(The post was guest written by Brook)
Wolves in the Throne Room’s Aaron Weaver said in an interview that black metal reminds him of a story that has a mythic quality, and creates a space where disgusting people can move you emotionally. This comment hints at two things – the beauty of many black metal soundscapes, and the inexcusable beliefs and actions of many of the genre’s founders and prominent members.
Anyone familiar with black metal is likely familiar with a certain story. This story mostly centers around Mayhem, whose history contains enough murder, suicide, and desecration of corpses to fill a hundred poor taste video essays and podcasts. The cherries on the cake here are Varg and Hellhammer being fascists. This narrative has been supplemented by the much maligned book turned film Lords of Chaos, originally written by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, which focused on other murders in black metal, and a growing NSBM movement.
The Norwegian second wave that spawned Mayhem still colors black metal today, having much political and musical influence, and many who are aware of this history treat the scene with understandable trepidation. However, a largely online movement of RABM has blossomed – anarcha-feminists like Feminazgûl, Marxists like Sankara, anarcho-communists like Panopticon and Trespasser, and environmentalists like Weaver’s Wolves in the Throne Room. Basically any ideology you can think of has had black metal made about it at this stage. There’s even Irish Republican blackened death metal. The wave of left wing black metal has even received academic attention, with the humor of Neckbeard Deathcamp featuring in a doctoral dissertation written by Jillian Fischer, leading to one of the stranger dissertation titles I’ve ever seen.
It would be easy to write RABM off as a manifestation of our highly polarized modern politics. Yet RABM as an online phenomenon is older than you might think, with the founding of an RABM Blogspot in 2009 and a Russian LiveJournal mentioning it as early as 2005. The movement sits as the heir to a tradition of left wing black metal that stretches back to the 1980s. Weaver is right that black metal is a story, but there are multiple stories to tell here. The best way to tell this story is to trace the history of left wing black metal through the thrash influenced first wave, the rise of the Hellenic scene, and the advent of blackened crust and other bands in the late 1990s and early 2000s, finishing at the beginning of RABM as an online movement in the late 2000s.
For the uninitiated, the first wave of black metal mustn’t make much sense. Venom and Mercyful Fate gave black metal its name and aesthetic and are sometimes included in lists of first wave bands, despite being influenced more by speed metal and prog rock respectively. It was Bathory, Celtic Frost, and Hellhammer that gave the first wave its sound, drawing from thrash metal and hardcore punk. The first wave wasn’t limited to the US and Sweden, however, and there are other bands, in Germany, Brazil, and Colombia, who also embodied this early black metal sound, and they were either overtly political or affiliated with those who were.
The German first wave scene has two major examples of this – Sodom and Destruction. Tom Angelripper has called himself a pacifist, and said that Sodom’s lyrical focus on war comes from a desire to show the brutality he witnessed growing up watching the Vietnam War. He has also noted that himself and Sodom and their contemporaries took a lot of influence from punk music.
Schmier of Destruction has been outspoken politically for decades. He has stated that, from the outset, he believed that metal should be used to try to remedy the world’s problems, whether that be through lyrics or providing a community, and also acknowledges the influence of punk. He says he has never understood right wing metal fans, as metal in no way fits into a conservative society.
Other bands in the early German scene replicated this thought. Mille Petrozza of Kreator is a fierce antiracist and antifascist, and although he doesn’t consider Kreator political in the same way as punk, he once eloquently stated that metal has always been for human rights and against ‘government bullshit’. It’s worth remembering that these bands are from the homeland of the Nazis, and predate the second wave by a decade in some cases. And they all fiercely reject fascism, militarism, and everything NSBM stands for.
This left-leaning first wave was also prominent in South America. Although their most famous export is Sepultura, who dealt with politics from the beginning, Brazil has many other left-wing bands who stuck to the black metal sound. The most famous of these is Sarcófago. Translations of interviews from the late 1980s show that Wagner Antichrist and the rest of the band were all members of the Communist Party of Brazil. Interviews with Sorcerer Do’Urden of Mystifier reveal that these two bands and others worked with the punk and hardcore scenes to literally beat Nazis out of the Brazilian extreme music scene after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1985.
Another example of the left wing first wave can be seen in the ultra metal of Medellín, Colombia. The likes of Parabellum and Reencarnacion violently defended their music and culture from what they saw as middle class hangers on in conflicts reminiscent of the 1970s British heavy music scene. The middle-class bands, headed by Kraken of the relatively affluent Belén district, had a refined and poetic sound, while ultra metal was reminiscent of blackened thrash with hardcore punk elements mixed in.
These bands, who tended to hail from poorer neighborhoods like Manrique, Aranjuez, and Buenos Aires, came out against many things – against the Colombian political establishment, the more refined music of their contemporaries, and the commercialization of their culture. Ultra metal was a fundamentally working class movement that aimed to oppose those who would seek to profit from a culture born of their poverty. This is obviously political in its own way, on top of the collective opposition to the Colombian political elite.
This left wing South American movement also predated the Norwegian and NSBM scenes, and even influenced them musically. All this shows that, broadly, the first wave of black metal had an antiestablishment character – it was antiracist and antifascist, and members of the scene weren’t afraid to use violence to protect it from fascists and profiteers. But our story doesn’t end here. In Greece, something new and different was stirring, and it had a name – Rotting Christ.
