From Chaos To The Concert Hall: Emperor, Enslaved, And Deafheaven Live
Will Oliver
The infamy surrounding the Norwegian black metal scene of the early 1990s has a way of drowning out the music. Thanks to books like Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s Lords Of Chaos and documentaries like Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s Until The Light Takes Us, even the most marginally informed music fan can probably tell you about the burning of Fantoft Stave Church, the murder of Euronymous, the incarceration of Varg Vikernes, and the circle of young outcasts who hung around Helvete, the record shop in Oslo where “BLACK METAL” is still scrawled on the basement wall, the “T” stylized as an inverted cross. Some smaller percentage of those general music fans has heard anything beyond maybe De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and A Blaze In The Northern Sky; an even smaller group has followed the scene’s survivors through their present-day work. The dark side of Norwegian black metal remains true-crime docuseries fodder, but most of the people who existed in its orbit in the ’90s are simply working musicians today.
Amid all the arson and homicide, Norwegian black metal was rapidly defining itself as a genre, and despite some scene leaders’ insistence on orthodoxy, bands started breaking the rules of black metal convention almost as soon as they were established. Among those bands was the keyboard-heavy Emperor, who embraced synthesized orchestras and choirs more fully than anyone else in the Norwegian scene. Led by co-guitarists Ihsahn and Samoth, the band pioneered what would eventually be known as symphonic black metal. (Here we must also acknowledge that their original drummer, Faust, murdered a gay man in 1992 after he allegedly solicited him for sex. Faust served a prison sentence and has expressed remorse for his crime, but it’s certainly a lot easier to enjoy Emperor now that he’s no longer involved.) Emperor haven’t released anything since new 2001’s Prometheus: The Discipline Of Fire And Demise, but they still play the occasional live show, and those shows are always a big deal in the metal world. I saw them play Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre earlier this month, for the first of three black metal gigs I’d see over the course of five days. It was a great show. It was also a fascinating illustration of Norwegian black metal’s 35-year journey from ignominiousness to, essentially, classic rock.
Kings Theatre is a beautiful 1920s movie palace in the Flatbush neighborhood that was renovated and reopened as a concert venue in 2015. Of all the illustrious live rooms in NYC – Radio City, Carnegie Hall, the Beacon Theatre – I find it the most opulent and transportive. With a capacity of 3,250, it’s also a good venue for the kinds of (often European) metal bands who have outgrown the clubs but aren’t quite arena-sized. I saw Ghost there on the Meliora tour, and I’ve seen King Diamond there multiple times. Emperor play a much more extreme style of metal than either of those bands, but they had no problem filling the room. Their grandiose, orchestral sound made a lot of sense in the confines of Kings, and I was eager to see their set, which was to open with a full playthrough of their debut album, In The Nightside Eclipse.
Before that, it was time for Wolves In The Throne Room, one of the few American black metal bands who can credibly claim to be as popular as their biggest European peers. (I first saw them at the tiny Union Bar in Athens, Ohio, opening Skeletonwitch’s record release show for Beyond The Permafrost. A pre-LP-era Midnight was also on the bill. 2007 was cool!) I’ve had a hard time with the past handful of WITTR albums. They’ve receded into limp self-reference since the failed experiment of 2014’s Celestite. I just don’t think they’ve been able to recapture the magic that made them special when they were essentially inventing the atmospheric, nature-worshiping sound they called “Cascadian Black Metal.” Live, though, they can still call forth an imposing forest of sound. The set leaned too heavily on recent material for my liking, but when they played “Thuja Magus Imperium” from 2011’s Celestial Lineage, their power was undeniable.
As I settled in for Emperor, I noticed a young girl, maybe 14 years old, seated to my right with her dad. My dad was a little too old to experience extreme metal as a young person, and when I dragged him to shows with growled or screamed vocals, he’d complain and do that old-person thing where they do a bad impression of a death metal voice. This guy clearly grew up with Emperor, and he was excited to show true Norwegian black metal to his kid. (She seemed to love it, too.) The rough edges of all extreme subcultures tend to get sanded down with age, but I’ll admit I was pretty moved by the idea of Emperor being repackaged as a family bonding experience.
