Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1994

Symphonic black metal

Emerged 1994 Origin Norway Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
8
Speed
8
Melody
7

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

In short

Keyboards and choirs over black metal structures. Grand, theatrical and by far the most saleable of the subgenres.

How it sounds

  • Keyboards and choirs treated as a lead instrument rather than as background.
  • Broad orchestration, occasionally with a real orchestra, and large studio production.
  • Epic structures with recurring themes and film-score dynamics.

Hear what that means

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
160-240 bpm
Song length
5-9 min
Tuning
D or E standard with keyboards doubling and harmonising the guitars, so the orchestration and the riffing occupy the same lines.
Production
Big, layered and much cleaner than black metal generally allows, because an orchestral arrangement is unintelligible under four-track hiss. This production choice is exactly what the genre is attacked for.
Written about
Occultism, Grandeur and menace, Nature as a hostile force, Vampiric and gothic imagery

What each part is doing

  • Keyboards Orchestral strings, brass and choir carrying melody alongside the guitars rather than under them. On the founding records the keyboard is a lead instrument.
  • Guitar Tremolo-picked black metal riffing, written to harmonise with the orchestration — which constrains the harmony far more than second-wave riffing is constrained.
  • Drums Blast beats and double kick played to an arrangement, with fills timed to orchestral hits rather than to the riff.
  • Vocals The black metal shriek, and frequently a clean or operatic voice against it — an arrangement borrowed from gothic and symphonic metal.

What it isn't

That the orchestration made it commercial. Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse is a founding second-wave document and a symphonic black metal record simultaneously, made in 1994 by people at the centre of the Norwegian scene. The keyboards were there from the beginning; what came later was a wing of the genre that was commercially successful, and the two facts get conflated into a story about selling out that the chronology does not support.

Told apart from

  • Second wave The second wave is thin, raw and hostile to production. This is layered, orchestrated and clean, and the purist objection to it is precisely that.
  • Symphonic metal Symphonic metal is clean-sung, major-key and grand. This keeps the shriek, the blast beat and the menace.
  • Atmospheric black metal Both use keyboards for scale. Atmospheric black metal uses sustained pads to hold a mood; this uses written orchestration as a second melodic voice.
  • Gothic metal Shares the theatrical streak and the beauty-and-beast vocals, at doom's tempo rather than black metal's.

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

History

Emperor released an album in 1994 in which the keyboards carried the main melody without softening the harshness. Dimmu Borgir took the formula to big stages and orchestral budgets, and Cradle of Filth added British gothic theatre. This is the branch that lifted black metal out of the basements, to the purists' displeasure.

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.