

Which part of the album came first: the metal or the orchestral stuff? 

“It was simultaneous. I wrote the entire album as a piano score, then orchestrated it for guitars and bass and everything else, then I orchestrated the same music for an orchestra.” 

Is that how you usually write? 

“I used that technique on my fourth album, [2012’s] Eremita. The biggest difference this time was the duality aspect: I put a lot of effort into the underlying layers because, most of the time, they don’t come through in a dense metal mix. If you listen to the orchestral album, there are parts that sound really intimate, whereas, in the metal version, they’re really intense.” 

Did the Emperor tours you did before the pandemic [celebrating the 20th anniversary of Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk] influence the orchestral side? 

“It’s hard to say – maybe subconsciously. It’s very different from Emperor, harmonically and structurally, but I did get some feedback when friends started hearing the album, and one of them said, ‘This sounds like the Emperor album that was never recorded.’ That’ll probably upset my bandmates in Emperor! Ha ha ha! But it has that extremity.”

Is there a lyrical theme to the album? 

“There’s a very conceptualised storyline underneath. It’s a very classic hero’s journey type of story, with an existential crisis and a slightly Ancient Greek twist. The protagonist is trying to figure out the balance between conforming to norms and culture and breaking away from them.” 

That’s very black metal. 

“It’s an archetype you see through all of metal, I think. I’m digging deeper into the core of the kind of material I’ve always made.” 

Do you have any Ihsahn tours planned for after the album’s out? 

“We’ve already started booking live shows. I really want to perform this music live.” 

With an orchestra? 

“If you can get me the resources, yeah! Ha ha ha! Ideally, it would be with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, because they’re very good at this kind of stuff, but they cost about 10 grand a day.”

Ihsahn is out Feb 6 via Candlelight

Black metal might be notorious for its purists - and sensationalist headlines - but that hasn't stopped the subgenre from producing some of the most boundary-pushing acts within the extreme metal sphere over the past 40-plus years. 

In 2023 the genre remains one of metal's most beloved - and fiercely defended - subgenres, its sound subsuming everything from symphonic grandeur to shoegaze melody and all the way back to old school, Motorhead-style rock'n'roll. With so much ground to cover, it can be almost impossible keeping up with everything great in the world of black metal - but that hasn't stopped us from digging deep to find some of the finest BM records 2023 has had to offer. 

Blackbraid – Blackbraid II

Blackbraid’s 2022 debut album was the black metal sleeper hit of the year. Despite being released entirely independently, Blackbraid I earned serious press with its melodic songs, pro-nature and anti-imperialist ideas, and Native American folk flourishes. II expanded the one-man project’s scope, presenting more adventurous compositions while also shooting straight for the jugular on the more succinct The Spirit Returns. As such, the band’s growth has only accelerated in 2023. MATT MILLS

Blut Aus Nord – Disharmonium: Nahab

Last year, Blut Aus Nord knowingly betrayed the atmospheric and melodic excellence of their 2019 masterpiece, Hallucinogen. Disharmonium: Undreamable Abysses was a fever dream of disorienting black metal progressions, and its 2023 sequel, Disharmonium: Nahab, doubled down on those nightmarish tendencies. The Frenchmen’s new album was dissonant and screaming with noise, making it as confusing as it was addictive: after each listen, it dared you to return and unravel its musical mysteries. MATT MILLS

Dawn Ray’d – To Know The Light

With the surprise announcement that the band had decided to split in September 2023, Dawn Ray'd's third full-length To Know The Light now serves as their swansong. Thankfully, the band have ended on a colossal high, taking the atmospheric approach of their previous releases and torching it atop a pyre of explosive blast-beats and melancholic strings that add a poignance to the release. With the likes of Ashenspire, Underdark and more taking up the charge for explicitly anti-fascist black metal in their wake, Dawn Ray'd will be greatly missed, but leave behind a creative legacy worthy of celebration. RICH HOBSON

Dodheimsgard – Black Medium Current

On their seventh album, Dødheimsgard perfected the sonic universe they’d been building since the mid-’90s. Black Medium Current presented a unique fusion of extreme metal with post-rock melodies, alongside dazzling electronica and incomprehensible prog. Few bands could make such a mixture coherent, but these Norwegians’ always-atmospheric vision tethered their disparate parts together. Dødheimsgard are one of those rare acts where you can genuinely say, “No one else does what they do.” MATT MILLS

Immortal – War Against All

Over 30 years since they first invited us into the frosty realms of Blashyrkh, Immortal remain stalwarts of no-frills second wave Norwegian black metal. Demonaz might be the sole remaining full-time member of the group, but the sheer force of War Against All is proof that you don't particularly need more to capture the sheer tooth-gnashing fury of the band's best days, their raging blizzard of riffs and frenetic blasts as potent as it's ever been. RICH HOBSON

Laang 冷 – Riluo 日落

Laang 冷 describe themselves as “black metal based on the trauma of a survivor”. The duo’s leader, Haitao Yang, was shot in the head during a 2017 car-jacking, and their music screams for relief from the mental turmoil that tragedy’s caused. Although Riluo 日落 used the sunset as a metaphor for Haitao saying goodbye to the man he once was, it still snarled for catharsis over nine high-octane, folk- and melodeath-tinged songs. MATT MILLS

Mental Cruelty - Zwielicht

"Symphonic blackened deathcore" might be a bit of a mouthful, but it's a school that has gained traction in recent years thanks to the likes of Lorna Shore, Black Tongue and Shadow Of Intent. Germany's Mental Cruelty certainly ensured their name should be upheld amongst the genre's best and brightest with Zwielicht, their fourth album embracing the imperious maximalism of bands like Emperor and Dimmu Borgir with a sense of grandeur and undeniable brutality that shows just how well they can bridge the worlds of black metal and deathcore together. RICH HOBSON

The Sun's Journey Through The Night - Worldless

UK newcomers operating under a veil of anonymity, The Sun's Journey Through The Night have been quietly bubbling in the underground since their 2020 debut Eternal Black Transmissions. Album no. 4, Worldless marked the first time the project had expanded to a full band however, trading out the low-fi approach of their early releases for a more realised, explosive sound that evoked a sense of atmospheric mystery whilst blasting harder than a stick of TNT in a fireworks factory. RICH HOBSON

Underdark – Managed Decline

On 2021 debut album Our Bodies Burned Bright On Re-Entry, Underdark introduced an antifascist and atmospheric-sounding manifesto that made them cult darlings in the UK. Followup Managed Decline reinforced both their thematic and musical direction. While its lyrics raged against neoliberalism by narrating the generations-spanning decay of a British town, its songs stretched into full-on post-rock as well as unabashedly muscular black metal riffs. Hopefully, Underdark’s future momentum reflects their ever-strengthening prowess. MATT MILLS

Wayfarer – American Gothic

In a world where blackgaze has spawned an entire movement of new acts and acts like Zeal And Ardour are able to enjoy massive success, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Wayfarer's mixture of tanging Americana and bilious black metal works as well as it does. And yet, with their fifth full-length the Denver-based band offer the most cohesive vision of their fused styles yet, trading frost-bitten Norwegian forests for desolate, dusty plains but losing none of the scope and viciousness that has made BM so enduring these past four decades. RICH HOBSON

Laang 冷 self-classify as “black metal from Taiwan based on the trauma of a survivor”. Singer and guitarist Haitao Yang started the project in 2018, 18 months after he was declared medically dead: the Taiwanese-Norwegian musician was shot during an attempted carjacking.

“I was in the US at the time,” Haitao, now based in Tennessee, tells Hammer. “I was returning to my car in a car park, and there were two people standing next to it I didn’t know. I just remember one of them walking towards me and then I was on the ground, and I couldn’t feel anything. It just felt very cold, very numb.”

Haitao was shot in the head, with shrapnel scraping the upper-right side of his brain. Following the placement of steel plates in his skull and extensive physical therapy, he thankfully recovered. However, the trauma persisted long afterwards, hence the need for Laang 冷 as what the frontman likens to a “diary”.

“I don’t think I’m really the best at expressing myself, verbally or in writing,” Haitao explains. “The ability to literally put my body into it is something that’s really helpful for expressing that kind of emotion. This is something where I just wanted to scream: I was fucking unhappy.”