The band walked out to In The Nightside Eclipse’s instrumental intro before firing up “Into The Infinity Of Thoughts,” and the first thing that crossed my mind was how clean everything sounded. Even in its remastered editions, Nightside is a fairly raw black metal album, but the mix at Kings was pristine. Ihsahn’s screams were far more intelligible than they are on the record, and the keyboards, handled by longtime live member Jørgen Munkeby, had nuance and heft. The cleaner presentation revealed what’s sometimes easy for take for granted: that Emperor was always the most adventurous band in Norway’s black metal wave. Their songs have winding, discursive structures, and a genius-level riff might only pop up once or twice before receding into the mist. After Emperor’s final album, Ihsahn would reinvent himself as a couture-wearing prog rock zaddy, and at Kings, he brought that energy (and wardrobe) to In The Nightside Eclipse.
After Nightside, Emperor ripped through some other classics from the catalog, including four cuts from 1997’s Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk. To me, that will always be the superior Emperor record, and it seemed like the crowd at Kings agreed. “Thus Spake The Nightspirit” and “With Strength I Burn” got the loudest responses of the night, and even the tracks they played from the less-loved IX Equilibrium and Prometheus records went off well. Ihsahn keeps plenty busy with his solo career, but the set was invigorating enough to make it a disappointment that we’ve gone 25 years without a new Emperor record. Still, if black metal is now classic rock, I suppose it stands to reason that one of its key bands is happy to work the nostalgia circuit.
The first show Emperor ever played was on April 13, 1992, when they shared a bill with their fellow Norwegians in Enslaved. Like Emperor, Enslaved started out in a largely conventional black metal mode before quickly outstripping its strictures. They released a pair of full-lengths in 1994, Vikingligr Veldi and Frost, that would help define the sound and aesthetic of Viking metal. Over the years, they took on a more pronounced progressive streak, folding sonic references to Pink Floyd and King Crimson into their tales of Nordic myth and warfare. 2023’s Heimdal was their 16th full-length, and the experience of seeing them at the Gramercy Theatre was in stark contrast to Emperor’s ’90s-throwback set.
Enslaved might be the best live black metal band I’ve seen, at least in terms of their onstage charisma and the tightness of their performances. Led by bassist/vocalist Grutle Kjellson, founding rhythm guitarist Ivar Bjørnson, and the perpetually shirtless lead guitarist Arve “Ice Dale” Isdal, they put on an immaculately professional show. At the Gramercy, they only did three songs from the ’90s (“Fenris,” “Jotunblod,” and “Slaget I Skogen Bortenfor”), meaning the rest of the set was reserved for musically complex, physically demanding blackened prog workouts. Some of those tunes, like “Isa” and “Havenless,” took on a ritualistic air, with Kjellson leading the band in ancient pagan chants over the strains of detuned guitar and mellotron. Enslaved maintain a deep connection to the Viking lore that served as the band’s early foundation, even as the songs have continued to morph into stranger forms.
My favorite moment was their opening number, “Ethica Odini,” the pseudo-title track of 2010’s Axioma Ethica Odini. Drawn from their proggiest era, its appearance at the start of the set played like an immediate self-challenge, one that Enslaved conquered with relish. The interplay between Kjellson’s back-of-the-throat roar and the soulful clean singing of keyboardist Håkon Vinje introduced the rich vocal harmonies that they’d revisit repeatedly throughout the night. It also served as a first showcase for Ice Dale’s wild, almost Van Halen-esque soloing style. Black metal has produced plenty of great guitar players, but few of them are out-and-out shredders. Ice Dale proves you can play this dead-serious style of music and still have a good time.
