Emperor: Symphonic Black Metal's High-Water Mark

There is a specific move at the heart of the best black metal, and Emperor made it better than anyone. The move is scale — taking a genre built on cold, thin, deliberately primitive sound and pushing it toward the grandeur of a cathedral, all towering keyboards and orchestral sweep, without losing the ferocity underneath. Symphonic black metal is a phrase that can sound like a warning; done badly it curdles into pomp and keyboard cheese. Done the way Emperor did it on their two great records, it is some of the most genuinely majestic music heavy metal has ever produced.

I rate Emperor above almost every band from their scene, and I want to make the case for why, because the Norwegian black metal story is usually told through its most notorious figures rather than its most accomplished musicians. Emperor were both, awkwardly — their history has a criminal shadow like so much of that scene — but the reason to keep listening is the music, which reached a level of ambition and craft the rest of the genre spent years trying to match.

Notodden, 1991: two teenagers with grand ideas

Emperor formed in 1991 in Notodden, a small industrial town in Telemark, built around the partnership of two teenagers: Vegard Sverre Tveitan, who took the name Ihsahn, and Tomas Haugen, who became Samoth. From the start they wanted something bigger than the raw template their peers were working with. Ihsahn had a classical bent and a composer’s instinct; where much early black metal was content to be primitive on principle, Emperor treated primitivism as a starting texture rather than a rule.

Their first proper statement was the 1994 album In the Nightside Eclipse. Even now it sounds like a band reaching past its grasp in the best way — the production is murky and the playing is raw, but the ambition is unmistakable. Keyboards wash across the whole thing like weather; the songs are long and structured in movements rather than verses and choruses; the atmosphere is enormous. It is one of the founding documents of symphonic black metal, and it was made by musicians barely out of school.

The criminal shadow

Honesty demands that the darkness gets named, because it is inseparable from the band’s early history. Drummer Bård Eithun, who performed as Faust, was convicted of murder in 1994 for killing a man in Lillehammer in 1992, and Samoth served time for his involvement in the church-burning wave that ran through the Norwegian scene in those years. These are documented facts that belong in any honest account, and writing about Emperor that skips them misrepresents what that scene actually was.

I raise it and then set it aside, the same way I would with Mayhem, because the true-crime lens flattens the music into a lurid footnote and the music is the reason we still care. The men involved served their sentences; the records stand on their own terms. Both things are true, and a grown-up reading holds them together rather than choosing the more comfortable one.

Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk: the peak

If In the Nightside Eclipse was the promise, Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk in 1997 was the delivery, and it is the record on which I would rest the entire symphonic black-metal case. Everything that was murky on the debut is now clear; everything that was ambitious is now realised. The songwriting is dizzyingly dense — riffs stacked on riffs, tempo shifts arriving with the logic of a symphony, Ihsahn’s shriek riding over the top of arrangements that genuinely earn the word orchestral. It is fast and cold and brutal, and it is also, unmistakably, beautiful. Few bands in any genre have squared that circle so completely.

What makes it work where lesser symphonic metal fails is restraint in the right places. The keyboards never take over; they colour and expand the guitar riffs rather than replacing them. The heaviness is always the foundation, and the grandeur is built on top of it rather than substituted for it. That balance is extraordinarily hard to strike, and Emperor struck it on a single record more convincingly than most bands manage across a career.

What the keyboards were actually for

The word “symphonic” has become a slur in some metal circles, shorthand for bombast and bad taste, and Emperor are the best argument against that reflex. The trick they understood, and that their imitators mostly did not, is that the orchestral element in black metal is a way of expanding the emotional range without softening the assault. A tremolo-picked riff on its own conveys cold and speed and menace. Add a swelling keyboard line underneath it and suddenly the same riff can carry grief, or awe, or a kind of frozen exaltation — feelings the raw form struggles to reach. The keyboards do real work; they are the band saying more than distorted guitars alone can say.

That ambition connects Emperor to a much older tradition than metal. Ihsahn has always been open about his classical influences, and you can hear a Romantic-era sense of drama in how the songs build and release. The point of comparison is not other metal bands so much as programme music — pieces meant to evoke landscapes and states of mind. Anthems is, in that sense, closer to a tone poem about a Norwegian night sky than to a conventional album, and hearing it that way makes its strangeness feel deliberate rather than excessive.

