Early Norwegian Black Metal Scene - Musical Innovations

Musical Innovations

During the 1980s, black metal was a loose grouping of a handful of extreme metal bands who shared traits such as "shrieked" vocals, high-pitched guitar tones, raw recording, and "Satanic" lyrics, although most of the "first wave" bands referred to Satanism only for shock value. During 1990–1992 a number of Norwegian artists, who were strongly influenced by those bands, began performing and releasing a new kind of black metal music. The surge of interest and popularity that followed is often referred to as the "second wave of black metal". The Norwegian bands developed the style of their 1980s forebears as a distinct genre of heavy metal music. This was partly thanks to a new style of guitar playing developed by Snorre 'Blackthorn' Ruch of Stigma Diabolicum/Thorns and Øystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth of Mayhem, in which guitarists played full chords using all the strings of the guitar in place of "powerchords" using only two or three strings. Gylve 'Fenriz' Nagell of Darkthrone has credited them with this innovation in a number of interviews. He described it as being "derived from Bathory" and noted that "those kinds of riffs became the new order for a lot of bands in the ‘90s".

Visually, the dark themes of their music was complemented with corpsepaint, which became a way for black metal artists to distinguish themselves from other metal bands of the time.