My last show of the week was from a band who have almost certainly been inspired by Emperor and Enslaved, but whose recontextualization of that early black metal influence is a fascinating, ongoing experiment. Deafheaven headlined Irving Plaza the night after the Enslaved show, the first of two sold-out gigs in New York that week celebrating their excellent new album, Lonely People With Power. The average age of the crowd, daddy-daughter duos notwithstanding, was at least 20 years younger than at Emperor and Enslaved. People looked cool. I didn’t see any battle vests or sketchy band shirts. This really bothers a certain kind of black metal fan, but it should go without saying that it doesn’t bother me — if anything, I think it’s indicative of the potential of black metal to continue to thrive as more than a mere museum piece. The energy in the room was easily the best of the three shows, and I caught myself just fucking smiling like a dweeb for most of Deafheaven’s set.
It’s hack to write about how George Clarke is handsome, so I won’t do that (even though I kind of just did), but I will point out how athletic he looks onstage. Deafheaven play long sets, and he doesn’t stop moving for a second. If he’s not jumping up and down or running back and forth across the stage, he’s gesticulating wildly with both hands while he sings. It’s like the passion behind the words has a physical lifeforce of its own, a mana that needs to escape through his sweat. As if to emphasize the athleticism of his performances, Clarke has been reemerging for Deafheaven’s encores in a football jersey. A lot of Lonely People With Power is about deconstructing masculinity, and there’s something undeniably badass about watching the guy who black metal dorks called anti-gay slurs for most of 2010s shrieking through “Dream House” while looking like Brian Urlacher. [Editor’s note: Urlacher wishes he had Clarke’s head of hair.]
Speaking of “Dream House,” it’s the closest thing to a hit song black metal has produced this century, maybe ever. It’s the song that gets the biggest crowd response, and Clarke goes out into the audience to let kids scream its chorus into the mic. To me, it was so much less dynamic and interesting than the songs they played from Lonely People. Clarke and guitarist Kerry McCoy have quite simply gotten better at writing songs that seamlessly incorporate everything they’re interested in — black metal, post-rock, dreampop, shoegaze, harsh noise, ambient music. “Doberman” and “Magnolia” are heavier than anything they put on Sunbather; “The Garden Route” and “Heathen” are more engagingly contemplative. “Revelator” swings between those two poles with the grace of a ballet dancer. It’s been over a decade since Sunbather made Deafheaven the most talked-about band in metal, and the glare of that spotlight has long since faded. With Lonely People With Power, and with the dynamo live shows they’ve been playing to support it, they look more than ever like the future of the genre.
TEN NAILS THROUGH THE NECK
Candlemass – "Black Star"
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Subgenre: epic doom metal
Even though he sang on the band’s genre-defining debut Epicus Doomicus Metallicus, Johan Langquist was never actually a member of Candlemass during their initial run. He was brought in as a session vocalist, with the inimitable Messiah Marcolin waiting in the wings to take over as the band’s full-time lead singer. (The three albums Candlemass made with Marcolin at the end of the ’80s – Nightfall, Ancient Dreams, and Tales Of Creation – are widely considered the extended high point of their discography. I still prefer Epicus.)
Improbably, Langquist finally joined Candlemass in 2018, and he’s led them through a nice little career resurgence. I’ve seen them headline the Hell’s Heroes festival in Texas twice since then, and they were excellent both times, with Langquist capably handling his own vocal parts as well as Marcolin’s. The new material they’ve released since his return has been frustratingly uneven, but “Black Star” shows the tantalizing potential of the band’s new/old lineup. It begins with a passage of acoustic guitar and vocals reminiscent of the intro to “Solitude,” the first song Langquist ever sang with the band. From there, it erupts into a stomping doom epic, seemingly as inspired by the early days of Candlemass as by the Tony Martin-fronted Black Sabbath albums that were coming out around the same time. With just the title track, an instrumental, and two covers, the Black Star EP is too slight to enthusiastically recommend. Still, at its best, it reminds us of the awesome power of these godfathers of epic doom. [From Black Star, out now via Napalm Records.]
