The most dangerous men in heavy metal are now middle-aged
The complex, violent history of black metal poses a question: what happens when we outgrow our aesthetics, but not our beliefs?
It’s a long one today. As ever, please send this piece to anyone you think may enjoy it.
There’s a taxonomy to Scandinavia, and it goes a bit like this. The Danes are the gruff, beer-swilling, heavy-partying pseudo-Germans who drink on trains and have accents a bit like Brummies. The Swedes are a little more arch, and like think they run things over there: they’re the most populous, the only really post-imperial Scandinavian country, and they design and make the cool clothes and the furniture and the pop music for the rest of us. And then there are the Norwegians: the teachers’ pets of the subcontinent, those pleasantly forgettable, high-achieving, sauna-dwelling folk who love to run marathons up mountain and along fjord alike, and hang out in their perfect, oil-funded, infrastructure-rich society. Norway is the peaceful, relaxed, and homogenous envy of the world.1
Which is what makes it so weird that Norway is the home of black metal.
Part One: Welcome to Helvete
In the late 1980s, a type of extreme heavy metal emerged in Norway which was characterised by dissonant chords, blast beats and tremolo picking, as well as lyrics about Satan, death, pain, suffering… anything that would set an edgy teenage boy’s pulse racing, basically. Initially an offshoot of Swedish death metal, this new, underground style took on its own form and became known as black metal. Recordings were initially often very lo-fi, but they would eventually develop from something sounding like this, recorded in 1990…
…into this, in 2015:
Pretty extreme, huh?
Like everything in Norway then and now, black metal was pretty local. Everyone involved knew each other. By the early 1990s, a burgeoning scene had crystallised around a shop in Oslo called Helvete (“Hell”, in Norwegian). Helvete was owned and run by 25-year-old Øystein Aarseth, known as Euronymous, who was also the guitarist of a black metal band called Mayhem.2 The members of Mayhem, as well as other bands with names like Emperor, Immortal and Darkthrone, would spend time in the basement of Helvete, drinking and swapping (extremely negative) points of view on 1990s society and conservative, Christian Norway. What they had in common was an almost pathological desire to reject the values of their parents and grandparents, and an urge to shock. Many members of the scene made a point of professing to worship Satan, whether literally (via “theistic” Satanism – i.e. belief in Satan as a real entity opposed to God) or as a metaphor for rejecting broader Christian ideals like compassion and non-violence. In many instances, there was a vague desire centred around returning to an idealised, pre-Christian Scandinavia, and a sort of loosely outlined survival-of-the-fittest, do-as-thou-wilt philosophy, all expressed through extreme music. (It’s not hard, in hindsight, to see why these ideas might have appealed to a bunch of bored 19-year-old boys in the pre-Internet era.)
Heavily influenced by British band Venom and their 1982 album Black Metal, the people who converged on Helvete formed bands, adopted stage pseudonyms, and experimented with corpse paint, a style of black and white make-up meant to make the wearer look semi-skeletal (think Kiss, but Gene Simmons is screaming into the mic about sacrificing babies to Lucifer).3 Euronymous founded a label called Deathlike Silence Productions, via which he planned to unleash their music on the world. As the book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground – something of a definitive folk history of black metal since its publication in 1998 – puts it, “the aura surrounding Helvete attracted many young people later to gain fame in the scene. They would start their Black career by lingering in the shop, literally hanging around there for hours. It would be extremely annoying for Aarseth to have teenagers hovering in the shadows of his store all day perfecting their ‘evil’ act, but he was too polite to tell them to beat it.”
The general vibe of Helvete seems to have swung between the performative and the shambolic. Aarseth/Euronymous painted the whole shop black and planned to have customers walk the aisles and browse records by the light of flaming torches. At the same time, the commercial space he rented was far too big, so the shop made a loss and large areas had to be barricaded off while not in use. One member of the black metal scene recalled Helvete as akin to “renting a big house and only using one room.”
