Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1993

Blackened death metal

Emerged 1993 Origin Poland / Global Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
10
Speed
9
Melody
4

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

In short

Death metal structure with black metal atmosphere and subject matter. Often with ritual and stagecraft to match.

How it sounds

  • Death metal structure and weight with black metal tremolo and atmosphere.
  • Large-scale production, often with orchestration, choirs or ambience.
  • Dual vocals: guttural growls alternating with high shrieks.

Hear what that means

  • Two techniques that were not built to coexist from 8:14

    Behemoth - Demigod

    Black metal's tremolo picking over death metal's tuning and rhythm section, producing dissonance neither parent generates on its own.

    Open on YouTube at 8:14
  • Ceremony rather than assault

    Behemoth - The Satanist

    A growl declaimed like liturgy over mid-tempo ritual passages, which neither death nor black metal uses much.

    Open on YouTube
  • The English wing

    Akercocke - Choronzon

    The same hybrid with clean vocals and jazz chords arriving unannounced - closer to avant-garde metal than to either parent.

    Open on YouTube

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
180-260 bpm
Song length
4-7 min
Tuning
B or C standard, with tremolo picking from black metal over death metal's low tuning — the two techniques were not designed to coexist and making them fit is the genre's work.
Production
Big, clear and expensive. This is the wing of extreme metal that wanted orchestral scale and modern production, and it has almost nothing of black metal's lo-fi inheritance.
Written about
Occultism and blasphemy, Ritual, Grandeur, Death, as ceremony

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Black metal's tremolo picking played on death metal's tuning, with the harmonic language dissonant rather than melodic — neither parent's approach survives intact.
  • Bass Audible and heavy, doubling the guitars for weight in the death metal manner rather than disappearing in the black metal one.
  • Drums Blast beats with death metal's precision and triggers, plus ceremonial mid-tempo passages that neither parent uses much.
  • Vocals A low growl rather than a shriek, mixed forward and declaimed — closer to a liturgy than to either parent's delivery.

What it isn't

That it is death metal with black metal aesthetics bolted on. The riffing is genuinely hybrid — tremolo picking is a black metal technique and it behaves completely differently over a low tuning and a death metal rhythm section, producing dissonance neither parent generates. Whether you like the result is separate from whether it is doing something new, and it plainly is.

Told apart from

  • Death metal Death metal is dry, low and precise. Blackened death adds tremolo, dissonance and atmosphere, and is far more theatrical.
  • Black metal Black metal is thin, cold and lo-fi. This is thick, clear and expensively produced, which is why the black metal purists disown it.
  • Melodic death metal The other hybrid of these two branches, and its opposite: melodic death metal makes the result tuneful, this makes it monumental.
  • Symphonic black metal Both use orchestration and scale. Symphonic black metal keeps the shriek and black metal's rhythmic feel; this keeps death metal's.

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

History

Behemoth started as a black metal band in Poland and evolved into something denser and more ritual. The genre established itself in the 2000s as the most spectacular form of extreme metal, with elaborate staging and big productions. It is also the branch that has drawn the most lawsuits and public controversy in Eastern Europe.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Teutonic thrash 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
  • Second wave 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
  • Mathcore 2.2 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.