Fugitive – "Spheres Of Virulence"
Location: Fort Worth, Texas
Subgenre: thrash metal/crossover
The return of Power Trip has been controversial, although not so controversial that they haven’t been able to march unimpeded through gigantic arena tours, festival appearances, and sold-out one-off headliners. I never much minded it. Power Trip wasn’t just Riley Gale’s project, and while it will never be the same without him, the remaining dudes are entitled to make a living. My biggest concern was that the reunion would inevitably divide the attention of guitarist Blake Ibanez and vocalist Seth Gilmore, who were off to a hot start with their new band Fugitive when Power Trip gigs started popping up again. (Gilmore was tapped as Gale’s replacement.) Fugitive rule, and they’ve got a slightly different, more explicitly extreme-metal flavor than Power Trip, as evidenced by the cover of Bathory’s “Raise The Dead” that appeared on their first EP. New music has come at a trickle, but songs like the standalone single “Spheres Of Virulence” will keep me hanging on the band’s every word until an album materializes. It’s a vicious track, driven by vise-tight thrash riffing and punishing death metal drumming courtesy of Creeping Death’s Lincoln Mullins. Gilmore sounds like a more intelligible, quicker-trigger John Tardy, and he’s every bit the charismatic force and foil to Ibanez that Gale was at Power Trip’s peak. Here’s hoping we get a lot more Fugitive music soon. [“Spheres Of Virulence” single out now via Blue Grape Music.]
Escarnium – "Through The Depths Of The 12th Gate"
Location: Salvador, Brazil
Subgenre: death metal
There’s no getting around the fact that the Brazilian band Escarnium sounds a lot like Incantation. Onward To Golgotha and Diabolical Conquest are common touchstones for just about any band making dark, dissonant, atmospheric death metal, and Escarnium don’t shy away from the comparison. That said: “Through the Depths of the 12th Gate” is one of the best Incantation-style death metal songs I’ve heard this decade. It starts, somewhat confrontationally, with a lone guitar, just two mournful notes ringing out into the void. Then the drums come in and the vortex starts sucking everything into its maw. Frontman Victor Elian has been the lone consistent member of Escarnium since the band’s founding in 2008, and he’s in total control here, his Ross Dolan-ish roar weaving between the tangled riffs he trades with co-guitarist Alex Hahn like Steph Curry through a thicket of off-ball screens. (Yes, they sound like Immolation, too; and yes, I’m going to keep making basketball analogies in this column.) We know that what we’re hearing is a studious recreation of a well-trodden sound, but when the execution is this spot-on, it’s hard to care. [From Inexorable Entropy, out now via Everlasting Spew Records.]
Livin'Evil – "Under The Banner Of The Damned"
Location: Maine-et-Loire, France
Subgenre: epic heavy/power metal
Livin’Evil were nearly one of metal’s many forgotten failures to launch. The Frenchmen put out two demo tapes in the early ’90s, but they never got around to making a proper recording, and in 2018, founding guitarist Patrick Pairon died. Pairon’s death inspired Jérôme Viel, who joined the band after those demos were already recorded, to put together a new lineup of Livin’Evil in his honor. 2023’s Prayers And Torments was essentially an expanded rerecording of those demos, but The Warriors Of The King is an album of all-new music. That’s the first time that’s ever happened, in 35 years of Livin’Evil history. That’s wild! The Warriors Of The King is excellent, and it vindicates Viel’s decision to resurrect the band. You can still hear the raw energy of their trad metal roots, but there’s an extra touch of grace and class to the sound now, something ineffable that puts them closer to the epic power metal of bands like Sacred Outcry and Atlantean Kodex. “Under The Banner Of The Damned” soars highest, with session vocalist Tasos Lazaris invoking the kind of scale-climbing pathos and melodrama I associate with Daniel Heiman. (Heiman’s work on Sacred Outcry’s Towers Of Gold remains the finest vocal performance in 21st century power metal.) And to think Livin’Evil might have just languished in the dustbin of metal history. [From The Warriors Of The King, out now via the band.]
