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 around rebellion, individuality and doing whatever the fuck you wanted, it has somehow managed to write itself an increasingly strict set of rules that everyone seems terrified to break.

You must look like this. You must sound like this. You must stand in a forest looking miserable. You must apparently record your album through a broken telephone. And God help you if you accidentally make something that sounds too good.

The irony is fucking magnificent.

Black metal spent decades telling the rest of heavy music to fuck off, only to construct its own little prison and then appoint a bloke with corpse paint as the guard.

Look, I’m not suggesting we throw away everything that makes black metal what it is. The cold atmosphere, the ugly guitar tones, the blast beats, the sense of isolation, the theatrical imagery, all of that can be brilliant when somebody actually has something to say with it.

But there are certain things that have gone from stylistic choices to mandatory genre paperwork.

So, in the spirit of making black metal slightly less predictable, here are five tropes that need to be put in a shallow grave immediately.

1. Acoustic Intros and Forest Ambience

Unless you are Opeth in 1995, nobody needs two minutes of wind blowing through pine trees followed by three clean nylon-string guitar chords before the song actually starts.

We know what you’re doing. You’re trying to build dread. You’re establishing isolation. You’re connecting the listener with nature. You’re probably also standing somewhere in a forest wearing a cloak while you recorded it.

And here’s the problem: I’ve heard this fucking intro approximately twelve thousand times.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with acoustic guitars or field recordings. Black metal can absolutely use quiet passages effectively. When they’re actually integrated into the composition, they can create contrast, tension or atmosphere.

I’m talking about the obligatory preamble. The one where the album opens with thirty seconds of wind. Then a raven. Then some footsteps. Then another forty seconds of wind. Then three notes on an acoustic guitar that sound like someone tuning it in a medieval reenactment field. And then the blast beats finally arrive.

Congratulations. You’ve just made the listener sit through a bad Renaissance Fair soundcheck before the song actually starts.

If your opening riff is good enough, you don’t need to make me walk through the fucking forest to get to it.

Just play the riff.

2. The Tom G. Warrior / Abbath “Blurgh!” Grunt

We get it.

Celtic Frost did it forty years ago. Abbath turned it into an art form. And yes, that stupid little BLURGH! can sound absolutely fucking brilliant when it’s used by the right vocalist at the right moment.

But hearing every bedroom multi-instrumentalist hawk up a vocal phlegm grunt before every fucking tempo change has gone from an iconic homage to a genre-wide nervous twitch.

The riff kicks in.

BLURGH!

The drums change.

BLURGH!

A new section begins.

BLURGH!

Someone has apparently discovered that their microphone is also capable of recording whatever noise happens when you clear your throat after eating half a packet of crisps.

There comes a point where you have to ask yourself whether the grunt is actually doing anything.

Does it add menace? Does it punctuate the riff? Does it make the song more intense? Or did you simply hear Abbath do it and think, “Fucking hell, I need one of those”?

There’s a difference between influence and karaoke.

If your riff isn’t heavy enough to transition on its own without you clearing your throat into the microphone, maybe write a better riff.

3. Right-Wing Edgelord Shit

This one is less a musical cliché and more a recurring problem surrounding parts of the scene.

Black metal has always had a complicated relationship with provocation, transgression, nationalism, religion and political extremism. Far-right movements have also attempted to use black metal and related metal scenes to circulate racial and nationalist ideologies, while NSBM emerged as a distinct strand of the genre in the early 1990s.

Honestly, the whole thing gets fucking tedious.

There’s something particularly absurd about a musician presenting themselves as the ultimate outsider, the enemy of conformity, the individual who refuses to bow to society, and then spending their time parroting authoritarian politics and recycled racial-nationalist bullshit.

You don’t become more dangerous because you’ve discovered runes. You don’t become more extreme because you’ve put a swastika next to a picture of a Norwegian mountain.

And calling something “traditional” doesn’t magically make an exclusionary political ideology ancient, authentic or profound.

There is plenty of room in black metal for darkness, misanthropy, nihilism, anti-religious imagery, historical themes and political provocation without dragging fascist ideology into the dressing room every five minutes.

