You could ask a thousand people what ‘black metal’ means and you’d probably get a thousand different responses back. For some, it’s metal about Satan. For others, it’s defined by its drive to challenge the boundaries of taste. What few metalheads will question, though, is that the genre has remained relevant and reinvented itself multiple times over the past 40-odd years.
Black metal was formulated by a sprawling ‘first wave’ made up of the likes of Bathory, Venom, Hellhammer and early Sepultura, but it didn’t become a consolidated movement until the early 1990s. That was when the likes of Mayhem, Emperor, Darkthrone and Satyricon formed the genre’s ‘inner circle’, centred around Mayhem guitarist Euronymous’s record shop in the centre of Oslo.