Haitao had a history of making metal well before Laang 冷. The musician lived in Taiwan until he was seven, then his family moved to Norway, where he remained until well into adulthood.

“I was in bands [in Scandinavia], but none of them were very good,” Haitao laughs. “I was in some black metal bands and power metal bands, and none of them really did anything interesting, but I didn’t have as much of a connection to them. In a lot of ways, [Laang 冷] was the first thing where I could actually really be like, ‘Wow, this is very personal to me.’”

Laang 冷 (Mandarin Chinese for “cold”) are also composed of bassist Willy “Krieg” Tai and released their debut album, Hǎiyáng 海洋 (“ocean”), in 2019. Their newest, Riluo 日落 (“sunset”), continues to explore Haitao’s trauma, yet also carries acceptance, waving a metaphorical goodbye to the man the musician once was.

“I’m not saying goodbye to the trauma,” he says, “but I’m just not the person I was before. I can be frustrated all the time about things I can’t do anymore, but that doesn’t change it. In this case, the sunset is trying to just reconcile and say this [trauma] is a part of my life now.”

Laang 冷’s raw black metal also taps into Haitao’s Taiwanese identity using instruments like the erzu, while the synths and vocals carry the urgency of melodeath. It’s a combination that, together with the incredibly evocative backstory, is seeing the band resonate across the extreme metal underground.

“I’ve had people with similar experiences approach me on tour or social media, saying they really appreciate having something that allows them to not suffer in as much silence,” Haitao says. “Seeing that this is helpful for other people is really rewarding, and I think that’s probably the most that I could hope for.”

Riluo 日落 is out now via Talheim.

Sons of Northern darkness, lords of the fictional, ice-bound realm of Blashyrkh, and one of the most defiant, iconic bands in black metal, Bergen’s Immortal were, for 24 years, a singular brotherhood forged around co-founders guitarist/lyricist Demonaz and frontman Abbath. 

Demonaz was forced to take a back seat for more than a decade due to acute tendonitis, but although he was cured by 2013, he and Abbath underwent a much-publicised split two years later, leaving Demonaz to resurrect the band with himself as frontman. As new album War Against All raises its banners, we sent him into battle with your questions. 

How did your move from Bergen to the countryside [in 2019] affect how you wrote music for Immortal?
Adelina Ravenwraith, email 

“When I was living in a city, I was always trying to escape from it. I like the city, but the countryside feels more free. Where I’m living now, it’s mountains everywhere, there is snow on the top, and I’m at the foot of the glacier where we recorded the All Shall Fall video. So it’s easy to write Immortal music here.” 

What are Immortal’s greatest accomplishments and what are your biggest blunders?
Dustin Brand Miller, Facebook 

“The biggest accomplishment is being able to re-establish the band. The vibe was really hungry on All Shall Fall [the last Immortal album with Abbath, released in 2009], but after that we didn’t know where to go, and couldn’t find our way back. I had to find the true spirit of what this band meant to me and Abbath from the beginning. 

The biggest blunder was to go from [legendary early black metal producer] Pytten and [equally legendary Bergen concert hall and set of studios] Grieghallen to the person who produced [1997’s] Blizzard Beasts. We thought that the new studio, [Sigma, also in Bergen] would make us a better record production-wise, but we ended up with a producer who couldn’t handle what we wanted.”

Hammer: What was so special about Pytten as a producer? 

“He took us seriously. I asked him if we could do the acoustic guitar in the basement, because there was a big sound from the stairs in the hall there, and he went away and he came back with 100-metre-long cables, and said, ‘Yeah, let’s go do it’, instead of just adding reverb. 

He wanted it to sound natural, he didn’t want to put a lot of effects on it afterwards. So I recorded the lead solo on The Call Of The Wintermoon [from 1992 debut album Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism], on the stage of the concert hall. He was willing to do whatever it took to make our vision come true.” 

What was it like being part of the black metal scene in the early 90s?
Karl Blepp, Facebook 

“We were in touch with the other bands like Mayhem, and there was a subcultural spirit, but we couldn’t see how it would become, so we just did what we wanted to do. We were very fearless. It was, like, follow your instincts, no matter what. 

I remember when we were playing Denmark on the Fuck Christ tour in 1993 with Rotting Christ and Blasphemy – it was the first black metal tour and there were 40 people there. Immortal were headlining that night, and me and Abbath said to each other, ‘Let’s blow their fucking minds and pretend it’s 15,000 people.’ We did three encores, because people were banging their heads off. The next time we played there it was packed. It’s that attitude I remember.” 

Have you spoken to Abbath lately?
Lucy Dwyer, Facebook 

“It’s been a while now. But we were talking on the phone about a year ago. I think it’s not a problem with us, it’s more like a problem now and then, like when the split happened. But it’s now 10 years ago, so we just moved on. We’re always going to have a connection.” 

How different is today’s Immortal from your solo project, Demonaz?
Xenomarc, Twitter 

“It’s very different. The solo album was something I did when Immortal were on a break from 2003 to 2007. I’d always wanted to do an album like Bathory’s [1996 concept album] Blood On Ice, or like Manowar, with that old heavy metal flame. But the difference is that that is not Immortal.” 

If a movie was made set in Blashyrkh, who would direct it?
Aiden Masters, email 

“Francis Ford Coppola, or maybe a mix between a horror director and Peter Jackson. A lot of people ask me if there is going to be a movie or book, and I’ve even been offered to do it, but Blashyrkh belongs to Immortal. Nobody else is doing this, so it’s unique to us. I’m trying to protect my expression and keep Immortal at its best.”

Are you a fan of how black metal has evolved?
Chris Stewart, Facebook 

“A lot of bands changed their direction, and for me, that is not the way to go. I don’t want Immortal to be more progressive or become more modern. I try to find a balance, keeping the old recipe and still delivering something different. It’s more work to find the right production each time than it is to write the music sometimes.”

What’s your favourite tour memory?
Hannah Webb, email 

“We were playing in Germany, and Abbath and me were coming onstage from opposite sides, but there was no sound in my guitar, and my leg got stuck in the mixer on the side. I was standing there and Abbath was playing along, so it was just the bass and the drums. When I got out, I pretended like it was nothing. And then after a while, there was no drums, and then we look up and there’s no one there. Horgh had fallen behind the drum kit. It was Immortal’s Spinal Tap moment.” 

Is it true somebody once kidnapped your cat?
Bex Eccles, email 

“Yes. I bought a house in the city and there was a cat already there. But then one day it disappeared, and there was a letter on the front door stating that this cat had not been taken care of, and if I wanted her back I had to treat her better. But the truth is, I had just adopted it. But when it came back, someone had stabbed it with a knife, in the stomach. So I took her to the vet and fixed her up, and she lived for four years after. It ended up in the papers.” 

How much have you spent on make-up since the beginning of your career?
Jim Prgd, Facebook 

“More than you.”

What did you do to heal your tendonitis?
Sam Saalfeld, Facebook 

“I had problems with the left arm, but I discovered later that the problem was in my shoulder. A muscle had split off, so it had to be sewn back. After that, it was another two years before the arm was right. That time without playing guitar was a nightmare. The Damned In Black period was the worst. I thought I wouldn’t come back, and you can hear that on the album [released in March 2000]. But then we pulled our shit together and wrote [2002’s] Sons Of Northern Darkness. We were really inspired, and we thought, ‘OK, we’re going to make it no matter what.’” 

Do you genuinely enjoy being the Immortal vocalist, or would you prefer the guitarist/songwriter role again?
Tom Davies, Facebook 

“A good question. I always wrote the lyrics for how the singing should be, so for me it’s very natural. I hadn’t thought about it until I got the question now.” 

What music do you listen to other than metal?
AIndedark, Twitter 

“I’ve been listening to music from the Conan movies, and Howard Shore’s [concert suite] Concerning Hobbits. He’s flawless. Usually music has to have some kind of dark essence to it. If I drink whisky, and I’m in a relaxed mood, I might listen to some old Frank Sinatra, when there’s a bit of depression hanging over the album.” 

Will the melting of the ice at the poles of the Earth affect Immortal’s next studio album?
Eleftherios Pantazis, Facebook 

“It will make me work even harder to give people an impression of how important it is to mix this music with those feelings of nature. It’ll definitely affect the next album, and it will have to be even better, because I have to focus and remind people what raw nature feels like.” 

