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The Second Wave: Norway, Frost and the Forest Catching Fire

If the first wave was the poison in the soil, then the second wave was the moment when the forest grew above it.

And this forest was not friendly.

In the early 1990s, something condensed in Norway that still shapes the image of black metal today: cold sound, corpse paint, radical aesthetics, anti-commercial attitude, nature mysticism, Satanism, scene myth, real crimes, legend-making, and music that did not merely want to sound heavier, but stranger.

Black metal was not invented here.

But this is where it became what many people mean when they say “black metal.”

No longer only leather, noise, and poison.

Now: frost, forest, ruin, grave, church, mask, cold.

And, of course, an unhealthy supply of very serious young men who apparently decided that daylight was a personal insult.

From the Antechamber into the Forest

The Norwegian second wave took the ingredients of the first wave — rawness, Satanic theatre, speed, provocation, dirt, occult darkness — and turned them into something more coherent.

The sound became colder.

The production often thinner and sharper.

The guitars flickered more.

The voices became less human.

Atmosphere moved to the centre.

Black metal was no longer merely aggressive. It became landscape-like.

That is one of the crucial points: with many Norwegian bands, the music does not simply sound like a song, but like a place. A snow-covered forest. A ruin. A night without warmth. A church that offers no comfort. A mountain that does not answer.

It was not only about being loud or evil.

It was about building a world in which niceness no longer had jurisdiction.

Mayhem: The Open Wound

Mayhem stand at the centre of this history like an open wound.

Musically, aesthetically, mythologically, and biographically, almost everything that still makes the second wave so heavy, fascinating, and problematic is tied to this band.

Mayhem were not simply “a band.” They became a point of convergence: rehearsal room, scene, label, shop, contacts, ideology, provocation, music, drama, death.

Their album De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, released in 1994, is still considered one of the central works of the second wave. It sounds cold, sacred, sick, strict, and strange. Not like metal that wants to be fun. More like a ceremony in a room where the walls have decided to listen.

But Mayhem are also inseparably connected with real death, violence, and scene myth. This must be handled carefully. It would be cheap to turn tragedies and crimes into mere dark decoration.

The important point is not: “Look how extreme all of this was.”

The important point is: here, music history became intertwined with real human abysses. And that shadow still lies over the genre today.

Monocle Note: When a band biography eventually starts sounding like a police report with a guitar appendix, it may be time to dim the candlelight and switch the brain back on.

Darkthrone: The Art of Cold

Darkthrone are another key.

Originally coming from death metal, they made a radical turn in the early 1990s with A Blaze in the Northern Sky. The album became one of the classic documents of Norwegian black metal: raw, cold, reduced, bony, unfriendly.

Here one can hear very clearly what defined the second wave: not polish, but consequence. Not technical showing off, but atmosphere. Not “we show what we can do,” but “we show what we refuse.”

Darkthrone did not make black metal bigger.

They made it barer.

And that was exactly its strength.

This music does not sound like a full throne hall, but like a hut without a fire. Like a forest path where, at some point, one realises one has already gone too far to simply turn back.

Darkthrone showed that reduction can be a weapon.

Less warmth.

Less comfort.

Less humanity.

More frost.

Burzum: Minimalism, Trance and the Problem of Legacy

Writing about Burzum always means doing two things at once: taking the musical significance seriously, and not downplaying the person behind it.

Musically, Burzum was enormously influential for the development of black metal. The sound is often minimalist, repetitive, hypnotic. Less band feeling, more solitary space. Less attack from outside, more endless corridor inward.

Many Burzum pieces do not work through classical song tension, but through repetition. Riffs circle. Structures stretch. The music becomes a state.

This is important for the atmospheric and trance-like element in black metal. Here, it is not only about frenzy, but about pull. About monotony that does not have to be empty, but can open something.

But Burzum is also a prime example of why black metal cannot always be listened to musically without asking questions. Ideology, violence, political radicalisation, and reception hang heavily in the room here.

One can write about it. One should write about it. But not kneeling, not blindly admiring, not excusing.

Rather with a cold lamp.

Musical effect is not an acquittal.

Emperor: Grandeur in the Storm

While Darkthrone made cold barren and Burzum turned repetition into trance, Emperor brought in another dimension: grandeur.

In the Nightside Eclipse, released in 1994, stands for a more symphonic, majestic form of black metal. Here, the forest does not only become frosty, but vast. Almost imperial. The music races, but it also rises. It builds towers. It opens night skies.

Emperor showed that black metal did not have to be only raw and reduced, but could also be massive, complex, almost orchestral.

This is no longer merely cellar or earth-hole.

This is cathedral in the storm.

Of course, the music remains extreme. But it has this size, this dramatic ascent, this black splendour that would later influence many symphonic and atmospheric forms of the genre.

