Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1991

Second wave

Emerged 1991 Origin Norway Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
9
Speed
9
Melody
3

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

In short

The Norwegian scene that fixed the definitive sound: thin guitars, demo-tape production as an ideal, corpse paint.

How it sounds

  • Guitars with the mids scooped out entirely — thin and cutting, with no audible bass.
  • The production ideal is a demo tape recorded in a bedroom, not a studio session.
  • Rasping high vocals with reverb, and fast, deliberately monotonous blast beats.

Hear what that means

  • Tremolo as harmony

    Darkthrone - Transilvanian Hunger

    The pick moves as fast as it goes while the left hand holds a full chord voicing, so what you hear is harmony moving rather than a riff. Recorded on four-track by choice.

    Open on YouTube
  • Where the vocal sits from 5:44

    Mayhem - De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas

    Behind the guitars and drowned in reverb, so it reads as distance rather than aggression. Compare a death metal growl, which is placed underneath and dry.

    Open on YouTube at 5:44
  • Cold as a production decision

    Immortal - Pure Holocaust

    Thin guitars, no low end, blast beats mixed as weather. Every choice here trades weight for atmosphere, which is the exact opposite of what every other extreme genre does.

    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
180-280 bpm
Song length
4-8 min
Tuning
E or D standard on thin strings, tuned high rather than low. Almost alone among extreme genres, this one refuses down-tuning: the aim is a cutting treble, not weight.
Production
Deliberately raw, and frequently recorded onto four-track. The guitars are thin and distant, the reverb blankets everything, and the result is meant to sound like a place rather than a band.
Written about
Winter and wilderness, Anti-Christianity, Misanthropy, Norway, specifically

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Tremolo-picked chords, not single notes — the pick moves as fast as it goes while the left hand holds a full voicing, so what you hear is harmony moving rather than a riff.
  • Bass Frequently inaudible and left that way. A solid low end would fill exactly the space the guitars are using as atmosphere.
  • Drums Blast beats played thin and high on the snare, with the cymbals washing over the take. The kit is mixed as weather.
  • Vocals A shriek from the top of the throat, mixed behind the guitars and soaked in reverb so it reads as distance rather than as aggression.

What it isn't

That the lo-fi recording was a lack of money. Darkthrone had just made a well-produced death metal album and chose this instead; the four-track sound is a positive decision about what the music depicts, which is cold and distance and somewhere other than a studio. Bands who could plainly afford better kept recording this way, and the ones who cleaned it up were told they had lost the plot.

Told apart from

  • First wave The first wave is thrash with occult imagery and no shared sound — Venom, early Bathory. The genre as a sound is this, and it arrives in Norway in 1991.
  • Atmospheric black metal Atmospheric black metal keeps the tremolo and the shriek and drops the hostility, letting one chord run for minutes. This never lets you settle.
  • Old school death metal Both are 1990s extreme metal with a scene and a look. Old school death metal is low, thick and dry; this is high, thin and drowned in reverb.
  • Symphonic black metal Symphonic black metal adds keyboards and orchestration to exactly this, which the purist wing of the second wave regarded as a betrayal at the time.

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

History

A small circle of bands formed around the Helvete shop in Oslo between 1991 and 1993, wanting the opposite of Swedish death metal: colder, more amateur, more ideologically extreme. The period was interrupted by serious crimes and prison sentences, including for murder and arson. The records left behind — Darkthrone, Mayhem, Immortal, Burzum — still define the genre.

Descended from

On the timeline

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.