Either way, the kids who hung out at this record shop coalesced into the hard core who would define early black metal. Euronymous, with as keen an eye for the dramatic as ever, called the group “the Norwegian Black Circle”; it’s unclear whether anyone else really took the name seriously. Naturally, within this loose circle of musicians there were different levels of commitment to the aesthetic, to Satanism and goat sacrifice and whatever else might offend the sensibilities of the gullible and the pearl-clutching outside. Press coverage of black metal bands at the time and ever since has taken their professed Satanism as broadly literal, but there is, of course, a more metaphorical use to the idea of invoking Judeo-Christianity’s most famous rebel as a touchpoint for your music. Did the first black metallers actually believe in (and worship) the Devil? Or was he a useful byword for a worldview that demanded you be brave enough – liberated enough from social norms – to walk down the street looking like this:
The scene’s politics aimed to strike a similar controversial chord. Some of the black metal bands declared admiration for Vidkun Quisling, Hitler and the Nazis in interviews, or else expressed a sort of antisemitic, anti-Christian neo-Viking ideology that blended cod Nietzsche and imaginary Odin-worship. How serious were they? It’s hard to say. Presumably no more or less serious than those American teenagers who use pieces of classical art as their Twitter avatars. Around 1992, Euronymous wrote in a letter to a British fan that “all bands in Norway [were] basically Nazis”. But it’s hard to tell whether these 20-year-olds were tooled-up fascists or simply edgelords trying to promote their otherwise obscure bands. Euronymous himself was that rare thing on the black metal scene – a self-professed communist who admired China and Albania of the 1980s and collected Eastern Bloc memorabilia, at least for a time. Politics didn’t matter much, as long as they were extreme.
Black metal could, in other words, have been seen as not dissimilar to any other expression of teenage poseur rebellion – were it not for a few events.
Part Two: A murder-hunt among Satan’s milieu
The first of these events involved a young man named Dead, the lead vocalist for Mayhem. Dead’s real name was Per Yngve Ohlin, and he had a reputation for morbidity even by the notoriously high standards of the black metal scene. Stories about Dead which may or may not be true include him carrying around the corpses of small, dead animals in paper bags, and inhaling the decompositional gases shortly before going on stage, as well as burying his clothes before digging them up again in order to make them smell like the grave.
What is definitely true is that in April 1991, after a lifetime of suicidal ideation and serious self-harm, Dead cut his own throat and wrists with a hunting knife and then shot himself with a shotgun in a farmhouse south of Oslo. In what would later become one of the most famous moments of scene lore, his body was found by Euronymous, who did the responsible thing and called the police – but only after driving to a nearby shop, buying a disposable camera, and returning to pose and photograph his bandmate’s corpse, an image of which was later used as the cover of a Mayhem bootleg album called Dawn of the Black Hearts (don’t Google it). Euronymous said he kept bits of Dead’s shattered cranium, too, and made necklaces out of them; various members of the early black metal scene have claimed to own these, and in 2018 a piece of it was allegedly sold for $3,500. You can decide how much of this you want to believe.
Then, in 1992, the church burnings began.
From the summer of 1992 through to around 1996, there were around 50 arson attacks on churches in Norway; per Lords of Chaos, in every single case where the arsonists were caught, they were black metal fans or musicians. The first was at Fantoft, a wooden stave church near Bergen that was originally built in the mid-12th century. The attack took place at 6 o’clock on 6 June, 1992: 6/6/6. Cheesy, certainly, but ultimately an act which robbed Norway of a piece of inalienable cultural heritage that was 800 years old.
Ihsahn, the guitarist and vocalist for the band Emperor, would later recall,
“To be honest, I think that many of the things that were done and said were just for the shock value of it. Some burned churches as a symbol against Christianity, and some burned churches just to prove themselves worthy, to say to the respected persons, ‘Look, I burned a church, I’m really true.’ Some did it just for the sake of burning a church, just to be bad…I remember that everybody was very inspired, thinking, ‘Yeah, I want to do a thing like that.’ Everyone was very drawn to it, because it was our thing. It became very personal; it was almost like us against everybody. You felt that brotherhood you get when you have people who are your friends, they agree with you, and you create something together. You felt part of something very strong.”