Will Immortal ever tour again?
David Long, Facebook 

“The honest answer is that we haven’t had the time to sit down and work it out, but there are a lot of opportunities. We have to fit it around the plans of the other guys who played on the album – Ice Dale from Enslaved and Kevin [Kvåle] from Gaahls Wyrd. If it feels good, and it’s something we can do properly, I want to do it.”

War Against All is out now via Nuclear Blast.

When it comes to prog, Enslaved rhythm guitarist and synthesiser player Ivar Bjørnson wears his heart on his sleeve. Or more specifically, his love of Pink Floyd. Prog is seated backstage at the USF Verftet venue – an old sardine factory, situated on the dockside in their hometown of Bergen – before the band perform a launch show for their recent Heimdal album and their own brand of beer. Bjørnson proudly points out his large The Dark Side Of The Moon tattoo among many other tattoos on his forearm.

He formed Enslaved with his friend Grutle Kjellson in 1991 during the heady days of the Norwegian black metal scene and the pair still lead the band to this day. While their roots are in extreme music, from the early 2000s onwards Enslaved have introduced more and more progressive elements to their sound – so much so that over the last decade they’ve risen to the forefront of the modern prog metal scene with the albums In Times (2015), E (2017) and Utgard (2020). And Bjørnson’s work with Einar Selvik of Wardruna for their By Norse label continues to push further musical boundaries.

Of course, prog being prog, it’s not always been a smooth ride, with some fans who take a dimmer view of heavy music refusing to accept the band as part of the fold. However, when some gatekeeperish complaints about 2020’s Utgard ranking too high in the Prog writers’ Albums Of The Year appeared on social media, there were plenty of pro-Enslaved prog fans who jumped in to support the band.

It’s been a fascinating journey for the group and especially for Bjørnson, who was further turned on to progressive music by the unlikeliest of sources – the late Euronymous of pioneering black metal band Mayhem. But for all the twists and turns, the big, bearded, heavily tattooed and hugely friendly musician has taken everything in his stride.

What was your first memory of music?

First was the music in the car, I guess like everyone else. Back in the early 80s we were driving for holidays. Everyone in Norway drove around from one end to the other, find a beach, and in the car there would be this – the Norwegian postal service had a cassette aimed at families – children’s music [and] something for the grown-ups. I remember some of that stuff: there was a rockabilly song, it was a kids’ thing.

And then it was watching Kiss on this kids’ series that was going every Saturday about this family that was sort of nutty in a very straight neighbourhood. The teenage daughter was very pretty and she was always dreaming about Kiss towards the end of the episode. She got onstage with them – obviously it wasn’t the real Kiss… imagine how much Gene Simmons would have charged for that? But there was something about the whole band thing that drew me into it. I wanted to be in a band first and foremost.

I was lucky with the people around me; they didn’t think too much about what kind of music it was. My granddad, a silent, strong kind of guy, was a bus mechanic. He saw I was into music and he liked that. My dad was a big Elvis fan – he led the local fan club chapter. When Elvis died he locked himself in a room for three weeks. Anyway, they gave me Kiss’ Dynasty cassette the Christmas I turned six. That was great; I had something that was mine. Then I got other stuff, Europe’s The Final Countdown and Bruce Springsteen. I’d play air guitar along to the music.

I joined a brass band in school. And my dad would play acoustic guitar on the weekends when he had friends over. I asked him at the age of eight if I could play with him. I got to borrow his other acoustic guitar, but my fingers were too small so I played the bass lines. And then I learned how to play the guitar at 15. That’s when I started learning chords. And then my dad went on a business trip, saw something on a shelf with long-haired dudes, bought it, didn’t really look at it, gave it to me. And it was Venom’s The 7th Date Of Hell. And that’s when the little horns came up and I was like, “This is the shit!” They were smashing guitars. It was beautiful.

Was it the energy of Venom that appealed because you were young?

I think so, but it was also tongue-in-cheek, and I liked that. They were singing about Satan and there were skulls on the cover, but it was cool; I wasn’t afraid. I might have been if I was 10 years old and put on some of these second-wave black metal bands that may have been more disturbing. But Venom still had that showbiz thing: they weren’t really good instrumentalists but they put on a spectacular show.

So Kiss and Venom are two early inspirations. What else?

The third path was when I turned 11 and my dad was getting rid of his vinyl. He had all the Pink Floyd albums and on my 11th birthday I got all the Pink Floyd albums and it felt important that I had a little bit of a collection. When I got The Dark Side Of The Moon that’s when something just really changed. I could not stop listening to that album. I still do. The minute I was 18 I got a tattoo of it on my arm.

At what point did you start thinking you might want to be in a rock’n’roll band?

The roughest stuff we were playing was The Beatles’ Ob-La- Di, Ob-La-Da. I was a rhythm guitarist already then and I played a little French horn, but I loved playing with other people so I didn’t care. I was eager; I wanted to learn more. I came forward when they had this opportunity to go to summer camp for kids; I went two years in a row. One class we had every day was called Another Instrument. You picked something you hadn’t played before and I chose the double bass. I learned to play it over the course of two weeks.

At some point the conductor, a highly educated guy [who had] moved from the city to the countryside, called my parents and said, “He’s yearning for something more sonic. Every break he’ll go back and find drums and make noise. I’m not complaining, I’m just suggesting you get him an electric guitar instead. I don’t think this is enough for him.” It was such a great thing to do. My parents went out and bought a guitar and amplifier. I could be in the basement and just crank it and play some riffs. And that was all because of the brass band.

What was your first proper band?

A band called Obnoxious. We had something called The Crocodile first but the problem was we were the only two guys in the village that played instruments, both guitarists. It didn’t go anywhere. I tried to convince people at school to become a drummer. At some point I was told to stop harassing the other students: “They don’t want to play in your band.” So I gave that up. That’s when we started Obnoxious. It was modelled on Anthrax, basically thrashy. We got a rehearsal room, people came in and out of the band. They wanted to be a singer and they didn’t want to learn stuff by heart, [that] was like school. But we kept going, and had a lot of fun with that.

As an impressionable young rock fan, what was it like living in Norway and having extreme black metal happen all around you?

I don’t think I processed it at the time. Euronymous of Mayhem was a mentor musically and as a guitarist. The single most important thing as a guitarist was his masterclass. He stopped by our house, he had his guitar, I kept asking him all the time: “How do you get that sound?” We were listening to the demos and he decided to take the guitar and show me. Everything good [was] shaped from that. He was the guy who showed me prog. He gave me Klaus Schulze’s Timewind, Tangerine Dream, all this stuff I had liked. It blew my mind, every second of listening to those albums.

I was 14 or 15 when we would go to his record shop, Helvete, in Oslo, with a packed lunch on the bus. There was an article [printed] two weeks before he was murdered. He was in a white turtleneck and he wanted to give a message. He said, “I’m doing this for my family but also for other people. There is an element of showbiz and charade to all this. It’s art. But things need to calm down because they’re about to get out of control.” That was his last media. I think he understood at that time that the other side was actually meant for the public, it was directed at him. That’s very sad.

Enslaved have never really bought into the satanic side of the black metal thing; you chose to follow your own path with Norse mythology.

If you didn’t have a satanic ideology, you couldn’t be black metal; it wasn’t even up for discussion. It was inseparable, so we didn’t think about it. Satanism? Nah, 99 per cent of the black metal scene is like that these days. You’re a normal chap during the week and then you put on the wig and hail Satan on weekends. It’s very different. But [Euronymous] was serious. It was bleak.

How did Enslaved form?

I saw this band, Witchhammer, and everyone was moshing. There’s one especially crazy guy who ends up stage diving. Of course it ends up with him hitting me on the head and I pass out. I woke up and that’s when I met Grutle [Kjellson]. He asked if I was okay. I didn’t see him for a while, but someone told him about a really good guitarist, and one day they’re outside the rehearsal room and kind of shocked I’m so young. They asked me to join them and that’s when we started Phobia.

After a year or so, we had a lot of friends in that black metal scene – Emperor and the guys in Burzum and all that – but we didn’t want to do satanism. That’s only fun for 10 minutes. We both said at the same time it should be about Norse mythology because we read about it at home. Our parents had books about it. And then we started Enslaved.

Norse mythology seems almost timeless in its scope and it also set you apart from the rest, didn’t it?