Monocle Note: Emperor are the moment when frost decides to study architecture.

Immortal: Blashyrkh and the Art of Frosty Theatre

Immortal brought their own form of cold into the second wave.

With their invented ice-world Blashyrkh, they created not only songs, but a kind of frosty fantasy realm. One can take this seriously, smile at it, or do both at once — which may be the healthiest attitude.

Immortal are often more theatrical, more visual, almost comic-book grand. Ice, battles, mountains, demons, eternal winter. This can feel magnificent. It can also look as if someone aimed a snow machine at a fantasy cover and then very firmly said “grim.”

And yet: Immortal are important because they show that black metal can also be worldbuilding.

Not only ideology.

Not only provocation.

Not only scene reality.

But myth as a self-built space.

Where others searched for darkness in real Norwegian forests, Immortal built their own frost continent. And that continent became part of the black metal landscape.

More Than a Few Bands

Of course, the Norwegian second wave did not consist only of Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, Emperor, and Immortal.

Bands such as Gorgoroth, Satyricon, Enslaved, Thorns, Carpathian Forest, Ulver, and many others also belong to this larger picture. Some were more strongly Satanic, some more atmospheric, some more mythological, some more experimental, some later ended up somewhere entirely different.

The scene was small, but its echo was enormous.

A few people, a few shops, a few rehearsal rooms, a few labels, a few demos, a few rumours — and from this grew a myth that still appears larger than its original size.

That is typical of subcultures: they are often small while they are happening, and enormous once they are being told.

The Forest Caught Fire

One cannot write about the second wave without mentioning that the forest did not catch fire only metaphorically.

Church burnings, violence, murder, political and Satanic radicalisation, media hysteria — all of this belongs to the historical shadow of this phase. But precisely for that reason, one should not casually wave it around like a particularly decorative black flag.

That deserves its own part.

Because if one throws everything into the same pot, something quickly happens that black metal itself sometimes encourages: myth devours reality.

And suddenly real acts become aesthetics. Real victims become legend. Real responsibility becomes a fog machine.

That would be too cheap.

For this part, it is enough to say:

The second wave made black metal colder, more coherent, more atmospheric, and more dangerous. It shaped the sound, images, and myth that are still connected with the genre today.

It turned poison into a forest.

But this forest was never innocent.

What Remains?

The Norwegian second wave is still the great shadow over black metal.

Not because everything afterwards was merely imitation. That would be nonsense. Black metal later became global, diverse, contradictory, experimental, politically varied, spiritually varied, aesthetically almost impossible to map.

But the second wave gave the genre a kind of primal image:

cold sound,

shrieking voice,

flickering guitars,

corpse paint,

forest,

frost,

anti-Christianity,

rawness,

myth,

danger.

It is not the whole of black metal.

But it is the place where many paths begin.

Or at least the place where many people first realise:

This is not simply loud music.

This is a forest.

Black Chronicles: A Short History of Black Metal — Part 1

Before the Forest: Venom, Bathory and the First Poison

Black metal did not simply crawl out of a Norwegian forest in the early 1990s, apply corpse paint, and decide to spend the rest of eternity staring at church ruins.

Although, admittedly, one could sometimes get that impression.

Before the forest, there was an antechamber. A rather messy, loud, leather-clad, chain-rattling antechamber. Inside it stood early extreme metal bands, punk filth, Satanic theatre, occult aesthetics, rough productions, speed, provocation, and a highly suspicious amount of candles.

In the beginning, black metal was not yet a neatly defined genre. It was more like poison in the system. A mixture of attitude, sound, imagery, and refusal. Not yet the frozen forest many people associate with it today, but rather the first smoke creeping under the door.

Or, to put it differently:

Before black metal became a forest, it was leather, noise, poison, and bad manners.

Venom: The Name, the Poison and the Noise

When speaking about the early history of black metal, there is no real way around Venom.

In the early 1980s, Venom did not sound like black metal in the modern sense. Anyone expecting icy Norwegian guitars, distant forest trance, and existential mountain ranges may be somewhat surprised to find something closer to rough, dirty, aggressive heavy/speed metal with punk attitude and a generous amount of Satanic stage decoration.

But that is exactly why it mattered.

With their album Black Metal, Venom did not only give the thing a name. They also gave it a kind of basic smell: raw, loud, disrespectful, blasphemous, and firmly opposed to good taste.

This was not about technical perfection. This was about effect. Provocation. A loud “no” to polish, niceness, and musical good behaviour.

Monocle Note: Venom may not be the frozen forest itself. But they are certainly the drunken man standing at the edge of it at night with a torch, shouting: “It gets worse over there.”

And sometimes, that is exactly the sort of person needed to open a door.

Bathory: The Shadow Grows Colder

If Venom gave the thing its name and poison, Bathory brought in something much closer to what black metal would later become.