The bassist of Mayhem, Varg Vikernes (then known as Count Grishnackh after, I shit you not, an orc from The Lord of the Rings), was found guilty of the arson. Vikernes was also in a one-man band named Burzum (another Tolkien reference; it means “Darkness” in the Black Speech that his orcs speak) and, continuing the tradition of putting gnarly black metal moments front and centre alongside the music, he used a picture of the charred remains of Fantoft on the cover of Burzum’s EP Aske in March the next year. “Aske” means “ashes” in Norwegian.
The third event that cemented black metal’s position also involved Vikernes, and his bandmate Euronymous. Sometime in early 1993, the two fell out. The motives behind the animosity are unclear – or, more accurately, there are too many motives, all of which are conflicting, offered by everyone involved including Vikernes himself and many of those interviewed for Lords of Chaos. But what seems to have happened is that some combination of clashing personalities, money owed to Vikernes by Euronymous, and possibly a disagreement over Euronymous’s treatment of Dead’s body (as outlined above) led to a serious disagreement. In August 1993, Vikernes and a friend drove from Bergen, where Vikernes lived, to Oslo to confront Euronymous. After the eight-hour drive, Vikernes walked up the stairs to Euronymous’s apartment, knocked on the door, and entered. Very shortly afterwards, neighbours reported hearing screaming from the apartment and the lobby outside. Vikernes – interviewed from prison – told the story to a journalist:
“They told the police they heard a woman screaming! I was laughing when I read about it. He ran away, pressing the doorbells and calling ‘Help!’ They said there were 23 or 24 stab wounds, but that’s not true. I was running after him, stabbing, and it was four or five stabs. The first stab was in the chest. The whole time he was trying to run away, so I had to stab him in the back.
“He was running down the stairwell, barefoot. I’d just been sleeping during an eight-hour drive and was wearing heavy army boots. I had to run like hell to catch up with him, and at the same time I was stabbing and he was running as fast as he could.
[…]
“The autopsy was bullshit. They said he died of blood loss. The real point is that he died from one stab to the head. He died momentarily. Bam! he was dead. Through his skull. I actually had to knock the knife out. It was stuck in his skull and I had to pry it out, he was hanging on it – and then he fell down the stairs. I hit him directly into his skull and his eyes went boing! and he was dead.”
Vikernes was quickly arrested, and his defence at trial – that Euronymous attacked him first in the apartment – was rejected by the court. In May 1994 he was sentenced to 21 years in prison, Norway’s maximum sentence.
Naturally, the media loved it. Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet creatively reported on a MORDERJAKT I SATAN-MILJØ – a “murder-hunt” among “Satan’s milieu” – noting that the murdered 25-year-old called himself DØDSPRINS, “the Prince of Death”. By this point, British and American magazines were following the black metal scene closely, and Kerrang! ran a spread featuring a stock image of Vikernes after his arrest, shirtless against a snowy backdrop, with the headline: “I piss on his grave! Count Grishnackh slams murdered Black Metal ‘godfather’ Euronymous!”
Despite the sensationalism, many of these figures splashed across the pages of the Norwegian and international press were barely out of their teenage years. Even Euronymous himself, something of a figurehead or thought leader for the early black metal scene, was little more than a metal fan in his mid-20s with an eye for self-promotion; a Nordic Malcolm McClaren whose embrace of controversy ended up getting him killed by his own band- and labelmate. His shop, Helvete, was partially funded by his parents, something Vikernes was alleged to have held against him as evidence that he wasn’t a serious figure in the scene. One interviewee in Lords of Chaos – a journalist called Simen Midgaard – recalls Euronymous closing up Helvete after the church burnings because his grandmother had banned him from speaking to the press.
