Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1993

Raw black metal

Emerged 1993 Origin Global Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
8
Speed
8
Melody
2

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

In short

Lo-fi production taken to the extreme, often recorded straight to tape. The noise is part of the composition.

How it sounds

  • Recorded to cassette or with minimal equipment, saturation and hiss included.
  • Guitars with almost no midrange, sometimes indistinguishable from the background.
  • Simple, repetitive compositions with total emphasis on atmosphere.

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
160-240 bpm
Song length
3-7 min
Tuning
Whatever tuning survives the recording. Intonation is not maintained and the strings are frequently audibly old, which is deliberate.
Production
The most extreme lo-fi on this tree: recorded to tape at home, mastered by copying, and frequently released on a hundred cassettes. The degradation is the aesthetic.
Written about
Misanthropy, Isolation, Nature, hostilely, Refusal of an audience

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Tremolo picking recorded so distortedly that individual notes are unrecoverable — what reaches you is a band of noise with a harmonic centre.
  • Drums Frequently a cheap machine or a barely-miked kit, thin and distant, providing pulse rather than impact.
  • Bass Almost never present. Its absence is the single largest contributor to the genre's characteristic hollowness.
  • Vocals Shrieked into a poor microphone and buried, so the voice is a texture in the hiss rather than a presence.

What it isn't

That worse fidelity is a claim to authenticity. Within the scene it is closer to a filter: records pressed in tiny numbers, deliberately unpleasant to hear, distributed to people who already know. Whether that is integrity or posturing is argued about constantly by the people who make it, and this encyclopedia has no way to settle it.

Told apart from

  • Second wave The second wave was lo-fi and still made records for people to hear. Raw black metal takes the same aesthetic past the point of communication, on purpose.
  • DSBM Both are extremely raw and bedroom-made. DSBM's subject is personal despair; raw black metal's is hostility to the listener.
  • War metal / bestial War metal is as extreme and far more violent, with a death metal rhythm section under the noise.
  • Atmospheric black metal The opposite response to the same materials — one wants to envelop the listener, the other to repel them.

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

History

Ildjarn recorded hundreds of one-minute pieces, each built on a single riff, and released them on tape. The genre rejects any notion of professional production: the noise counts as part of the composition. It is the branch that keeps the 1992 cassette ethic most strictly.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Mathcore 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Crust punk 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • D-beat 1.4 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.