The Best Black Metal Artists to Know

Ask ten different fans for a list of essential names and you'll get ten different lists — that's just how this scene works. But underneath the arguments, a handful of bands keep coming up again and again, because they're the ones who actually shaped how the genre sounds and looks. Here's who they are, what they did, and why they matter, no gatekeeping required.

Venom

Start here, because everyone else did. This English band's 1982 album Black Metal gave the whole genre its name, even though Venom themselves played something closer to speed and thrash metal. What they handed down wasn't a sound so much as an attitude: occult imagery, deliberate confrontation, and a taste for going further than anyone else was willing to at the time.

Bathory

Sweden's Bathory did more than almost anyone to actually bridge the gap between that early attitude and the atmospheric sound that followed. 1987's Under the Sign of the Black Mark is regularly cited as the record where the pieces started clicking into place — a genuine link between first-wave extreme metal and everything Norway would do a few years later.

Mayhem

If one band is treated as the genre's ground zero, it's Mayhem. Formed in Oslo in the mid-1980s, they were at the centre of the early-1990s Norwegian scene both musically and, tragically, personally — guitarist Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth ran the influential label Deathlike Silence Productions and was murdered by former bandmate Varg Vikernes in 1993. Musically, their album De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is widely treated as a canonical document of the entire Norwegian sound.

Darkthrone

Darkthrone went from a promising death metal band to one of the most influential names in black metal within a couple of albums, and then spent years afterwards refusing to compromise an inch. Transilvanian Hunger pushed raw, minimal production about as far as it could go, and remains the reference point whenever anyone talks about deliberately harsh, inexpensive-sounding recording as an artistic choice rather than a limitation.

Emperor

Emperor took the genre somewhere almost nobody else was going: orchestral, symphonic and genuinely ambitious. In the Nightside Eclipse folded keyboards and sweeping arrangements into the blast beats and shrieked vocals without losing any of the aggression, and it's the foundational record for pretty much every symphonic act that followed.

Immortal

Nobody sounded quite as fast, cold or austere as Immortal at their peak. Pure Holocaust is relentless in a way that still catches newcomers off guard, and the band's icy, almost cartoonishly theatrical image became one of black metal's most recognisable visual exports, corpse paint and all. It's still one of the purest examples of black metal played as fast and cold as the format allows.

Burzum

Burzum's early records, particularly Filosofem, are genuinely influential — hypnotic, repetitive and atmospheric in a way that shaped an entire branch of the genre. It has to be said plainly, though: the project is the work of Varg Vikernes, whose criminal history includes the murder of Euronymous and church arsons, and whose extremist political views are well documented and rightly condemned. Musical influence and personal history are two separate facts here, and neither cancels the other out.

Enslaved

Enslaved came up through the same Norwegian scene but pulled steadily towards Viking and pagan themes, becoming one of the clearest bridges between black metal and the folk and pagan metal that grew alongside it. Frost captures that transitional moment particularly well.

Dimmu Borgir

Dimmu Borgir took the symphonic approach Emperor had pioneered and made it considerably more accessible, with cleaner production and a bigger, more theatrical sound. Enthrone Darkness Triumphant became a genuine entry point for plenty of listeners who'd never have gone near the genre's rawer end. If you're weighing that entry point up for yourself, our guide for newcomers covers exactly that.

Wolves in the Throne Room

This American band proved the sound didn't belong to Norway alone. Drawing on the forests of the Pacific Northwest rather than Nordic winters, Two Hunters is a key record in atmospheric black metal's American branch, trading raw aggression for something closer to environmental dread.

Deafheaven

Deafheaven's Sunbather is the record most often credited with dragging black metal into indie and shoegaze territory, and it introduced a huge number of listeners to tremolo-picked guitars and blast beats who'd never have sought either out otherwise. It's divisive within the scene for exactly that reason, but its influence is impossible to argue with. For more on how this and other branches actually differ, see our subgenre breakdown.

Where These Names Fit Together

None of these bands worked in isolation. Venom handed down a name and an attitude, Bathory and the Norwegian second wave turned it into an actual sound, and everyone since has been pulling black metal in a slightly different direction — towards orchestras, towards the Pacific Northwest, towards indie rock, or deliberately further into the cold and the raw. Reading the names in that order tells you almost as much about the genre as any potted history could.

The Bottom Line

These are the names that keep showing up because they're the ones who actually moved things forward — from Venom's borrowed name, through Norway's founding scene, and out into every direction the genre has since travelled. Start with any of them and you're starting in the right place.

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