It did. It’s weird to think that we were the only band doing this. Some people had historical insight, like Heavy Load from Sweden, but for us it was just Bathory. That’s the only reference point. And slowly more and more people came with black helmets and woolly things and suddenly we’re at the festival and everybody else is a Viking and playing accordions. We’re like, “What the fuck happened?” And then we watched what we were doing. We were like, “I hope this isn’t our fault!” And snuck out of there. Ha ha!

Isa [2004] and Ruun [2006] probably mark a turning point, where you evolved from being an extreme metal band and things began to get more psychedelic and proggy. Where would you say that came from? 

You had bands that were short-term: they did one thing and then dropped or went very different. With us, we didn’t want to lose what we had. In the same way you’re a Norwegian or Bergen citizen, you’re first and foremost a human. We’re music lovers. We happened to spring out of the extreme metal garden, but that doesn’t exclude other types of music. We were always on the lookout.

Around 2000, our ambition was to make our favourite music with our favourite people and we have to stick with that – whatever happens as a consequence is going to be what it is. You think because you do well in extreme metal that [playing] Yes or Genesis is easy. Then you try, and you realise you have to do a bit more in-depth rehearsing. You start finding ways to integrate what you’re looking for. We’re still working on it and will be forever. “How do we integrate all this great music we love so much into one wholesome thing?”

Your musical roots are diverse, as is Enslaved’s sound. Yet many bands who shift their sound from extreme metal towards progressive music suffer the chagrin of fans of the older sound, while prog fans can be standoffish. How do you deal with that?

It’s fine. I don’t think someone who likes all the albums can say in a quantitative way that they have a better way of liking Enslaved than the guy who just likes [1994 album] Frost. But what we’ve picked up on over the years is we have respect for that. We can relate with bands like that too.

I don’t have a particular reason, but [with] some bands I’m really into [I prefer] two or three albums and I understand that’s what happens. Also I think they hear [what] we subscribe to – it’s important to people in metal that you have people who are preserving history, tradition.

You joined us for the Prog Awards in 2018 and presented the Video Of The Year award to Orphaned Land. Did you enjoy that?

I loved it. I’m sitting there [pointing and] saying, “Oh wow, that’s that guy!” It was so cool. We’re metal people, but I think we feel like a part of the prog scene too. Art lovers. Prog rock is, like, the fans and the level of interest and dedication.

You’ve worked outside of Enslaved with Einar Selvik of Wardruna on the Skuggsjá and Hugsjá projects, and with the By Norse label. What does that give to you musically?

It’s given me a lot. I think it’s good therapeutically to not be the only guy calling the shots musically. Einar’s not this up-and-coming artist, he’s on a level that’s just insane. And working with By Norse you can see that too. He’s a fantastic guy, but also a great composer and the way he works has been a learning curve. We both have a great time. As we went on we discovered we were looking for more of a meeting of what I love about this rock and prog: mystic meets folk. There’s a lot of that in Norwegian folk music and Swedish even more. Swedish folk music is so much more vibrant than Norwegian. It’s close to our hearts. It’s a localisation opposed to globalisation.

It’s dangerous to talk about identity, but for us the world is becoming colder and I think it’s because people are moving away from storytelling and the strain when people start talking about identity and history, especially since the Second World War – it’s causing more trouble these days.

When we meet people from other countries who are wearing their insides on the outside, it scares us because we’re not used to having thoughts about that. Where do we come from? We are not used to thinking positively about it. [But] talking to old people [about the] history, all these wonderful discussions came up. That’s when we realised this was something we wanted to do both with music and with lyrics and start singing again. It’s okay to be what you are.

Your involvement with Einar and By Norse has certainly helped open more prog fans’ ears to what you do, especially those who might have been initially intimidated by Enslaved’s heaviness.

That’s interesting. People are missing that thing from music that you had during prog’s golden era: nothing is so serious or sacred or anything like that. It’s superficial in a sense. Music was about discovering something new, and it was a selling point. And now everything is about what it reminds you of. “Do you miss your high-school years?” What the fuck, man? It’s all retrospective and you’re embarrassed to represent something new.

It must be pleasing to see that development...

It’s great. From a Bergen perspective, for many years we kept wanting something new from black metal bands. But then you notice what’s happening in the prog scene [with] the Dark Essence and Karisma labels, they’re exporting elements of prog rock.

Norway continues to have a terrific prog scene. Why do you think that is?

It’s a DIY thing: they have their own labels, they’re active. That’s where we found Håkon [Vinje, Enslaved’s keyboard player since 2017]. We were at a Seven Impale show and me and Grutle looked at each other going, “Is this happening? Are we finding a new keyboard player at this gig?” And we did.

Working with Shaman Elephant, as you did in 2022, helps with the prog credentials, too.

It’s great. We have Iver [Sandøy, drummer] in the centre of it all. The octopus or puppeteer. He’s producing all of those bands in the studio.

It’s been an incredible journey for you and Enslaved, from extreme metal to pioneers of modern progressive metal...

I’m extremely happy. My daughter asked what I wanted to do when I grew up and I said, “basically what I’m doing”. It’s great, but then we go to the rehearsal place. That’s the success of the band, 32 years now, album 16. It’s so much fun. We want to be at rehearsal to hang out. It’s the best thing we know to do.

Black metal is often associated with its early-day transgressions – church burnings, murder, suicide – but the truth is that no heavy subgenre has pushed in as many different directions over the course of its history. Since the Norwegian movement formulated what black metal means, we’ve heard this music collaborate with almost every other style under the sun. It’s now a worldwide scene that’s still innovating – and the 10 bands below prove it. From the darkened hardcore of Calligram to Abstract Void’s screeching synthwave, here are the new, incredible artists that every black metal aficionado needs in their lives.

Blackbraid

The fastest rising black metal band of this generation, Blackbraid reject the cliches of the genre, instead using it to honour nature and Native American culture. Their 2022 debut, Blackbraid I, imbued extreme music with woodwind instrumentation to become a viral megahit. Then this year’s sequel doubled down on the project’s progressive ambition. With tours and festival slots across the globe coming up, expect these aggressors to go far.

Gaerea

Gaerea are what would happen if Behemoth downed all the coffee in Poland. The Portuguese black/death metal quintet are among the loudest and most high-octane forces in their subgenre, rampaging through a litany of lightspeed riffs as their vocals cacophonously shriek. Little else is known about them thanks to their masked get-up and insistence on anonymity, but the safe money is on this band attaining superstardom almost as quickly as they play their instruments.

Calligram

Calling a band that formed in 2011 “up-and-coming” may seem like a stretch, but Calligram didn’t release their debut until nine years later. And what a debut it was. The Eye Is The First Circle was a furious yet intellectual statement, colliding blackened hardcore together with poetic lyrics screeched in Italian. This year’s Position/Momentum was somehow even better, its rampant pace and tragic yet grandiose melodies making it sound like a rush towards the apocalypse.

Lepra

Black metal’s earliest days are inherently tethered to religion, and this Maine-based trio acknowledge those origins in the most unique way. Their brand-new debut album, Devil’s Blood In Her Tongue, is ostensibly a mixture of rabid metal and gothic rock, but the echoing production, patient melodies and towering organ make it seem as if it were recorded in a church. Catchy and slyly unholy, it’s a sign that Lepra are well worth watching.

Bizarrekult

Russian multi-instrumentalist Roman V started Bizarrekult in Siberia in 2006, but quickly put the project – pun intended – on ice. When the musician relocated to Bergen, Norway, he found inspiration anew and restarted the band as a post-black metal powerhouse. New album Den Tapte Krigen clashes ferocious riffing with the odd heavenly vocal melody courtesy of Roman’s wife, Dina. It’s an avant-garde adventure ideal for fans of Enslaved and Thy Catafalque.

Abstract Void

This’ll infuriate the purists out there. Abstract Void are an enigmatic one-man project from parts unknown, and their M.O. is to blend the iciness of black metal with nostalgic synthwave. Somehow, it works. The songs on new album Forever are built around bubbling keyboards that could soundtrack any Metroidvania boss fight, before blast beats and shrill screaming make the music feel even more exciting. 