Prophetic Suffering – "Empire Of Filth"
Location: Edmonton, Canada
Subgenre: raw black/death metal
Edmonton’s Prophetic Suffering were once a gleefully stupid brutal death metal band called Kurt Gobang – get it? – but they changed their name when their sound started mutating into a more evil-sounding black/death hybrid. They never forgot the tricks of the trade from their BDM days, though, and that’s what sets Rivalry Of Thyself apart from much of the so-called “war metal” that serves as its closest aesthetic bedfellow. Over-the-top brutality is still Prophetic Suffering’s end goal, and if they want to let out a pig squeal to hasten the proceedings, as they do in the middle of “Empire Of Filth” — goddammit, they’re going to do it. There’s a lot of other stuff in the mix here, too, from early Cannibal Corpse and Drawn And Quartered to Blasphemy and Teitanblood, and I admire the way the band recombines seemingly distant strains of disreputable, disgusting extreme metal into one foul solution. I don’t know if the terminally online, crowdkilling kids who go to slam shows are going to be able to hang with Rivalry Of Thyself, but Prophetic Suffering are at least giving them a chance to join the party. [From Rivalry Of Thyself, out now via Sentient Ruin Laboratories.]
Animalize – "Damnée"
Location: Lyon, France
Subgenre: traditional heavy metal
The music video for Animalize’s “Damnée” is an impressively realized ’80s B-movie in miniature, featuring the members of the Lyonnaise band squaring off in neon-soaked battle against a woman who summoned them via VHS tape. The aesthetic universe of Animalize spans their videos, their striking cover art, and their live shows, where the band members play larger-than-life versions of themselves, wielding chainsaws and katanas and spitting blood at the audience. It’s a commitment to world-building that carries into their songs, which meld the denim-and-leatherisms of the NWOBHM, the heavier side of Sunset Strip hard rock, the keyboard-led prog metal of Savatage, and the classicist verve of French metal heroes like Sortilège and Blaspheme. Verminateur is the first Animalize album sung entirely in French, and frontman Niels Bang sounds more fully in command of his powers, summoning rich melodic phrasing and finding big hooks on every song, no matter how unusual its construction. “Damnée” is the hit, though. Its chorus melody sounds a little like the Cult’s “Fire Woman,” and it suggests the same radio-conquering ambitions that band once had. I’m sure it will sound great under the glow of stage lights, as fake blood drips from the band’s blades. [From Verminateur, out now via Dying Victims Productions.]
Witchcraft – "Idag"
Location: Örebro, Sweden
Subgenre: hard rock/doom metal
It’s been a long time since Witchcraft made a metal record. In the nine years since Nucleus, sole constant member Magnus Pelander has released just two albums, both fully acoustic — his solo debut, Time, and Witchcraft’s trollishly titled Black Metal. At his best, Pelander has been a historically gifted conjurer of ’70s proto-doom. (2007’s The Alchemist is one of the best metal records of the 21st century, and if you haven’t heard it before, stop reading this right now and put it on.) But as recently as last year, it didn’t seem like he was interested in making heavy music ever again. That makes Idag (“Today”) feel like a minor miracle as well as a return to form. There’s a little bit of acoustic stuff here, but the album mostly finds Pelander burning through the kind of groovy, heavy, Sabbathian songs he made his name on. He’s also singing in his native Swedish on half of the album, something he hasn’t done since The Alchemist deep cut “Leva.” He sounds great doing it, especially on his return to epic songwriting, the towering, low-end-worshiping “Idag.” Even for a studiously retro act like Witchcraft, the song sounds thrillingly primordial, like it was recorded in rural Sweden in 1970 and buried in a box until now. [From Idag, out now via Heavy Psych Sounds.]
