Scene on vo.rs

Norwegian Black Metal: Corpse Paint, Cold Forests, and a Very Dark Chapter

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The story of Norwegian black metal is two stories tangled together, and any honest account has to keep hold of both. One is about a small group of young musicians in early-1990s Norway who invented a genuinely new and powerful strain of extreme music, cold and atmospheric and unlike anything before it. The other is about arson, and a murder, and a set of real crimes committed by some of those same people. The music is remarkable. The crimes were crimes. Pretending either fact away produces a lie, so this piece holds both at once.

The Gothenburg Sound: How a Swedish City Rewired Metal's Melody

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Every so often a single city coughs up a sound so distinct that the geography becomes the genre. Gothenburg, the rainy industrial port on Sweden’s west coast, did exactly this in the early 1990s. A handful of young bands there took death metal, the ugliest and most extreme form heavy music had yet produced, and did something nobody expected: they made it sing. The result got labelled the Gothenburg sound, and its DNA is now so widespread that most metal fans hear it every day without knowing where it came from.

Why Scandinavian Winters Bred the Loudest Music

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Little Country, Loud Export: How Denmark Became a Metal Heavyweight

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The Rider: What Bands Actually Ask for Backstage

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Festival Toilets: Civilisation Measured in Portaloos

Fri, 30 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Why Every Festival Now Feels the Same

Thu, 22 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Growled Vocals: How to Scream for Twenty Years

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Why the Crowd Sings the Guitar Solo

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Sludge, Doom, Drone: A Field Guide to Slow and Heavy

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Wall of Death: A Short History of Pop's Daftest, Best Ritual

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Picture the field from above. A band vamps on one riff, the singer walks to the lip of the stage, and a seam opens down the middle of ten thousand people like someone unzipped the crowd. Two walls form, forty feet apart, staring each other down across a strip of bare, trampled grass. There is a countdown. And then, on a cue nobody voted on and everybody understood, both halves sprint at each other and collide. Bodies bounce. Nobody dies. Everybody laughs. Thirty seconds later the field has healed over as if nothing happened, and the song lurches into its next section like a bus finding gear.

That is the wall of death, the most theatrical, most obviously mad piece of choreography in loud music, and one of the very few crowd rituals with a genuine origin story worth telling. It has a borrowed name, a debated inventor, a rough birthday, and a physics all its own. Take it seriously for a minute and it stops looking like meatheads running into each other and starts looking like one of the more sophisticated social contracts you’ll ever watch a stranger honour.

Illegible on Purpose: The Metal Logo as Gatekeeping

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Roadies and the Load-In: Live Music's Invisible Labour

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Reunion Tour Is a Séance

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Three nights ago, on 2 December 2023, KISS finished. Madison Square Garden, twenty thousand people, two and a quarter hours of pyro and blood and platform boots, and then the four men in the make-up took their bow and walked off for the last time. Except they didn’t walk off. After the last chord of “Rock and Roll All Nite”, the screens read A NEW KISS ERA STARTS NOW, and four digital avatars — younger, taller, smooth-faced, laser-eyed — strode on to finish the encore. The band that had just retired was already back, rebuilt in polygons by Industrial Light & Magic and the Swedish company that runs the ABBA hologram show. The corpse was still warm and the séance had already started.

The No-Phones Gig: Locked Pouches and the Return of Attention

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

What the Mosh Pit Is Actually For

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

The Setlist as Strategy: Building a 90-Minute Arc

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Festival Wristbands and the Cashless Economy

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

The little plastic band gets fastened on at the gate and stays there for the whole weekend, through the rain and the beer and the sleep, until you cut it off days later at home. Somewhere inside it is a chip the size of a grain of rice, and by the time you leave the field that chip has recorded a surprising amount about who you are and how you spend. The cashless festival is now the default across most of Europe, and it is one of those changes that arrived dressed as pure convenience while quietly rewriting the whole economics of the event.

The Loudness War: Quiet Records, Deafening Shows

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Here is a contradiction that took me years to notice, and once you see it you cannot stop hearing it. The recorded music of the last three decades got quieter and flatter and more exhausting to listen to, while the actual live shows got louder — genuinely, measurably, ear-damagingly louder. The industry fought a decades-long war over volume in the studio and won it in the worst possible way, and the whole saga is a small tragedy about mistaking loud for good.

The Classic Album, In Full: The Anniversary-Tour Racket

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 09:00:00 +0000

The poster tells you everything before you have read the small print. A band you loved a long time ago, a famous album title, and the words “performed in its entirety” — often with an anniversary number bolted on, thirtieth, fortieth, whatever the maths demands. You already know the setlist. You have known it for decades. That, depending on your mood, is either the whole appeal or the whole problem, and I have stood in rooms feeling both at once.

The Blast Beat: How the Double-Kick Conquered Metal

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

There is a sound at the far end of loud music that stops feeling like drumming and starts feeling like weather. Kick, snare and cymbal fire together at a speed the human ear cannot separate into individual hits, and the whole thing becomes a wall of grey static with a pulse buried in it. That is the blast beat, and once you know how it is built you cannot un-hear it — in the pit it is the difference between a fast song and a genuinely overwhelming one.

Corpse Paint: A Short History of the Painted Face

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 09:00:00 +0000

White greasepaint over the whole face, black sunk into the eye sockets and streaked down from the mouth, the living man rearranged into a skull. You have seen it a thousand times on a T-shirt and it has stopped meaning anything, which is exactly the problem worth unpicking. The painted face is one of the oldest tricks in loud music and one of the few that still land a punch when the lights drop.