Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1982

Black metal

Emerged 1982 Origin Norway / Sweden Subgenres 10 Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
9
Speed
9
Melody
4

Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.

In short

Tremolo picking, blast beats, shrieked vocals and deliberately cold production. More an aesthetic than a technique — atmosphere matters more than clean sound.

How it sounds

  • Tremolo picking on open fifth voicings, with vocals in the high register.
  • Deliberately thin, cold production — the missing bass is an aesthetic choice, not an accident.
  • Fast blast beats, drums often mixed back, atmosphere placed above technique.

Hear what that means

  • Production as a place

    Darkthrone - A Blaze in the Northern Sky

    Thin, distant, hissing, and recorded by a band who had just made a well-produced death metal album and chose this instead. You are not being put in front of a band; you are being put outdoors.

    Open on YouTube
  • The shriek behind the guitars

    Mayhem - De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas

    Note where the voice sits in the mix. A death metal growl is placed underneath the guitars, close and dry; this one is placed behind them and soaked in reverb, so it reads as distance rather than as weight.

    Open on YouTube
  • Melody at a speed that stops sounding like melody

    Emperor - In the Nightside Eclipse

    The tremolo picking is a chord progression, not a riff - and because every note is repeated at the same speed, you hear the harmony changing rather than the notes moving. It is the closest metal gets to writing for strings.

    Open on YouTube

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording.

The specifics

Tempo
160-280 bpm
Song length
4-9 min
Tuning
E or D standard, on thin strings. Almost no down-tuning: the aim is a trebly, cutting tone rather than a heavy one, which is the opposite of every other extreme genre.
Production
Deliberately raw. Guitars recorded thin and distant with the reverb left on everything, so the record sounds like a room rather than a mixing desk — a choice about as often as it was a budget.
Written about
Winter and wilderness, Anti-Christianity, Misanthropy, Folklore and nation

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Tremolo-picked chords rather than single notes, held long enough that what you hear is the harmony moving, not the riff. Melody at a speed that stops sounding like melody.
  • Bass Frequently inaudible, and left that way on purpose — a solid low end would fill the space the guitars are using as atmosphere.
  • Drums Blast beats played thin and high on the snare, cymbals washing over the whole take. The kit is mixed as weather rather than as a rhythm section.
  • Vocals A shriek at the top of the throat, mixed back and drenched in reverb, sitting behind the guitars instead of in front of them.

What it isn't

That the terrible production is incompetence. Some of it was, and the rest is the genre's single most deliberate decision. A clean recording puts the listener in front of a band; hiss, distance and blanket reverb put them in a place instead, which is what black metal is actually depicting — cold, forest, distance, the sound arriving from somewhere else. Bands who could plainly afford better, and later made records that prove it, kept recording this way on purpose, and the ones who cleaned it up got told they had lost the plot.

Told apart from

  • Death metal The mirror image. Black metal is high, thin, reverberant and cold; death metal is low, thick, dry and precise. Hear where the vocal sits — behind the guitars, or under them.
  • Atmospheric black metal Atmospheric black metal keeps the tremolo and the shriek and drops the aggression, letting one chord run for two minutes. Second-wave black metal never lets you settle into anything.
  • First wave The first wave — Venom, Bathory's earliest records — is thrash with occult imagery and no shared sound. The genre as a sound arrives with the Norwegian second wave in 1991.
  • DSBM Depressive black metal uses the same tools to sound defeated rather than hostile: slower, sparser, and with the shriek turned into something closer to sobbing.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Venom supplied the name with the 1982 album Black Metal, Bathory supplied the sound, and the Norwegian scene of the early 1990s supplied the definitive form. The 1991-1994 period in Norway was also marked by serious crimes — church arsons and killings — which dominated public perception of the genre and led to convictions. The music survived and spread worldwide, into branches that differ sharply from one another ideologically.

Descended from

Branches into

On the timeline

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Mathcore 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Crossover thrash 2.2 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • D-beat 2.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.