Dawn Ray’d

Black metal’s historically been a nesting ground for the far right – and Dawn Ray’d are changing that. This trio are openly antifascist, as you’ll quickly see in their interviews and music videos. They’re also a distinctly folk-inclined offering in their native UK, incorporating woodwind, violins and acoustic guitars to stand out from the rest of the scene. Their messaging’s annoyed the underground’s bigots and they’re a fixture on festival stages, so they’re getting everything right.

Hidden Mothers

If you like feeling sad, then Hidden Mothers are the black metal band for you! This Northern collective are a shoegazey, post-metallic prospect, emphasising sombre segues just as much as they savagely riff and scream. Their three-track EP, released in 2020, earned them underground darling status, and they’ve recently graduated to stages at festivals as beloved as ArcTanGent. It’s a promising build-up to their debut album… whenever that’s coming out.

Laang 冷

This Taiwanese duo tout themselves as “terror black metal based on the trauma of a survivor”. Their singer/guitarist Haitao Yang has lived through being shot and briefly being declared medically dead, and Laang 冷 is rooted in the ongoing impact of that experience. “This story has no hero and no happy ending,” Yang howls in Mandarin Chinese during recent single Baoyu 暴雨: an emotionally and musically intense precursor to new album Riluo, out November 24.

Vermilia

This mysterious one-woman project hails from deepest, darkest Finland and… that’s pretty much all we can tell you about her. However, Vermilia’s music is easier to define, taking the infatuation with nature key to most folkish black metal and upping the sturdy riff and lovely melody quota. 2022 album Ruska is full of barrelling guitar chords and enigmatic singalongs, making this songstress a more adrenaline-pumping counterpart to Myrkur and Wolves In The Throne Room.

It’s fair to say that black metal vocals are an acquired taste. Not everybody who dips their toes into heavy music is instantly going to be up for I Am The Black Wizards for four minutes – they often need to work up to it. So we commend the bravery of one Aaron Marshall, who popped onto UK primetime talent show Britain’s Got Talent in 2015 to blast the mainstream with some full-on screaming.

During his onstage audition for the programme (seen below), the young man presents judges Simon Cowell, David Walliams, Alesha Dixon and Amanda Holden with an… unconventional take on the Frozen megahit Let It Go. The singer screeches the song out black metal-style for a live crowd and millions of TV viewers, and fair play to him, he does it well. One of the panel in front of him isn’t impressed, however.

Holden’s initially overjoyed when she hears the jingling instrumentation come over the speakers. Her jubilant mood then turns into shock and disgust the second Marshall opens his mouth, voting him off within a second. It looks like the audience are going to go the same way, laughing at the poor lad – until the chorus hits. At that point, they’re swaying their arms and unintentionally providing a lovely, melodic counterpoint to his roars as they sing along. “He’s being outsung by the crowd,” the series’ co-host, Declan Donnelly, comments from the side of the stage.

Holden’s still pissed, though. “I found that offensive,” she states as post-performance feedback. “I really hope you lose your voice this afternoon.” Popular opinion didn’t share that sentiment, though, and Marshall gets through to the next round of the show with a three-against-one judge vote. And you know what: for having the balls to bring black metal to the masses in such a unique way, he bloody well deserved it.

Watch the full footage here:

The 10th studio album from Norway’s most unmistakable black metal entity is the second since the departure of co-founder Abbath in 2015 and the first with Demonaz as the last man standing, after the departure of drummer Horgh. 2018’s Northern Chaos Gods offered convincing proof that Immortal remain committed to delivering the kind of thrilling, riff-powered black metal that can evolve with the times without losing its connection to the elemental spirits of its notorious second wave. Given the turbulence between Demonaz and his former bandmates, it’s easy to see the title as both a standard-issue Thunder-god metaphor and a personal manifesto. Regardless, Immortal’s latest is an unremittingly brutal campaign with an absolutely ruthless sense of conviction.

Thunders Of Darkness, Blashyrkh My Throne and the title track erupt with raging blastbeats, taut riffage and Demonaz’s icy shriek, recalling Immortal at their most primal – all speed, precision and fury. Other tracks, like No Sun, Return To Cold and Wargod ratchet the tempo down, letting the grinding, distorted riffs take centre stage alongside a vacuum-tight rhythm section that unleashes more groove than a Norwegian black metal album has a right to wield. The album’s undoubted peak is the emotionally wrought, seven-minute instrumental Norlandihr, whose shimmering melody builds to a crystalline solo that glides over a raging rhythm beneath. Every tankard in Valhalla will be raised high.

Immortal aren’t going to range too far outside of the margins when it comes to the black metal blueprint, but that’s not to say the album is rote. War Against All boasts riffs as catchy as anything the band has ever released, and there’s plenty of depth across the tracks. Immortal might now be a one-man band – with help from Gaahls Wyrd’s Kevin Kvåle and Enslaved’s Ice Dale – but Demonaz clearly intends on making a stand for the ages.

Controversial Swedish black metal band Marduk have parted company with bassist Joel Lindholm after he was filmed performing a Nazi salute onstage in London.

The incident was captured during the band’s set at the Incineration Festival at the Camden Electric Ballroom. In the footage below, Lindholm (on the right hand side of the stage) can clearly be seen making the gesture as the band finish the song Beyond The Grace Of God.

The following day, the band posted a message on Instagram saying that the bassist was no longer in the band.

The statement read: “Following a variety of intolerable stage antics by a very drunk Joel at Incineration Fest last week, he has vacated his position in the band.  Our old friend and bass player Devo has agreed to step in on a temporary basis, so this is unlikely to affect any of upcoming shows.”

This isn’t the first time that Marduk have been at the centre of political controversy. In 2018, the names and addresses of vocalist Daniel Rostén and then-drummer Fredrik Widigs were discovered to be on a leaked database of people who had purchased Nazi propaganda from extreme right wing Neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement (Rostén and Widigs denied the allegations).

Lindholm has been replaced by former Marduk bassist Magnus ‘Devo’ Andersson.

Within the mainstream, the genius of black metal’s music is often lost amid a sea of sensationalism. "Its musicians are murderers, arsonists and satanists!", pop culture’s been crying since the 1990s. But, beyond the crimes of an extremist few, the subgenre’s consistently broadened what heavy music can get away with.

What started as a punk-ish rebellion against the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal is now the underground’s most malleable sound. There’s symphonic black metal, progressive black metal, blackgaze, viking metal, blackened death metal… and so little of it’s actually been made by the criminals the papers still focus on. So, here’s the full, 40-year history of black metal music, distilled into five essential albums.

Venom – Black Metal (1982)

Although the black metal manifesto was formalised by the “inner circle” of the 90s Oslo scene, it by no means invented it; 80s inspirations like Bathory and Venom are nowadays worshipped as the first wave of black metal. The latter iconoclasts had the strongest impact on the genre to come – and not just because it took its name from their raw-as-red-meat second album.

Black Metal scratched at the then-almighty NWOBHM. While Iron Maiden and Judas Priest counterattacked against punk using operatic melodies and intricate riffing, Venom embraced it to become obnoxious outcasts within their own movement. Outsiders loathed the album’s cheapskate production and unsubtle songs, and were terrified of its outright satanism. But then those tenets became the core values of Mayhem and early Emperor. When Black Metal’s lyrics called the genre “metal for maniacs pure”, Venom had no idea how right they were.

Mayhem – De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas (1994)

Mayhem’s debut is the scariest metal album of all time. Even without context, it’s a chilling listen, defined by its icy tremolo picking and screeching hymns to the dark side. But then you learn the backstory.

The band were the nucleus of Norwegian black metal. Guitarist Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth defined its sound, vocalist Per “Dead” Ohlin invented its corpse-painted theatrics and one-time bassist Varg Vikernes instigated the church-burning extremism. Then Dead killed himself and Vikernes murdered Euronymous before outing himself as a far-right twat. Mayhem corralled their scene and it dispersed with their downfall.

On De Mysteriis…, Dead is replaced by Attila Csihar, and a killer and his victim hauntingly play on the same songs. It being released one year after Euronymous’s death makes it a sinister epitaph to one of the most destructive and notorious episodes in pop-cultural history – yet it remains a touchstone for everything else black metal would become.

Enslaved – Eld (1997)

After Euronymous died in 1993, the Norwegian black metal scene sonically splintered. Immortal built their lyrical landscape of Blashyrkh and delved deeper and deeper into old-school metal. Emperor grew in their symphonia and technicality. Ulver flourished into an industrial jazz post-rock thing, because why not? Meanwhile, Enslaved became the band Euronymous always wanted them to be.