Rotting Christ struck while the iron was hot during the heyday of the second wave, with Thy Mighty Contract setting the tone for the Hellenic black metal scene. What set Rotting Christ apart from the Scandinavians was the roots of their founders, with brothers Sakis and Themis Tolis and their friend Mutilator having their grounding in a grindcore band. The band, originally formed as Black Church in 1984, had its base in the Exarcheia neighborhood of Athens, which is renowned historically for its anarchist politics.
The band’s lyrics appear more atheistic and blasphemous than anything else, but in a country as religious as Greece, where the Orthodox Church holds as much sway as it does, this is a powerful statement. It has seen them run into legal trouble and protests in their homeland, other parts of eastern Europe, and the US. More recently, they have helped run collections for refugees through a special compilation album, which again aligned them with the explicitly antifascist Greek underground.
The other progenitor of Hellenic black metal, Varathron, contained members from Rotting Christ. During Varathron’s early years, Mutilator and Themis helped them create their as the bassist and drummer respectively. But this is not the only influence they have had on the Hellenic scene. Mutilator continues to exert influence through his work with Yoth Iria and Medieval Demon, while Themis was also involved in the early work of Zemial. This is to say nothing of Sakis. He has played in Thou Art Lord since 1993, briefly performed vocals in Desolation, and has begun branching into solo work.
It isn’t an overstatement to say that Hellenic black metal would be unrecognizable without these three men, who gained their musical and political education in the anarchist hotbed of Exarcheia. The Hellenic scene has been at the forefront in ways not connected to Rotting Christ, as it spawned the first all woman black metal band in 1995, who have gone by Lloth (yes that is a D&D reference) and Astarte. All this flies in the face of the politics espoused by the Norwegian scene at a time when they seemed to be achieving hegemony.
Our story from here is not as easy to follow. As the Hellenic black metal continued to develop, nothing sprung up to replace it in the sense of a physical space for left wing black metal bands. Yet many bands emerged on their own regardless. It is during this time that most people say the first RABM album was produced. This came from Profecium, who released Socialismo Satánico in 1997. The album is more similar to the wave of melodic black metal that came out of Sweden in the mid to late 1990s, which which was already marred by the actions of Jon Nödtveidt. The same year, Bolivian blackened death metal band Subvertor released Cryptobiosis, which had a track calling for justice for Che Guevara, who was killed in Bolivia.
The RABM Blogspot also mentions Red Winter, the gothic Tisíc Let od Ráje, Dead and Forgotten, and the death metal-infused Fall of the Bastards (probably the best band name here) all being active during this time. Other bands not mentioned by the Blogspot were also active at this time – Sickle and Hammer was released by Agony in 2004, and the split Black-Red Dawn Before Armageddon was released by Мракобесие and Nazgulum in 2005. And two years after that, Neverchrist released Latinoamerican Elite of Antinazi Black Metal.
It was also during this time that the closest thing to feminist black metal before the 2010s, Caïna, was formed, with Andrew Curtis-Brignell being outspoken in his support for feminism into the modern day. Finally, more mainstream bands were more open to embracing left wing subject matter in their lyrics, with black ’n’ rollers Vreid releasing I Krig in 2007. The lyrics were based on an anthology of lyric poetry, Dikt fra krigstiden, which was written during the Second World War by Norwegian resistance member Gunnar Reiss Anderssen. None of this was co-ordinated, but it must have felt like a moment was approaching, which is reflected by early posts on the Blogspot.
The closest thing there is to a scene during this period is a wave of blackened crust punk. These bands were embedded within local crust punk scenes, as opposed to being a scene unto themselves. The Blogspot labels Canadians Black Kronstadt as the first blackened crust band, but they broke up in 1997. Their guitarist, Wolf, went on to form Iskra in 2002. The Blogspot mentions blackened crust and hardcore punk bands like this existing in at least Canada, the US (Suicide Nation), Poland (Antichrist), Germany (Arsen aka König der Monster), Brazil (Life is a Lie), Czechia (Full Bladder and Crucify Yourself), Sweden (Hotbild and Radioskugga), Japan (Shikabane), Spain (Disflesh), and Italy (Disprezzo). Most of these bands were obscure, with many releases having been lost. But what this does show is that the left wing beliefs of many black metal artists never went away, even if they were overshadowed by the infamy of the Scandinavians.
It was in this context that the RABM Blogspot was founded in late 2009. Since 2009, the scene has gone from strength to strength, and during the early to mid 2010s would break towards the black metal mainstream. The sound diversified, with more traditional and atmospheric black metal bands joining the blackened crust bands that still exist today. The left were prominent in black metal again, and this would not have been possible without the dogged efforts of their predecessors.
So if black metal is a story, what is the story we have told here? There are a few common links that I can see – collaboration and resistance. Nothing here could have existed without input from outside the black metal space. The link between left wing black metal and punk goes back to the very beginning, with first wave bands incorporating various elements of punk into their sound in multiple countries, through Greek anarcho-punk giving birth to Rotting Christ and Varathron, to the disparate blackened crust bands in the earliest days of RABM.
Through all of this there has been resistance – resisting Nazis inside and outside local and larger scenes, resistance against conservative authority, and resistance against a perceived takeover of working class culture. Left wing black metal has sprung up in the homeland of the Nazis and in the home of the second wave, showing that that resistance and counter narrative has always existed even in the historical fortresses of fascism and NSBM. It has existed since the beginning, and I think this story is important to tell. Or, at least, I hope you found some cool new music.
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