Perhaps the most depressing part is how fucking predictable it all becomes. The music is supposed to be dangerous. The imagery is supposed to be dangerous. The attitude is supposed to be dangerous.

Then you discover that the big scary monster behind the corpse paint has basically spent six hours on an internet forum complaining about immigrants.

That’s not terrifying.

That’s just boring.

4. Promo Photos In Broad Daylight

Corpse paint works.

Obviously it fucking works.

When you’re standing in a dark venue under shitty red lighting, sweat dripping off your face, screaming into a microphone while somebody behind you is beating the living shit out of a drum kit, it can look genuinely sinister. But there is a time and place for everything, and that place is not necessarily 2:00 PM on a Tuesday in a sunlit birch forest.

I have seen enough black-metal promo photographs taken in broad daylight to last several lifetimes.

There they are.

Three miserable-looking blokes.

Full corpse paint.

Spikes.

Leather.

Weapons that nobody is legally allowed to explain.

Standing underneath what appears to be a perfectly pleasant Scandinavian tree, and suddenly the whole thing falls apart.

Because the second you step into direct sunlight wearing full makeup, spikes and enough black leather to upholster a small van, you don’t look like a creature of the night.

You look like a misplaced pantomime villain who got lost on a hillwalk.

You can practically hear the photographer saying:

“Right, lads, look terrifying.”

“Can we do one where you’re all looking away from the camera?”

“Perfect. Don’t smile.”

“Neil, can you move your rucksack out of shot?”

Black metal is supposed to look like it crawled out of somewhere unpleasant. If your promo photograph looks like the cover of Hiking Monthly, perhaps wait until sunset.

5. Recording Albums On A Tin Can From 1998

This is where people get defensive.

“BUT RAW PRODUCTION IS PART OF BLACK METAL!”

Yes. It fucking can be, but there is a massive difference between raw production and bad production.

Early Darkthrone is raw.

Mayhem is raw.

Immortal is raw.

A lot of the great early records sound like they were recorded in rooms where the walls were actively trying to kill the musicians, but those albums still have character.

You can hear the riffs. You can hear the drums. You can feel the atmosphere. The production serves the music instead of replacing it.

What I’m talking about is the modern obsession with making an album sound as though somebody buried the master tape underneath a shed for twenty years and then recorded it through a microphone made from a baked-bean tin.

There’s a difference between cold and indistinct. There’s a difference between primitive and lifeless.

And there’s a difference between deliberately abrasive production and simply turning down every frequency except the treble because you think sounding like a lawnmower running three houses away automatically makes you Kvlt™.

If I can hear the guitarist breathing between riffs but can’t hear the fucking bass drum, that’s not atmosphere. That’s a mixing problem.

The whole point of raw production was never supposed to be “make everything impossible to hear”. The best raw black-metal records sound alive. They’re ugly, abrasive and hostile, but there’s still a performance underneath all that filth.

So by all means, keep the cold guitar tone. Keep the hiss. Keep the fucking frostbite.

Just let me hear the bastard riff.

And That’s The Problem

None of these things are inherently bad. That’s the annoying part.

Acoustic passages can be brilliant. That stupid BLURGH! can sound fucking great. Dark political themes can be fascinating. Corpse paint is one of the most recognisable visual styles in extreme music. And raw production is absolutely capable of producing some of the most atmospheric records ever made.

The problem starts when the technique becomes compulsory.

When every band starts copying the same visual language, the same vocal gestures, the same production tricks and the same handful of compositional ideas, rebellion becomes conformity wearing corpse paint.

And that, more than anything else, is what black metal should probably be fucking terrified of.

Not sounding too polished. Not accidentally becoming accessible. Not someone using a clean guitar.

Conformity.

Because the funniest thing black metal could possibly do at this point is stop worrying about whether something is true enough and start making whatever the fuck it actually wants to make.

If that means acoustic guitars, use them. If it means synthesizers, use them. If it means sounding crystal clear, fucking do it. If it means wearing corpse paint in a forest at midnight, knock yourself out.

Just don’t do it because you’re scared that some bloke on an internet forum is going to tell you that your black metal isn’t black metal enough.

The genre spent decades telling everyone else to fuck off.

Maybe it’s time it listened to itself.