Formed by Ivar Bjørnson and Grutle Kjellson when they were just teenagers, the band were proteges of the Oslo ringleader. They were even first exposed to progressive music in his record shop, Helvete. Such influence was apparent on 1994’s synthy metal debut Vikingligr Veldi, but Eld pushed even further. 16-minute opener 793 (Slaget Om Lindisfarne) is a classic of both the prog-black and viking metal styles, and was the strongest signal of the genre’s eclectic potential. Nowadays, Enslaved self-categorise as “all the favourites in your record collection in one cohesive mass”.

Cradle Of Filth – Cruelty And The Beast (1998)

Between Dusk And Her Embrace and Cruelty And The Beast, Dani Filth’s macabre cabaret courted the mainstream by generating as many headlines as Norwegian black metal, but killing 100% less people. Two fans were arrested for wearing that ‘Jesus Is A Cunt’ shirt in 1997 and '98, inspiring widespread scrutiny. Like Iron Maiden amidst the ‘satanic panic’, Cradle disgusted old fogeys and fascinated teenagers – the perfect combination for attention.

Cruelty… was always going to be a hit as a result, but what ensured the staying power was mixing the nascent and the timeless. Cradle tethered the fury and screams of black metal to the pageantry of Maiden and tales of historical horror. The band reached number 48 in the UK and number 13 in Finland, then their commercial ascent was sealed by From The Cradle To Enslave dominating MTV the following year.

Alcest – Écailles De Lune (2010)

Stéphane “Neige” Paut was just a kid with a dream. Literally. When he was young, the Alcest mastermind had repeated visions of a blissful landscape, which were so vivid that he believes they were flashes of a life before life. Neige’s MO for his band is to bring the sound of that personal paradise into reality.

The musician was also a child of the French black metal scene. Although he formed Alcest as a straight-ahead genre project, he united that aggression with heavenly beauty to create blackgaze. On breakthrough album Écailles De Lune, black metal sounded delicate, stocked with angelic croons and clean strumming as much as it was abrasive guitar tones and flurrying drums. The love that it received from mainstream critics pre-empted the kind of intrigue that would follow Deafheaven and Zeal & Ardor’s later genre experiments.

There surely isn’t a more upper-middle class sport than skiing, is there? Just saying the word evokes images of wholesome, pearly white-teethed families, decked out in Ralph Lauren gear, sipping on cocoa by a roaring fire. Not very metal. But trust the good people of Norway to do its best to give it a heavy metal makeover nonetheless.

The 2011 Nordic World Ski Championships were chosen to be hosted by Oslo, and so, like most big sporting events, it featured an opening and closing ceremony, as well as some outdoor “cultural events”. A lot of it was of little interest to metalheads - Norwegian trumpet virtuoso Ole Edvard Antonsen wrote a song especially for the tournament called I Like to Ski, which we’ve given a swerve - but on one occasion, tens of thousands of skiing enthusiasts were treated to the bizarre sight of black metal legends Satyricon playing their classic anthem K.I.N.G. from their 2006 album, Now, Diabolical. 

The performance itself is pretty wild, with frontman Satyr stomping around the massive stage, barking out the song, when he is suddenly joined by a bunch of catwalk models, who elegantly strut around in time to Satyricon’s grizzly riffing, and a bunch of dancers who seem to be voguing whilst covered in glowsticks. Voguing. To black metal. There’s also a huge gramophone on stage with the band. It’s absolute fever dream stuff. 

Maybe the most surprising thing about it all, however, is the fact that the attendees (and there are a lot of people there) aren’t turning their nose up at Satyricon at all and appear more than happy to chant along with the band. Guess they just do things differently in Norway. It’s great to see, and it makes us a little jealous that this kind of thing isn’t more commonplace here in the UK. 

We’re determined to take a leaf out of Norway's book and, quite frankly, we won’t be happy until we get Venom Prison down to the Royal Leamington Spa Bowling Club to have them close out the English National Bowls Championships with a run through Castigated in Steel and Concrete. If black metal is good enough for skiing fans in Norway...

Anyway, you can watch that bizarre Satyricon performance in all its glory below.

It was recently confirmed that Voyager would be representing Australia at this year's Eurovision Song Contest with their track Promise. And they've been speaking about on national television, specifically on the breakfast show TODAY, sporting Emperor no less.

And the band took the chance to show off some of their vocal abilities, seemingly terrifying hosts Karl Stefanovic and Allison Langdon.

Firstly though, They were asked about how it feels to be able to share their music in such a way. Vocalist Daniel Estrin replied, “We’ve got seven studio albums, we’ve toured the world, all the countries - USA, Japan, Mexico - and to be able to do this and take it to the big stage is just absolutely phenomenal. It’s been a hard slog and it’s just so rewarding. And just the support behind us, especially from Australia, had been phenomenal.”

Then to finish up the hosts ask to be taught how to “growl”, so they oblige. First, dealing out a low and guttural death metal vocal, with everybody joining in for good measure. Then delving into a bit of black metal, specifically, a lyric from Immortal's Blashyrkh (Mighty Ravendark), they leave Karl and Allison reeling, with them stating, “That’s slightly terrifying”.

They even have time to deal out a classic James Hetfield, “Yeah, yeah”, too.

Good Morning Australia, indeed.

Voyager will be performing at Eurovision Song Contest which is taking place at Liverpool Arena in May. This isn't not the first time the band have been involved with the contest either. They were shortlisted in 2020 with the song Runaway but failed to make the final ten, while last year they won the public vote with Dreamer, but lost out at the final hurdle.

This is what Daniel had to say when the announcement was made: “As a long-time Eurovision fan, this is the pinnacle - Voyager gets to play the greatest show on earth. Our song Promise is made for the Eurovision stage and collectively we feel it's one of our best yet. We filmed the music video in both the city of Perth and beautiful parts of Western Australia to showcase the majestic beauty of our home state. Eurovisionation, we are coming!!!”

While a logo is supposed to be an instant way of getting your band recognised, black metal bands have traditionally tried to outdo each other with indecipherable designs which look like they were created by a spider after falling into a tin of emulsion. 

For fans of the genre, it’s become the basis of one-upmanship – friendship groups have become fractured because someone misread an intricate logo. Here’s a tip: do you remember those ‘magic eye’ images from the past? Stare into the centre of the logo, allow the flames of Hades to tickle your retinas and all will become clear.

But before you do that, check out our favourite black metal logo memes floating about in the darkest corners of the internet…

Earlier this year we brought you the brilliant news that devout heavy metal fan Louis-Paul Gauveau made it through the audition phase of The Voice: Quebec with his cover of Necrophagist’s Stabwound. And now we have even better news…

He’s made it through to the next round again!

Engulfed in flames and flanked by two guitarists behind fences (for some reason), Louis-Paul growls and snarls his way through a blistering rendition of Canadian black metal band Incandescence‘s L’abîme du Rêve. Going the whole 666 yards, he barks and screams like a maniac with his spiked arms and studded leather jacket – you couldn’t look much more metal, could you?

We don’t know what his next choice will be, we’re hoping for some King Diamond to really push his vocal abilities to the limit.

10-year-old drummer wins Denmark's Got Talent

Think of black metal and you’ll conjure images of the frostbitten north, corpsepaint, steel weapons and dark forests. All these things are evil and scary, sure, but is it really the best place for the grimmest and most kvlt bands?

Woods Of Trees’ new song Black Metal In The Desert is an ode to exactly what the name suggests – playing extreme music in a barren, sandy wasteland. According to the band, the forest is for poseurs like Immortal and Dark Funeral, and the idea of playing in the woods has become to mainstream. They also point out the hypocrisy of bands singing about isolation and death in an environment bursting with life (and men walking dogs).

Plus, according to the video, there’s also treasure in the desert – which always a good thing.

All together now “The desert is kvlt! The forest’s not!”

Of course, as is always the way, it’s just a matter of time before the desert is overrun by metal bands trying to make a name for themselves. So where do you go after that? Underwater black metal is coming, mark our words.