The Notodden factor

It is easy to forget how provincial the origins of all this were. Notodden is a town of a few thousand people in a rural Norwegian county, better known for its blues festival than for anything infernal. Emperor did not emerge from a scene with clubs and labels and a supportive press; they built their sound in near-isolation, teenagers ordering records by post and imagining a bigger world into being. That isolation is part of the sound. Music made by people with nothing to react against locally tends toward the interior and the grandiose, and Emperor’s records have exactly that quality of a private world constructed in enormous detail. When the wider Oslo scene eventually canonised them, it was canonising something that had grown up largely apart from it.

Restlessness, and the end of the band

Emperor could have spent a decade remaking Anthems and been beloved for it. Instead they got restless. IX Equilibrium in 1999 pushed toward a more technical, less atmospheric sound that divided the fanbase, and Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire & Demise in 2001 went further still — a dense, cerebral, almost progressive record largely composed by Ihsahn alone, with the symphonic washes traded for complexity. It is a demanding album and, for some listeners, a cold one; for others it is the most sophisticated thing the band ever did. Either way it was clearly the work of a musician who had outgrown the box the genre wanted to keep him in.

The band dissolved in 2001, at what looked from outside like a creative peak. That was the point. Ihsahn wanted to write music that no longer fit the Emperor name, and rather than dilute it he ended it. The decision looks wiser every year.

After Emperor: Ihsahn’s long game

What Ihsahn did next is a large part of why Emperor’s stock has only risen. His solo career, running from 2006’s The Adversary through a long, adventurous run of records, took the compositional ambition of late Emperor and ran it into progressive rock, jazz saxophone, clean singing and every texture black metal supposedly forbade. He became one of extreme metal’s genuine composers, a musician other musicians study, and his refusal to repeat himself retroactively made Emperor look less like a black-metal band and more like the first act of a serious body of work.

Samoth and Faust, meanwhile, carried the harsher flame through other projects, and the wider Norwegian scene kept treating Emperor as a benchmark. When the band did reunite for occasional festival appearances — playing the two classic records to enormous crowds — the shows functioned less as nostalgia than as coronation. Watching a field of people who were toddlers in 1997 roaring along to Anthems material, you understand that this music has become a kind of canon, taught band to band.

The live proposition

Black metal has always had an uneasy relationship with the stage. A genre built on interiority, cold atmosphere and studio texture does not automatically translate to a sweaty room, and plenty of bands from the scene are diminished live, their carefully layered records thinning out to a blur of guitar and blast beat. Emperor’s reunion shows are one of the exceptions, and the reason is the compositional strength underneath. Songs this well built survive the loss of studio polish; the movements still land, the dynamics still register, the grandeur reads even through a festival PA. Ihsahn is also, unusually for the genre, a commanding and unfussy frontman, present rather than theatrical, letting the material do the looming. Seeing Anthems performed in full is one of the more overwhelming things the festival circuit offers, precisely because so little of the effect depends on gimmickry — it is just very great writing, played very well, at enormous volume.

It is worth naming the players around Ihsahn and Samoth, because Emperor were never a two-man operation on record. The drumming across the classic albums — Faust early on, then Trym Torson, a blast-beat technician of real precision — gave the symphonic sweep its engine, and the interplay between the orchestral keyboards and that relentless percussion is a lot of where the grandeur comes from. Bassist and vocalist Tchort and others passed through, and the band’s willingness to shuffle personnel in service of the music, rather than protect a fixed line-up, is of a piece with their broader restlessness. The sound was always bigger than any one member, which is partly why it has proved so durable.

The high-water mark, and why it holds

I called this piece Emperor’s high-water mark and I mean it in the strong sense: Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk is, to my ears, the point at which symphonic black metal achieved everything it was reaching for, and the point every subsequent band in the style has been measured against. Dimmu Borgir sold far more records; countless bands piled on more orchestration; nobody bettered the balance Emperor found on that album between fury and grandeur, between the primitive and the cathedral.

The band’s whole arc is a lesson in ambition. Two teenagers from a small Norwegian town decided that the coldest, most underground music in the world should also be able to sound like a symphony, and then they went and proved it, and then they walked away before the idea could rot into formula. The shadow over the early years is real and I have not pretended otherwise. But the achievement is real too, and it is the larger thing. Emperor took a genre that prized smallness and made it vast, and the best of what they made has not been surpassed in the quarter-century since.