Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1997

Black 'n' roll

Emerged 1997 Origin Norway Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
7
Speed
6
Melody
7

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

In short

Black metal with a rock and roll groove. Darkthrone turned this way on their own after 2006.

How it sounds

  • Riffs with rock and roll groove, but a black metal tone and vocals.
  • Mid tempos, plain drumming and verse-chorus structures.
  • Warmer production than in classic black metal.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
140-190 bpm
Song length
3-5 min
Tuning
E standard on thin strings, kept trebly. The tone is black metal's and the riffs are Motörhead's, which is the joke and the method at once.
Production
Raw but punchy, with the drums audible and the guitars still nasty. It is black metal recorded so you can hear the groove, which the second wave deliberately would not do.
Written about
Drinking, Misanthropy, cheerfully, Rock and roll itself, Contempt for black metal's seriousness

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Rock-and-roll riffs — boogie shuffles, open chords, Chuck Berry double stops — played with black metal's thin, trebly distortion. Tremolo appears as a garnish rather than as the default.
  • Bass Audible for once, following the guitar in the punk manner. Black metal's habit of burying the bass is one of the first things this genre drops.
  • Drums A rock backbeat with the occasional blast, swinging where the parent genre refuses to swing. The return of groove is the entire proposition.
  • Vocals The black metal shriek delivered over music that grooves, which is what makes the genre funny and also what makes it work.

What it isn't

That it is a joke at black metal's expense. Darkthrone made second-wave black metal's defining records and then spent twenty years making these, which suggests the players themselves saw no contradiction. The genre is better understood as black metal remembering that Venom and Bathory were rock and roll bands, which the second wave had chosen to forget.

Told apart from

  • Black metal Black metal is cold, tremolo-driven and refuses groove. Black 'n' roll keeps the shriek and the tone and puts a rock and roll band underneath.
  • First wave This is a deliberate return to the first wave's rock-derived sloppiness, made by people who know exactly what they are quoting.
  • Death 'n' roll The same manoeuvre on the death metal branch, arriving a decade earlier — Entombed did to death metal what Darkthrone later did to black metal.
  • Teutonic thrash Both keep a trebly, nasty guitar tone with rock and roll underneath the extremity.

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

History

After fifteen years of pure black metal, Darkthrone began releasing albums built on Motörhead and punk riffs in 2006, to general confusion. Kvelertak took the formula somewhere almost celebratory, with lyrics in Norwegian. It is the branch that proves the genre is not obliged to be grim.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.