The 10 Most Malevolent Black Metal Logo Memes

Back in 1999, Cradle Of Filth were not only the UK’s biggest black metal band, but they were exciting, challenging and prepared to take musical risks. The EP From The Cradle To Enslave that year was a visionary stride forward into the mists of the onrushing new century.

While the band still had a vicious bite, with Stuart Anstis’s guitar ripping out chunks of rotting flesh and Dani Filth’s nasty vocal croak having a manic sadism, they were also opening up fresh musical avenues. Lecter’s keyboard approach had a diabolic, symphonic presence and the songs were remarkably well honed.

You can hear the emphasis on allowing the tracks to develop at their own pace through the title song and Dark Brooding And Fucking, while the cover of Misfits’ Death Comes Ripping adds a mature moodiness to the text, and Sleepless, a version of an early Anathema tune, is gothically brooding.

The band also show their ability to immerse themselves in electronics with Pervert’s Church, a remix of the song From The Cradle, showing a welcome Depeche Mode influence.

Funeral In Carpathia (Be Quick Or Be Dead Mix) has a surprisingly deft melodic feel beneath the savage torque. And they incite a rhythmic riot to embellish the tone of Dawn Of Eternity, a Massacre cover.

Now available on vinyl for the first time, and appropriately pressed in blood red, this stands as one of the band’s finest achievements. As such, it should be praised for being among black metal’s landmark releases.

The first album I ever bought was Ultravox’s best of, The Collection. I actually re-bought it in Germany about 10 years ago because it had some different tracks on it. It was the first album I ever bought and literally two or three months after buying it, I got into metal! I loved Ultravox because it was pop, but it was dark. It was really dark.

My dad was a reggae collector but he collected records in general; he bought me a record player and gave me loads of singles in special cases and stuff, so I learnt to look after records! I think I got Dancing with Tears in My Eyes in that box and just progressed from there. Ultravox were quite a big band back then.

• The A-Z Of Cradle Of Filth
• I was held at gunpoint in the Vatican with Cradle Of Filth
• Cradle Of Filth: Dani Filth's Guide To Life
• My life in 10 songs, by Dani Filth

Hymn’s the second-best song on the album, it’s got that really dark bit in the middle. Everybody bangs on about Vienna because it’s the one that everyone remembers, but it’s got a really great darkwave middle section where it all goes into strings and there’s lots of bits like that throughout the whole album. The best song on the album is The Voice, though. I wanted to cover that with Cradle Of Filth and we were close to doing it at one point, then we all realised the error of my ways.

I might go back and listen to this album but only when I’m washing the car, and that’s just because I chuck my iPod on shuffle. Once in a blue moon, an Ultravox track will pop up and you realise that actually, yeah, it’s really cool. Obviously I’ve got my headphones on – I’m not blasting it out for everybody to hear because it’s quite embarrassing.

Devilment are on tour from December 6. Their album, II - The Mephisto Waltzes is out now through Nuclear Blast.

Dani was speaking to Alec Chillingworth.

The 10 Best Cradle Of Filth B-Sides

Ever since Cradle Of Filth’s early demos and their 1994 debut LP The Principle Of Evil Made Flesh, our favourite extreme metal manglers have propagated blasts of symphonic, tremolo-picked metal of the highest standard. As the band finish scribbling for their as-yet-untitled twelfth album and frontman Dani Filth poises to release II: The Mephisto Waltzes with his other band, Devilment, we sift through the swamp and select 10 of Cradle’s beastliest B-sides.

10. Mistress From The Sucking Pit (2010)

Culled from Darkly, Darkly, Venus Aversa’s bonus disc, Mistress From The Sucking Pit displays some of Ashley Ellyllon’s finest keywork before Paul Allender’s trademark chug muscles its way in. This was Ellyllon’s sole Cradle record, but her tinkling on this track remains one of Darkly, Darkly, Venus Aversa’s more memorable ditties, blending the cut-throat romanticism of early Cradle with the band’s thuggish output from the fresh decade.

9. The Snake-Eyed & Venomous (2007)

Thornography is wrongly accused of being the poorly-made crown of thorns atop Cradle’s skull, but there are gems aplenty. On the Harder, Darker, Faster edition, The Snake-Eyed & Venomous’ unyielding thrash overtones are cemented through ex-Skyclad/Sabbat mouthpiece Martin Walkyier’s backing vocals – all in all, it’ll make your head bang.

8. Misericord (2015)

Hammer Of The Witches slapped us all in the face and wagged a fungal finger at us for ever doubting Cradle, despite an almost complete line-up reshuffle – the record turned out so strong, even its bonus tracks are brilliant. Misericord succeeds most in its mid-tempo downtime, exuding an archaic racket akin to Doberman Pharaoh’s Egyptian nods, before we’re dragged back into more of that much-missed, twin-lead bliss.

7. Prey (2005)

Taken from Nymphetamine’s bonus disc, Prey builds on that record’s sensual-yet-unsettling nature. Dani’s lyrics seep with conviction and the keyboards are the spaciest since From The Cradle To Enslave; Allender’s gnarled riffs keep everything firmly rooted in the nastiest of territory, mind you.

• The 12 best Cradle Of Filth tracks selected by Dani Filth
• The A-Z Of Cradle Of Filth
• I was held at gunpoint in the Vatican with Cradle Of Filth
• Cradle Of Filth: Dani Filth's Guide To Life

6. Sodomy And Lust (1998)

German thrashbastards Sodom get their classic track defiled by Filth, Sodomy & Lust being reinvented with plenty of Dani’s take on the black metal “Urgh!” trope and Nick Barker’s pant-shittingly powerful drumming. Raw, raucous, and just a little bit ridiculous. In the best possible way.

5. Bestial Lust (Bitch) (2005)

Another lustfully-titled effort now, this time in homage to Bathory’s Bestial Lust (Bitch). With Cradle’s major label production job, it obviously doesn’t sound like they’re recording live from inside a goat’s anus, but the thrashing, urgent nature of the source material remains intact.

4. Balsamic And Anathema (2008)

Mercilessly gutted from Godspeed On The Devil’s Thunder due to the thing being too bloody long, Balsamic And Anathema slots into Cradle’s tale of satanic, child-murdering knight Gilles de Rais betwixt Ten Leagues Beneath Contempt and the title track. Dani fancies himself an MC and namechecks his own band before a tasty dual-guitar melody hits you; if this sounds like your bag, pick up the album on vinyl, where the track is included in sequence.

3. King Of The Woods (2015)

This song could have easily murdered Onward Christian Soldiers and taken its place on Hammer Of The Witches. Alas, it wasn’t to be. No idea why. Lindsay Schoolcraft’s vocals harmonise perfectly with Dani’s screeches, Daniel Firth’s isolated bass-work is grimy as fuck and the spooky keys take us into full-on Treehouse Of Horror zones. Absolute spookiness, and a testament to the sheer power and dexterity of Cradle’s new line-up.

2. Truth & Agony (2010)

It’s the best song they recorded between Godspeed On The Devil’s Thunder and Hammer Of The Witches and it’s not even on a sodding album! Popping up on Darkly, Darkly, Venus Aversa’s bonus disc, Truth & Agony trades with that Allender beefiness and its pre-chorus has Martin Škaroupka destroying our ears with something other than blastbeats, but it’s Dani’s criminally underrated melodies and scant screams through the chorus that get us going.

1. Black Metal (1998)

With the stars maligned and the universe splayed open, Cradle took a cult classic and, as Louis Walsh would say, “they made the song their own.” The Venom classic set the precedent for an entire genre, Cradle’s skewed view giving Black Metal a spin in their nefarious washing machine. Lecter’s cheeky organ pumps into the chorus, camper than a one-man production of Hairspray starring Alan Carr; Barker manages some maddening fills as his double-pedal fractures your spine; a bile-flecked showing from Dani proves he can grunt with the best of them. This has everything. Black fuckin’ metal.

The Black Metal Quiz: from Celtic Frost to corpse paint

Devilment's track-by-track guide to II: The Mephisto Waltzes

No matter how far Norway’s black metal scene has moved on from its brutal and bloody birth throes, the murders, suicides and church burnings that took place throughout the first half of the 90s have become the cornerstones of a lore that still exerts a pull today.

