Finding black metal in Norway

Black metal is serious business in Norway. Even though you may not be able to tell the difference between a metalhead wearing corpse paint and a Siberian Husky, it’s obvious that they do mean business.

Black clothes, white faces, inverted crosses, forests, snow, Satan and guitars apparently tuned somewhere below the Earth’s crust. Norway took teenage rebellion and with admirable efficiency, turned it into an export industry.

One day, wandering through Bergen, I accidentally found myself in a black metal bar. As one does. It was the sort of dim, slightly sinister establishment where ordering a piña colada would probably get you quietly escorted into an alley. Inside was an altar dedicated to Dimmu Borgir and a cabinet of curiosities containing, among other things, a shrine to Euronymous. The man also known as Øystein Aarseth was founder of Mayhem and one of the central figures in the birth of Norwegian black metal.

And this is where the story stops being amusing. Mayhem is one of the most notorious bands in the history of black metal. Hugely influential, but accompanied by enough death, violence and general human catastrophe to make the average rock biography look like an afternoon at IKEA.

Their Swedish vocalist Dead (Pelle Yngve Ohlin) helped establish the corpse-paint aesthetic that became synonymous with the genre. In 1991 he committed suicide. Euronymous photographed his body, and one of those images later appeared on the cover of a Mayhem bootleg recording. Tasteful, it was not.

Two years later Euronymous was himself murdered by former bandmate Varg Vikernes, better known at the time as Count Grishnackh. Vikernes was also convicted of burning several churches. Among the targets associated with him was Fantoft Stave Church outside Bergen, an exquisite piece of Norwegian history that had stood since the Middle Ages before somebody apparently decided what it really needed was gasoline. For the condensed Hollywood version of this deeply unpleasant saga, there is the 2018 movie Lords of Chaos.

The chaos at Neseblod Records.

The lore of Norwegian black metal is wrapped by more myths and secrets than King Arthur. You can’t really make this shit up. When I later arrived in Oslo, I knew exactly where I was going.

The epicenter of the early Norwegian black metal scene was not some ruined monastery deep in a frozen forest. It was a record shop. Opened by Euronymous in 1991, the shop was called Helvete (Norwegian for “Hell”, because why not) and quickly became a gathering place for the musicians orbiting the emerging scene. Today the location houses Neseblod Records, and for anyone interested in black metal history, this unassuming shop has become something close to sacred ground. Or unsacred ground, presumably.

Into the cellar.

Inside, I descended a narrow spiral staircase into the cellar. Down there, the civilized Scandinavian world of excellent public transport, sensible urban planning and expensive drinks begins to feel very far away. I passed through cramped rooms and half-open doors, deeper into a basement labyrinth smelling of old concrete, vinyl and decades of dirt. Eventually I found what I had come for. The innermost room.

Across one wall, in crude letters, someone had scrawled: “BLACK METAL”. This was where members of the scene once gathered. The same room appears in old photographs and recordings, back when all of this was still happening and nobody yet knew that these young men in leather jackets would eventually become part of Norwegian cultural history.

Through the cellar.

The air was stale. If these walls could talk, they probably wouldn’t say anything particularly profound. They would scream through a badly tuned amplifier, complain about commercial music, and then argue about who was sufficiently evil.

Still, there is something down there. People come because this isn’t the Norway advertised in glossy tourist brochures. No fjords. No smiling families in expensive outdoor clothing. No heroic Viking staring thoughtfully across a mountain lake. This is another piece of Norwegian history. Uglier, stranger and considerably louder.

The inner chamber.

In the early 1990s, Norwegian black metal mutated from a tiny underground music scene into something resembling a secret society. There were pseudonyms, corpse paint, obscure manifestos, rivalries, violence and eventually murder and arson. What began with distorted guitars and teenage alienation developed its own mythology, and mythology is notoriously difficult to kill once people start making pilgrimages to the places where it happened.

Which is exactly what happens today. Black metal acolytes visiting Norway have even acquired a name: blackpackers. Instead of fjords and the northern lights, they seek record shops, graveyards, burned churches and damp basements. Neseblod itself became part of the continuing story when a fire broke out in its basement in 2024, damaging a place already saturated with black metal history. Records, memorabilia and pieces of the scene’s past were damaged or destroyed. Fire returning to the birthplace of Norwegian black metal feels almost too obvious.

Black metal has always fed on destruction. Sometimes metaphorically, sometimes tragically and very literally. It emerged from a cold country at the edge of Europe, created by young people determined to make something hostile, primitive and uncompromising. More than thirty years later, people are still descending these stairs. Still looking at that wall. And somewhere beneath the polite streets of Oslo, in a damp little cellar where Hell once operated a record shop, the darkness stubbornly refuses to die.