Nonetheless, black metal was different to other subgenres of music that had caused moral panics in the past. For all the Pistols’ talk of “Anarchy in the UK” and the swearing live on Bill Grundy’s show, no one in a British punk band ever knifed his bandmate in the head. Lords of Chaos again, in typically lyrical prose:
Rock music has always held seeds of the forbidden. As decades passed and the business swelled, the multinational corporations who came to control it could not allow such seeds to develop into uncontrollable stalks and vines. Simultaneous with Rock’s descent into a commodity, sold through endless magazine advertisements and glitzy videos, a façade of pseudo-rebellion has been carefully cultivated, but Rock’s “garden of earthly delights” is very well manicured indeed. Yet there are those who attempt to kick down the boundaries and allow it to rejuvenate its limbs in the fertile blood-soaked fields of real danger.
Well, quite.
Part Three: Cooking in Thulê
Those kids from the basement of Helvete are now men in their fifties.4
You might assume that some of them, like Varg Vikernes, would be spending middle age in prison, but you’d be wrong. Despite being convicted of not one, but four church burnings (he got off another charge), killing Euronymous, and being found with 150kg of explosives in his basement when arrested, under Norway’s extremely liberal sentencing laws he was released from prison in May 2009.
While incarcerated, Vikernes, as Burzum, released one of the all-time classics of black metal, an album called Filosofem. In fact, his prison time influenced his music, as Burzum was forced to embrace a more minimalist, lo-fi sound thanks to the lack of equipment he had access to.
As his music became more minimalist, his politics became more elaborate. In prison, Vikernes cycled through a range of different but related radical far-right and white nationalist political identities. He became obsessed with Esoteric Nazism – the sort of “black sun” bullshit that the SS embraced before the Red Army turned them into a pretty pink paste – and Odinism, the Nazi-adjacent, racialist neopagan movement where people whose Northern European ancestors wouldn’t consider them worth the muck on their shoes can pretend to be brave, strong Vikings again. Eventually, Vikernes aligned on an ideology he calls “Odalism”, a broad rejection of technology and progress, as well as the modern nation-state and the Abrahamic religions, in favour of a return to a romanticised pre-industrial past defined by race. Lovely.
And yet, if this all seems very hardcore, know that it isn’t. After his release, Vikernes moved to France and changed his name to “Louis Cachet”. He married a French woman and allegedly has eight children with her. But Burzum’s music is not what it was, and Vikernes himself is a pale imitation of the fearsome character he once claimed to be, reduced to the babbling racist in the corner of the pub who you try to ignore.
Vikernes now spends most of his time writing 150-page “books” about survivalism, and tweeting about his displeasure at interracial marriages. His income comes from the snappily-named “MYFAROG”, a self-published tabletop roleplaying game which – because of course it does – incorporates a racial hierarchy into its impenetrable, achingly boring ruleset. Elves at the top, thinly-veiled semitic goblins at the bottom. What a surprise.
It’s a pretty significant fall from grace for a man who was, literally, the most notorious person in Norway until Anders Breivik’s neo-Nazi terror attacks of 2011. Fourteen years in prison, only to come out and try to change the world through a much worse version of Dungeons & Dragons…
Varg Vikernes is not Nick Fuentes or Martin Sellner. In fact, he probably never was. Back in January 1993, the Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidende interviewed a “20-year-old youth” from Bergen who knew about the church burnings that had been going on for the six previous months. The interviewee was almost certainly Varg Vikernes. Even in the context of (at that point) eight serious arson attacks carried out by black metal figures, you can tell that the journalist can’t really take his theatrics seriously:
“It is completely dark in the halls while we ascend to his loft apartment at the hour of midnight. We have also been given the message that the youth is armed—‘In case you have contacted the police.’
“The apartment is clearly not the residence of an ordinary person. It is either just an overgrown kid who finds Nazi paraphernalia, weapons, and Satanic symbols exciting, or BT’s reporters have come into a ‘world’ few people understand.”
Reader: it was the apartment of an overgrown kid.
They continue:
“The windows are completely covered by carpets. ‘I hate the daylight,’ explains the thin, long-haired creature that introduces himself with an unintelligible name. We get the feeling that the youth simply likes excitement. It is difficult for us to grasp that he can be speaking the truth.”
