Yes, so, okay, right. How do I explain this. This isn’t an easy thing to review. Because Endless Dismal Moan and their mastermind, Chaos 9, were not an easy project to listen to. Hell, if you have heard any of his material, you’ll know that this isn’t music in the way you know music to…

A few things surprised me when I first sat down and listened to Call by Urisk. First off, they are an atmospheric black metal band with the black metal cranked up to eleven. They are emotionally deep, but possess a suffocation factor so high that you feel like you’ve got a plastic bag pulled tight…

If A Blaze in the Northern Sky was a declaration of war and Under a Funeral Moon built the brick wall around the scene, Transilvanian Hunger is where Darkthrone elevated pure black metal to a state of absolute, unbreakable perfection. It is also, hands down, my favourite album in the entire genre. Released via Peaceville…

One of the best parts and, also, one of the worst parts about this job is the Bandcamp trawl. Where I go to the place where seemingly every fucking band in existence has uploaded something, type in Black Metal, and then spend at least an hour a day going through every release I can find,…

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute. We all love black metal. Well, presumably you do if you’ve made it this far. But as a subgenre, black metal is also more bloated with ridiculous, untouchable clichés than almost anything else in heavy music. For a scene that originally built so much of its identity…

If A Blaze in the Northern Sky was the moment Darkthrone spat in the face of polished death metal, Under a Funeral Moon is where they locked the door, poured concrete against the frame, and sat in absolute darkness. By mid-1992, the death metal scene was rapidly turning into everything Fenriz and Nocturno Culto couldn’t…

If Darkthrone’s answer to the early nineties was to retreat into a cold, filthy garage and drag Celtic Frost through the mud, Immortal took a completely different look at the Norwegian landscape and decided to turn it into an avalanche. 1993 was the year the second wave truly froze over. While much of the notorious…

If you want to understand second-wave black metal, you don’t start with the tabloid nonsense, the church burnings, or the murder trials. You start with four blokes in Norway recording an album in 1991 that would help create the most glorious middle-finger U-turn in heavy metal history. To understand why A Blaze in the Northern…