The Batlord

I have this irrational thing where I think that if I see an album in a store that it must therefore be easy to find. I don't know why. I've seen Bathory albums in stores but I was always looking for something else and just said "Next time". And then of course when I get around to it it's gone. I'm pretty sure I'd have every one of their early albums except for their first, not to mention all of their nineties and 00's albums. Makes me want to kick myself.


Almost impossible to say. This is gonna be long winded so bear with me, In the early eighties black metal was just kind of a part of the thrash metal movement with a dirtier, darker sound played by people who didn't know how to play their instruments and so couldn't make something more sophisticated like Slayer, who were a black metal band at heart in the early days. Consequently a lot of the early black metal music basically sounds like hardcore punk with metal riffs. Stuff like...









Then you have the more late mid-to-late eighties stuff which was generally a primitive form of the extreme metal movement. Again, largely unsophisticated, but while Bathory and Hellhammer had largely predated or come out just as the thrash metal movement was developing, bands like Sarcofago and Blasphemy were much more influenced thrash and death metal and were therefore more extreme.







But none of those bands were really a part of any kind of greater black metal scene, and were generally isolated from one another. They were just extreme metal bands in a time when the lines between black, thrash, and death metal hadn't been drawn yet, and so a lot of those bands could almost be called death or thrash metal. They just had a slightly different aesthetic (i.e. they concentrated on a darker atmosphere and/or a more stripped down, simplistic approach that made them more raw than other, more technically proficent bands). You also had bands that would eventually gain more sophistication and become straight-up thrash or death metal bands...









It wasn't really until the Second Wave of black bands (the Norwegian black metal scene) that you really had black metal like you think of today. They were influenced by death metal and thrash metal just like Sarcofago and Blasphemy but they'd basically just become bored with that music and decided to make something even more uncompromising and evil sounding. The earliest stuff was much more stripped down and concerned with atmosphere than the death metal scene that was big at the time, but unlike the eighties bands they were consciously against sounding anything like death metal or thrash. You can hear on Mayhem's debut full-length that they basically just sounded like Sarcofago but without the thrash metal influences and a much bigger emphasis on an "evil" atmosphere...





Along the same lines you had Darkthrone...





And then the scene basically went into left field. A lot of bands kept the sound pioneered by Mayhem and Darkthrone and just beat it into the ground with almost zero innovation. But a lot of others decided to take different influences and really made stuff that was truly individual and almost uncategorizable. You had Emperor who created symphonic black metal (which sounds like what you were talking about)...





...and then there's folk black metal...





And on, and on, and on, ad infinitum.

So, TLDR black metal is hard to categorize.

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