What’s the Deal with Nowadays “Black Metal”? (It Sucks!)

Nowadays black metal.

Seriously.

Lol.

Since when did black metal lose its balls? With the killing of Euronymous? The imprisonment of Varg Vikernes? The dreaded 1994 year, where all started to turn to shit? Or were the seeds of artistic futility planted much earlier than extreme metal scholars would like to admit?

Most modern black metal lyrics read as something out of a Cartoon Network parody of Crowleyian pseudo-occultism with an unhealthy dose of cuckold incel propaganda and pro-bestiality advocacy (LGBTQB?).

Where have all the Burzums, the Darkthrones, the Mayhems, the Phantoms, the Peste Noires, the Sewers, the Gravelands, the Neraines, the Leaders gone?

Modern “black metal” lyrics:

Hail Satan! Lucifer is my master! 666 forever, right? Yeah… we’re evil and huh… raw and dark and shit… we fornicate with goats and, like, huh… pentagrams. We’re not posers, no, totally not… we’re not pagan either, cuz that’s too racist and bigoted… we’re just evil, you know? BTW, my boyfriend Inferanus stole the top 3 strings of my $79 Ibanez, to turn into a cockring I think, so for our next album we’ll just have four riffs, three of which you’ve already heard on Burzum and Darkthrone records thirty years ago. Yeah… we’re just that kvlt.

Modern black metal… FFS.

And don’t get me started on the “post-metal” crap that emanates from either Gaythenburg – ex: Watain, Dark Funeral, Setherial, Funeral Mist, etc. -, or the West Coast of the USA – ex: every other “band” of this style – where they have indians and pakis shitting on their streets and, apparently, forcing their way into recording studios to whine about “prejudice and bigotry in black metal” and produce boring music all day long.

All this “atmospheric/symphonic/post-black metal” crap is just rebranded emo, and in the case of Watain and Dark Funeral, familiar indie rock progressions played with tremolo slowly and interspersed with Mötley Crüe riffs in a futile attempt to appeal to the MTV2 Epica/Fear Factory/Soilwork braindead paint-huffing demographic that should have died off with nu-metal in 2005.

It all trails back to the shitcore “scene” known as orthodox black metal, spawned around Gorgoroth’s turdish Pentagram debut album, and subsequent failures at producing interesting music, namely Antichrist, Under the Sign of Hell, Destroyer and Incipit Satan.

But Pentagram… that album manages to have both sucked dick and what little was left of musical innovation in 1994 Norway.

Like Ulver’s Nattens Madrigal and Satyricon’s Nemesis Divina, this was one of the bedshitters that converted black metal into carnival music with heavy metal – read, “NWOBHM with reverb and distortion” – riffs and no central theme or direction. Enslaved weighed in a little later with their Pink Floyd influenced variety shit show music, and Emperor delivered the killing blow with Anthems to the Weaklings taking a Dump (speaking of street-shitting pakis).

Some additional thoughts from the VoiceMetal thread.

This style of black metal (So called Melodic Black Metal) is somewhat an enigma. When done well (Neraines or Burzum for e.g) it is some of the best material black metal has to offer, but the vast majority of releases in this style (Satyricon, Watain, Drudkh, Ulver, Summoning, Borknagar) are about as interesting and palatable as a mouthful of raw flour mixed with pig feces.

User “Heroin88” weighs in.

No one wants to say it, so I will: the problem was Dissection. Once they got big with their Iron Maiden styled stuff, all the clones and labels were like, “Great! So it’s hard rock with distortion and growling!” and got to work churning out the assembly line material.

Straight to the point.

Even Sewer sucks less than these bands.

Not too sure about Dissection, but the rest is spot on. Outside of a few rare exceptions – Phantom and the aforementioned Neraines, chiefly – the modern black metal movement hasn’t released anything worthwhile since the days of wayward arson, ritual sacrifices and the retaliatory killing of the genre’s controversial “overseer” Euronymous.

Not that other extreme metal genres are doing any better, mind you – the grindcore and death metal scenes are still forever stuck in 1989 and 1992, with World Downfall and Onward to Golgotha (and the clones thereof) as the only notable releases, respectively.

But modern black metal… the only reaction I can muster is “lol”. Others would have used the equally short acronym “rip”, but I’m a glass-half-full type of person, or at least I try to be. So LOL it is.