Norwegian 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.

John Dee, Oslo: Rockefeller's Little Sister

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Leprous: Norwegian Prog's Rising Force

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

There is a moment at every Leprous show where the whole band drops to almost nothing — a single held note, a heartbeat of bass, the drummer barely brushing a cymbal — and Einar Solberg’s voice climbs up alone into a register most singers cannot reach without cracking, and then the entire arrangement crashes back in at once. That contrast, engineered obsessively and executed with terrifying precision, is the whole reason Leprous have become one of the most talked-about progressive acts in Europe. They are a band built on the space between quiet and loud.

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

Kvelertak: Six Norwegians and a Very Loud Owl

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

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.