Bathory sounded rawer, colder, more uncanny. The production was often thin and dirty, but not meaningless. It created distance. Cold. An early form of that strange atmosphere which would later become so important: as if the music were not coming from a studio, but from an abandoned room where something old had awakened.

Quorthon, the central figure behind Bathory, casts a long shadow over the history of black metal. In the early releases, one can already hear that raging, primitive, dark energy that many later bands would absorb and harden further.

And then Bathory brought in something else:

Vastness.

Later, the sound developed into a more epic and mythological direction, enormously important for what would later be associated with Viking metal or pagan-influenced metal. But this development also belongs to the prehistory of black metal: the connection between darkness, myth, nature, ancestry, war, sea, fire, and an older world.

Bathory showed that extreme music did not have to be mere noise.

It could be a space.

A grave.

A battlefield.

A storm.

A northern horizon.

A place where history and myth are not cleanly separated.

Hellhammer and Celtic Frost: Dirt, Heaviness and Occult Cold

While Venom prepared the name and Bathory prepared the frost, Hellhammer and later Celtic Frost brought in another crucial ingredient: dirty heaviness.

Hellhammer sounded raw, primitive, grim, sometimes almost awkward — but that was exactly where their force lay. This music had something swampy about it. Something unfinished. Something that did not stand neatly in place and say: “Look at me, I am well produced.”

It crawled.

Celtic Frost developed this into something of their own: heavier, more occult, sometimes experimental, sometimes almost avant-garde. Not black metal in the narrow sense, but important soil. A reminder that extreme music could become not only faster and harder, but also stranger, colder, darker, more ritualistic.

This is not about drawing a clean line and saying: Band A led directly to Band B, and then the next historically correct gravestone appeared.

Music history rarely works like that.

It is more of a web.

A smell.

An influence.

A particular sound of doom.

A feeling of: this no longer belongs to the normal heavy metal party.

Hellhammer and Celtic Frost brought that heavier, mouldering, occult note into the antechamber. The walls grew damper. The candles burned lower. Somewhere, a trapdoor opened.

Mercyful Fate: Theatre, Ritual and the Fine Art of the Occult

Musically, Mercyful Fate are more deeply rooted in heavy metal than in what one would call black metal today. And yet they belong in this prehistory.

Why?

Because of the atmosphere. Because of King Diamond. Because of the occult. Because of this connection between Satanism, ritual feeling, theatrical darkness, and musical elegance.

Mercyful Fate showed that dark themes did not have to be only raw and ragged. They could also be dramatic, narrative, almost ceremonial. Candles, crosses, invocations, high voices, guitar lines, stage, ritual.

Of course, this is a different kind of darkness than later Norwegian black metal. Less frost hole, more occult chamber with velvet curtains.

But this chamber, too, belongs to the house.

Black metal would later radicalise, roughen, darken, or throw many of these elements into the cellar without any theatrical elegance. But the idea that metal could be more than party, technique, or muscular display — that it could be a ritual space — was important.

Monocle Note: Mercyful Fate are not the type standing in a snowstorm with an axe. Mercyful Fate are more like the host who politely asks by candlelight whether one would like to take part in the invocation. Both are suspicious. Both have consequences.

The First Wave Was Not Yet a Finished Forest

The so-called first wave of black metal was not a neatly defined style in the modern sense.

It was a fermenting antechamber.

There, speed metal, thrash, heavy metal, punk rawness, Satanic provocation, occult imagery, bad production, anti-attitude, and the desire to sound harder, darker, and less friendly than what came before all met in one place.

It was not yet about one unified sound. Venom, Bathory, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, and Mercyful Fate do not all sound alike. In fact, some of them sound very different from one another.

But they prepared something.

They laid out terms, gestures, sound colours, and taboos to be broken. They made the ground unstable. They showed that metal could be not only loud and heavy, but ugly, blasphemous, raw, occult, cold, and hostile to anything that smelled of clean entertainment.

Looking back, one could say:

The first wave was not yet the forest.

It was the poison in the soil.

What It Became

Only the second wave, especially in Norway in the early 1990s, turned these ingredients into something far more coherent: colder, more radical, more atmospheric, more ideologically charged, more dangerous, more mythological, and still deeply influential for the image many people have in mind when they hear “black metal.”

That is where the forest truly begins.

Mayhem. Darkthrone. Burzum. Emperor. Immortal. Gorgoroth. Satyricon.

Cold. Corpse paint. Church burnings. Murder. Media hysteria. Legend-making. And, of course, music that did not merely want to sound heavier, but stranger and more uncompromising.

But before entering that forest, one should know what lay before it.

Because black metal did not begin as a fully formed kingdom of darkness.

It began as unrest.

As provocation.

As noise.

As poison.

As something fermenting inside metal until it eventually decided not to go back.

The door was already open.