Black Metal 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.

Satyricon: Norwegian Black Metal Goes to the Opera House

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Enslaved: Black Metal That Kept Growing Up

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Watain: Swedish Black Metal as Ritual Theatre

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

You smell a Watain show before you see it. The band are famous for dousing their stage and sometimes their gear in rotting animal blood, and the stench travels — through the barrier, into the pit, up into the balcony. It is deliberate, it is disgusting, and it is the single most honest piece of stagecraft in extreme metal, because it forces the audience to physically share the thing the music is about: death, decay, ritual, the deliberate breaking of the comfortable. Whatever you think of Watain, and there is a great deal to think, they mean it.

Kvelertak: Six Norwegians and a Very Loud Owl

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Illegible on Purpose: The Metal Logo as Gatekeeping

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

King Diamond & Mercyful Fate: The Corpse-Paint Originators the World Forgot Were Danish

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Play a certain kind of metal fan a burst of high, keening falsetto over galloping twin guitars, show them a face painted white with black around the eyes and a microphone stand built from what looks like a human femur and an inverted cross, and they’ll nod along to a story about Norwegian forests, church fires and the early 1990s. They’ll be wrong by roughly a decade and about 900 kilometres. The man who assembled most of that vocabulary was a Copenhagen singer named Kim Bendix Petersen, and he’d finished doing it before anyone in Bergen or Oslo had recorded a note. That the wider public still can’t place him — or his country — is one of the stranger accounting errors in heavy music.

Beyond the Gates: Bergen, Black Metal's Home Ground

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 09:00:00 +0000

If Oslo is where the Norwegian black-metal story turned violent and famous, Bergen is where a lot of it was actually recorded. The rainiest city in Europe, wedged between seven mountains and the North Sea, is where the sound itself was engineered — and Beyond the Gates is the festival that plants a flag on that home ground every August. It is a small, curated, fiercely serious extreme-metal weekend in exactly the place the genre came from.

Inferno: Oslo's Easter Weekend in the Dark

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

There is a specific joke in a black-metal festival landing on Easter, and everyone involved is entirely in on it. Easter is the Christian calendar’s most important weekend, the resurrection, the whole point of the thing. Inferno takes that holiday, in the country that produced the most church-hostile music scene in history, and fills Oslo’s biggest concert hall with several days of the darkest metal on earth. They call it Black Easter, and the timing is the joke and the statement at once.

Emperor: Black Metal's Grandest, Live at Inferno

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Most black metal wants to sound like a blizzard in a car park. Emperor wanted to sound like a cathedral catching fire. That single ambition, held from a Norwegian mining town in the early nineties, is why they remain the genre’s grandest act three decades on — and why watching them reassemble on a Norwegian stage is such a strange, freighted experience.

Emperor formed in Notodden in 1991, a small industrial town in Telemark with more waterfalls than nightlife. The two constants were Ihsahn — born Vegard Sverre Tveitan — on vocals and guitar, and Samoth, Tomas Haugen, on guitar and later drums. They were teenagers with keyboards and a very serious idea about what heavy music could be. Where most of the early Norwegian scene prized rawness and speed above all, Emperor reached for scale: layered synths, tremolo guitar lines stacked like organ pipes, and a sense of composition that owed as much to Romantic classical music as to Bathory. The result was a sound that felt vast, ceremonial, almost liturgical.

Myrkur: Amalie Bruun and the Fight to Be Taken Seriously

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

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.