Today, much of what Vikernes says now has the feeling of “Old man yells at cloud”. There’s even a Twitter account, No Context Varg Vikernes, set up to take the piss out of – essentially – his online ramblings. It all seems very offensive, and of course it is, but then you realise that the man is 51 and has the Twitter presence of a really, really racist #FBPE dad. The culture has simply outrun him. He’s a punchline.
If Varg Vikernes is a living example of how not to age gracefully or with dignity, though, there are other musicians from the black metal scene who might offer an alternative.
Gaahl is one of them.
Gaahl, a.k.a. Kristian Eivind Espedal, joined Gorgoroth in 1998, but was involved in black metal bands from 1993 onwards – in other words, a little later than Varg Vikernes.5 (Note that if you scroll back up to the top of this piece, the two embedded songs at the beginning are by Mayhem and Gorgoroth, Vikernes and Gaahl’s bands, respectively, though Gaahl had left Gorgoroth by 2015.)
A multihyphenate of an artist, Gaahl has also been involved in the traditional Nordic band Wardruna, as well as the black metal projects Trelldom, Gaahls Wyrd, and God Seed. Since 2018, he has co-run an art gallery in Bergen called Galleri Fjalar, where he sells prints and work by other artists. He’s an oenophile, and a good half of his Instagram posts feature him tasting natural wines.
Perhaps most significantly, Gaahl is gay. He runs Galleri Fjalar with his boyfriend of 16 years.
This wouldn’t be of particular note were it not for the significant homophobia of some of the early black metal musicians. In fact, even before Vikernes was jailed for killing Euronymous, another musician called Bård Eithun, known as Faust, had stabbed a man to death in a park in Lillehammer in 1992, after the man drunkenly approached and came onto him. Faust never claimed homophobia as a motive – he said that he simply wanted to kill someone, and the opportunity presented itself – but within a scene some of whose members have always carried more than a whiff of Nazism about them, it’s hard not to link the two. One doubts Faust would have stabbed a woman who hit on him.
To understand the contradiction between Gaahl’s open sexuality and the far-right elements of some of the subculture of black metal, one has to acknowledge the differences between the two countercultural ideologies that inform the most extreme elements of the scene: Satanism and fascism. Gaahl is still, by all accounts, a non-theist satanist (with a small s!). Satanism celebrates the individual and their right to live as they please, while fascist ideology strictly prescribes roles by both race and gender, accepting nothing which strays outside the narrow definitions within the collective. In 2018, he said as much: “Black metal is supposed to be about the individual, not the flock.”
Gaahl is not an easygoing man by any accounts. It’s worth pointing out that he has been convicted of assault twice, including once for 14 months for beating a man in his house, in an incident which he claimed was self-defence (seems like a running theme with these metalheads…). “I was the one who was attacked,” Gaahl told an interviewer in 2016, “but they [the authorities] think I punished him too hard. As I always say, when people cross my line and I let them know where the line is many steps before they cross it, and still they choose to cross it, then I will be the one to decide what their punishment will be.”
Gaahl represents the sort of freedom and individuality that could be thought of as black metal at its best: bold, aesthetically challenging, unapologetically atheist, with no time to suffer fools and posers. The philosophy is this: be yourself. Vikernes, on the other hand, is forced to live by the very, very narrow strictures he has imposed on himself. He cannot represent “true” black metal, because he isn’t free to do as he pleases. Instead, he has to follow the set of (bullshit) diktats his pseudo-philosophy of “Odalism” decrees.
On camera and on podcasts, Gaahl comes across as stoic. He never raises his voice, and rarely smiles or shows much sign of emotion. He demurs when asked if he follows paganism, Asatru or some other religion: “I live in my own world.” In interview after interview, he seems politely aloof, calmly uninterested in the earnest questions that (often younger, American) metal fan-journalists ask him about his music, his beliefs and his involvement in the scene.
There’s still a real intensity to Gaahl. He’s not a person who has spun out into irrelevance or, ultimately, into becoming a laughing stock, as Vikernes has. Slightly astoundingly, Vikernes is on Twitter (thanks, Elon), and his uninspired takes on young people, global politics, K-pop and so on have destroyed any mystique and danger that might once have clung to him after he burned Fantoft and killed Euronymous.