Lust Hag – "Irrevocably Drubbed"
Location: Missoula, Montana
Subgenre: black/death metal
A little less than three minutes into the title track from Irrevocably Drubbed, Eleanor Harper’s second full-length as Lust Hag, she plays a riff that never could have appeared on one of her earlier releases. It’s a short, violent burst of chromaticism, the kind of riff that makes you screw up your face like you just smelled something vile. The first time I heard it, I thought immediately of Immolation’s Bob Vigna, who likes to use pinch harmonics as the melodic bedrock of his riffs rather than as an accent. The reason Harper couldn’t have put that riff on a previous Lust Hag record is practical – she told me that she learned how to do pinch harmonics just before recording the album – as well as spiritual. It’s a death metal riff, and Lust Hag, once expressly a one-woman raw black metal project, has begun morphing into a death metal band. Irrevocably Drubbed is a righteous lashing out, an act of holy retribution. It’s the sound of a trans woman using the power of metal to bludgeon a society bent on her destruction. There’s still plenty of the hallmarks of Bandcamp-era raw black metal in the sound here, but death metal’s more direct, forceful thrust serves a crucial narrative purpose. Irrevocably Drubbed radiates with anger, and anger is the only responsible thing to feel when, say, a presidential administration attempts to legally define trans people out of existence. When the world seems determined to beat you down, to paraphrase Accept, you’ve got to fight it back. [From Irrevocably Drubbed, out now via Fiadh Productions.]
Hemlokk & Hyrde – "These Lands We Call Home"
Location: West Sussex, UK
Subgenre: folk/black metal
The relationship between traditional English folk music and black metal is explored at length on Feohland, the first collaborative album by the West Sussex musicians Hemlokk and Hyrde. Most of the songs are, superficially, either pure folk compositions or pure black metal songs, and the duo is equally adept in each mode. Repeat listens cause the lines to blur, though, and the fundamental similarities begin to emerge. These are songs uniformly inspired by the English countryside and the ancient Anglo-Saxon way of life, songs of sunlit idylls shaded by hardship. Volume and distortion are the levers Hemlokk and Hyrde manipulate; the world they create stays remarkably consistent. In their private lives – per my Instagram snooping – both artists are avid explorers of the ley lines of premodern England, and the songs they make together vibrate with a sense of place. “These Lands We Call Home” is perhaps the song that’s rooted deepest in the heathlands and coastlines of Sussex, and it also provides one of the few places on the record where folk and black metal mingle freely in the space of a single song. It’s a crash course in Feohland, an album that must be heard in full again and again to truly be unlocked. [From Feohland, out now via House of Inkantation.]
Magus Lord – "In The Company Of Champions"
Location: Los Angeles, California
Subgenre: epic black/heavy metal
When I interviewed Lamp Of Murmuur’s M. for Stereogum back in 2023, he talked about embracing classic heavy metal influences for Saturnian Bloodstorm, an album he hoped would be “an epic statement of my own existence.” He used words like might, discovery, and arrogance to describe what he liked about that sound, and it’s clear that those influences stuck with him beyond the Saturnian Bloodstorm cycle. M.’s new band, Magus Lord, is his most arrogant project yet. Three of the five songs on In The Company Of Champions – all but an interlude and a cover of Gods Tower’s “Seven Rains Of Fire” – stretch beyond the 10-minute mark, and each one feels like an Odyssean journey. This is M.’s interest in epic, audacious heavy metal taken to its logical extreme, and despite the high degree of difficulty, he pulls it off with seeming ease. Boldest of all is the 14-minute title track, which finds M. delivering big, belting hooks with his newly unveiled clean vocal range. The song’s winding path of triumphant, propulsive riffs eventually yields to plaintive acoustic guitar and flute, until the drums return a few bars later to usher the song to a melancholic denouement. As far as epic statements of one’s own existence go, this one’s pretty convincing—and it’s coming from a side project. We’re witnessing one of modern metal’s true masters operating at an imperial-phase peak. Don’t take it for granted. [From In The Company Of Champions, out now via the artist.]
JOURNEY TO THE WORLD BEYOND
