The History of Black Metal

Every genre has an origin story, but few are as tangled, dramatic and occasionally troubling as black metal's. It's a history that runs from a scrappy English band who never intended to found a movement, through a small, close-knit Norwegian scene whose infamy still overshadows its music, and on into a genre now made on every continent. Here's how it actually happened, in order.

Where the Name Came From

The name itself is almost an accident. It comes from English band Venom's 1982 album Black Metal — a record that, musically, sits closer to speed and thrash metal than to anything we'd recognise from the genre today. What Venom actually gave itre was a name, an occult visual identity and a confrontational attitude, which later bands would run with far more than Venom's own riffs.

The First Wave: Attitude Before Sound

Through the early-to-mid 1980s, a loose cluster of bands built the raw materials the genre would later be assembled from. Sweden's Bathory, particularly on 1987's Under the Sign of the Black Mark, is widely treated as the crucial bridge between this rough first wave and the more atmospheric sound to come. Alongside Bathory sat Switzerland's Hellhammer and Celtic Frost, Denmark's Mercyful Fate, and others including Sodom, Sarcofago and Possessed. None of these bands sounded much like the genre's classic form on record, but together they supplied its satanic and anti-Christian imagery, its primitive production values and its taste for confrontation.

Norway, Early 1990s: The Second Wave

The sound most listeners now recognise as black metal was consolidated by a tight scene of Norwegian musicians in the early 1990s. Bands including Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, Emperor, Immortal, Satyricon, Enslaved and Gorgoroth swapped the first wave's rough thrash energy for something colder: tremolo-picked guitars held in continuous, buzzing chords, blast-beat drumming, high shrieked vocals in place of death metal's growl, and deliberately thin, abrasive production. Corpse paint and black clothing completed a visual identity built to unsettle — this was black metal as most people picture it today.

This scene also became notorious for events far removed from music-making — a string of church arsons and, in 1993, the murder of Mayhem guitarist Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth by Burzum's Varg Vikernes. Those events are part of the genre's documented history and shaped its early media coverage enormously, but they shouldn't be read as representative of black-metal musicians or fans generally; the vast majority of the scene, then and now, had nothing to do with them.

Beyond Norway: A Genre Goes Global

The scene was never confined to Scandinavia for long. Through the mid-to-late 1990s and beyond, distinctive scenes grew in Sweden, Finland, France, Poland, the wider United States and elsewhere, each bending the Norwegian template towards its own instincts. Enslaved pulled black metal towards Viking and pagan themes; French and Polish bands pushed it in progressive and avant-garde directions; American bands would later root it in very different landscapes entirely.

Diversifying the Sound: Late 1990s Onward

From the late 1990s, the genre stopped being one sound and became a family of them.

• Symphonic records layered in keyboards and orchestral writing, with Emperor and later Dimmu Borgir as key reference points.
• Atmospheric records stretched into longer, more spacious structures built around mood rather than aggression.
• Depressive records leaned into repetition and bleakness over conventional song structure.
• Blackened death and thrash hybrids folded its tremolo-driven aesthetic into heavier riffing.
• Post-black records, exemplified by Deafheaven's 2013 album Sunbather, brought in post-rock and shoegaze dynamics for listeners who'd never touch a corpse-paint record otherwise.

For a closer look at how these branches actually differ from one another, our guide to its subgenres breaks each one down properly.

Where the History Leaves the Music Today

What's striking, looking back, is how far the genre has travelled from that small, hostile Norwegian scene. American bands write about ancient forests rather than Nordic winters; British and European acts push into progressive and experimental territory; crossover records reach listeners who'd never have gone looking for this scene at all. If you want to hear this history rather than just read about it, our rundown of essential albums from across the genre follows roughly the same timeline, record by record.

The Bottom Line

Black metal's history isn't a straight line from Venom to today — it's a name borrowed from a thrash record, a sound forged by a handful of Norwegian bands under genuinely dark circumstances, and a genre that has since scattered itself, gloriously, all over the world. Understanding that history is the fastest way to make sense of everything the genre has become since.

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