Part Four: Local council and butter adverts
So why have these guys aged so differently?
Obviously, the answer probably lies somewhere in Varg Vikernes’ wretched psyche. It’s likely he was always going to end up a nutjob, a hateful nerd pretending to be a hardman. Similarly, Gaahl has probably grown into himself with age, finding a calmness and – that word again – stoicism that suits our impression of how a man of 48 should be.
That said, black metal has spewed out an unusually fascinating range of adults since the 1990s, who range from the unrepentantly awful to the admirably countercultural to the downright weird. At 52, Fenriz, of Darkthrone, now hosts an online radio show where he promotes underground music, works part-time for the Norwegian postal service, and was “accidentally” elected to his local city council in 2016 after running a campaign consisting of a photo of him holding his cat and a sign reading “Don’t Vote For Me”. The genre, always appealing to outsiders, weirdos and free thinkers, contains multitudes.
Pop culture at large is full of artists who have handled reaching middle age with grace, and those who haven’t, and who have become embarrassing as a result. On the one hand there’s Madonna, still pulling tricks from the 1980s playbook, or worse, John Lydon and Iggy Pop popping up in ads for butter and insurance. On the other hand, there’s Henry Rollins, elder statesman of hardcore and a man who at 63 is somehow still on the right side of history on every single cause on which he opens his mouth, and Isabelle Huppert, 71 years old and still the hottest person acting in France.
Ours is a culture obsessed with youth, but also one which can’t let go of the past – just watch as the Rolling Stones embark on yet another world tour, as Marty Scorsese casts Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as 25-year-olds in his next project. As youth fades, holding onto the principles that inform one’s art and defending them is important – but so is adapting said art, and staying conscious about how you come across while expressing it.
There’s probably no area in which this balance is more difficult to strike than in heavy metal. Being a metal fan is a bit like being a football fan. If you’re not one, you think it all seems ridiculous and childish; if you are one, you really don’t give a shit what outsiders think. Rarely has a subgenre of music more perfectly captured this dynamic than black metal in particular, with its gothic corpse paint, Satan-worship that often verges into the camp, and names cribbed from Lord of the Rings. But it’s quite difficult to hit 50 and still pull off corpse paint. It’s also hard to retain your shock value, not matter how many racist RPGs you come up with.
In Lords of Chaos, Kristoffer Rygg, aka Garm, of the band Ulver, called Varg Vikernes “a neo-Viking martyr. A prophet of the ego who paradoxically enough chose to be the Jesus of his ideals, and now must suffer for it behind the walls of spleen.
“I have much respect for this man’s conviction and courage,” Garm continues, “but not his sense of reality.”
Well – I’m not sure ambushing a man at home and knifing him counts as courage, but anyway. Garm was speaking in the late 1990s, and hadn’t yet seen what Vikernes would go on to become, but he had already unwittingly articulated the entire contradiction with black metal, and all self-consciously countercultural movements: the more seriously you take your ideals, the more dedicated you are to rejecting the society’s norms, the broader the potential becomes for your movement to tip into self-satire. But to compromise and dilute those ideals is to sell out, to give in. You can never really win. Even if you have Satan on your side.
Congratulations on making it to the end of what is easily the longest post here by far. This post relied heavily on the book Lords of Chaos by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlund. You can buy it here.
Don’t ask about the Finns. The less said about them, the better.
In his mid-20s, Euronymous was already older than most of the (literal) kids in many of these bands.
A choice selection of black metal noms de guerre: Infernus, Necrobutcher, Hellhammer, Hellbutcher, Fenriz, Mortiis, Satyr, Frost and Samoth.
And they are all men. When the former drummer of the legendary black metal band Bathory, Jonas Åkerlund, directed an adaptation of Lords of Chaos in 2018, he had to invent a character called “Ann-Marit” for the film to feature any lines spoken by a woman at all. She was played by American musician Sky Ferreira.
Ironically for a Satanist and pagan respectively, both Gaahl and Vikernes’ real given names are Kristian.