While Jonas Åkerlund’s Lords Of Chaos movie revisiting that era is still in the works, a feature-length documentary Blackhearts is due for an imminent release. Directed by Christian Falch and Fredrik Horn, and produced by Torstein Parelius, bassist of Norway’s post-black metal experimentalists Manes, it explores the magnetism of his homeland through the eyes of three very different international black metal bands: Greece’s Naer Nataron, Columbia’s Luciferian and From The Vastland, aka Iranian musician Sina. Each band is fimed making a pilgrimage to the country to play at a festival as each finds the weight of their own expectation both vindicated and contradicted by the reality of actually being there.

A wry look at the enduring yet precarious power of myth, Blackhearts delves into the different psyches of its protagonists, given a particular frission due to Naer Mataron frontman Kaiadas’s heavy involvement with notorious Greek far-right nationalist party Golden Dawn, a fact that Blackhearts refuses to shy away from.

The documentary is also about to get its UK premiere at on November 5, 6pm at the Picturehouse Central in Picadilly, London as part of the Doc‘n Roll Film Festival that takes place from November 2-13.

As well as a trailer, we are proud to offer an exclusive short clip, featuring Naer Mataron’s vist to the Fantoft Stave church in Bergen, reconstructed after it was infamously burned down in 1992, its shell featuring on the cover of Burzum’s Aske EP a year later.

“This TeamRock exclusive clip from the documentary Blackhearts,” state the film’s production house, Gammaglimt, “illustrates in many ways the global impact of Norwegian black metal. However, the film is in no way a traditional music documentary about the history of Norwegian black metal. Blackhearts follows three dedicated diehard fans of this genre as they travel to Norway from Iran, Colombia and Greece, and three very different personal stories unfold as we meet them in their home countries and follow them on their journey. We’re really excited to host the UK premiere of Blackhearts at the Doc N’ Roll Film Festival in London November 5, and we’ll be there the introduce the film!”

Dim the lights, turn up the hellfire, make yourself some popcorn on it, and watch the exclusive clip below!

Visit the Blackhearts official website here!

And book tickets for the screening on November 5 here!

Behemoth frontman Adam ‘Nergal’ Darski described a trip to the Indian city of Varanasi as an enlightening experience.

The Polish blackened death metallers headlined the Deccan Rock festival in Hyderabad on September 24, which afforded the frontman a whistle-stop visit to the northern city, which is located on the banks of the Ganges river and regarded as the country’s spiritual capital.

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On his official Facebook page, Nergal writes: “Someone asked me why Varanasi? Because it always feels liberating to get out of your safe European comfort zone to experience all of this in its mighty unpredictable nature. It feels kinda enlightening to see where we are all coming from as Varanasi must be one of the most ancient cities in the world; a place that Buddha made divine with his footprints. It’s mystical and spiritual and you can feel it.

“There is a way to start enjoying it massively if you only stop using your brain too much for analysing and comparing. India is one of a kind! And It feels good just to be in this situation to truly experience the unknown and learn from it. It’s been two hyper-intense days where billions of impulses were feeding on my senses permanently. The taste, the smell, the sound, the touch – it’s been a lot to handle for my brain but I am happy and fulfilled. Two days in Varanasi is an ultimate dose of Indian culture in the most traditional way. Namaste!”

During his visit, Nergal took many photographs during his visit. Check out this sample below.

For more photos from Nergal’s trip to India, visit his Facebook page.

Discreetly beavering away on the north-west coast of England since 2010, gradually refining a distinctive amalgam of extreme, melodic, aggressive sounds and exploratory concepts, Necronautical have travelled a long way. Formed as a lo-fi recording project by a trio of bored mates named after an in-joke, they now stand poised to release their spellbinding second album, The Endurance At Night, on legendary reactivated label Cacophonous, ready to assert themselves live in earnest and claim their place among the cream of the burgeoning British black metal scene.

“There was never a plan,” emphasises their disarmingly personable guitarist/vocalist, Naut. “Almost everything has happened accidentally or organically. We settled upon the name when I joked to our guitarist, Carcarrion, ‘All your riffs sound like sailor riffs!’ It was very Viking-type stuff! But as we progressed we wanted to get a more sincere, atmospheric, evil sort of sound, and to take the concept more seriously. So we happened upon this idea of ‘necronautics’: experimenting with near-death experiences in order to experience different aspects of the underworld.”

Their self-released debut, 2014’s Black Sea Misanthropy, centred around the theme of “the world ending under a great flood, nature reclaiming Earth.” With The Endurance At Night, Necronautical have expanded their well-worn oceanic concept outwards and upwards, and made it their own. “We talked about astrophysics and the age of the universe, and Matt ran with it – the concept for this album was more his thing.”

“The aim was to keep the character of the band themed around aspects of exploration, be it the sea, the self, the cosmos…” explains bassist Matt, aka Anchorite (the pair, endearingly, alternate between real names and cryptic pseudonyms). “We were thinking about that next step. So the themes on this album are looking cosmically at ideas of Gods, origins, different mythos and explanations for the formation of the universe. There are a few controversial theories dropped in, almost Flat Earth conspiracy-type stuff. Interesting ideas!”

However, the band deftly channel these weighty themes through an intimate, emotional prism. “The idea of this cosmic journey is to express these personal feelings,” Anchorite affirms. “What Nordic, Greek, even Biblical mythologies do is talk about personal human issues through grand, over-the-top imagery and language, and we wanted to use these devices to get across the same power and message, but with a subversion behind it.”

Perhaps the most powerful example is the album’s stunning closer, Theia. Nominally, as Anchorite explains, it’s about the ‘giant- impact hypothesis’: “There’s this idea that Earth’s moon is the final remnant of a proto- planet called Theia, which collided with our proto-Earth hundreds of millions of years ago.” But Naut approached the song as “a regretful love story about the relationship between our moon and Earth across all time. We’ve taken these ideas from the cosmos and applied them to emotions, so when I’m singing Theia it’s like I’m trying to personify the moon, and speak of my laments and regrets. I feel very personally about that song, but at the same time I’m imagining I am the moon. That may sound ridiculous, but that’s the way we’re working!”

In this sort of music there’s often a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous. “That’s the line we endeavour to walk!” laughs Naut.

Surprisingly often, oceanically inclined metal artists live a long way from their beloved briny. Heidelburg’s ‘nautical doom’ quartet Ahab are 300 miles from the North Sea, while Mastodon wrote Leviathan a similar distance from their nearest seaport. For Necronautical, sea winds are closer to home.

“I’ve spent a lot of time at sea,” Naut reveals, “because my dad was always into sailing boats, so a great deal of my childhood and teenage years were spent doing that. I’ve been out on some stormy seas in really harsh conditions, so I’m aware of that power.”

Did any of these squally jaunts constitute a near-death experience? “No, I didn’t nearly die,” Naut admits, sounding almost rueful, “but there’s a feeling when you’re on the ocean… you can’t see land, you can’t fathom how deep the water is, it’s so powerful… you feel at its mercy. We’re nothing to nature, we are nothing to the universe.”

“That’s what the cosmic scale is all about,” Anchorite chimes in. “It’s showing how insignificant human activity really is. Any kind of living you try to scrape together is just about what importance you place on it. These things are personally important, but cosmically irrelevant.”

The band clearly have a close friendship that is rare in the misanthropic turmoil of black metal. Naut and Anchorite formed their first band when they were “11 or 12… Ever since then we’ve been in bands together,” reveals Naut. They were thrown into the black metal deep end when Naut saw Dissection and Watain live in 2004 – “I didn’t know what to expect… it blew my mind,” the frontman intones – where their musical destiny became manifest. The band are bonded by a shared affinity for the sea, a fascination with the universe, a love of nature and a specific obsession with the Immortal song Beyond The North Waves (“Essentially the foundation for the entire Necronautical concept,” the band announced via Facebook), as well as a soft spot for extremely cheesy movies. “Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, obviously that’s not a good film – don’t watch it! – but there’s a song in there, right?” Naut laughs. “There’s all kinds of inspiration, we all think the same kind of stuff is awesome, but growing up around nature has to be influential. The natural world and black metal go hand in hand, it’s the forces of nature at its extreme. Since day one we’ve never done a CD that didn’t have some sort of sample of the weather on it!”

THE ENDURANCE AT NIGHT IS OUT NOW VIA CACOPHONOUS

Necronautical – The Endurance At Night album review

Symphonic black metallers Necronautical stream their epic new album in full