Not For Our Feet

The Intrictate Merging of Two Minimalist Sounds: Black Metal Punk at a Glance

As always let me preface this by stating that this is my general experience within a subsect of music and is not to be taken as historical fact, merely how I view and absorb it. Again, your mileage may vary and you don’t move me (I don’t give a fuck.) Also-this is a long one, there will have to be a part II otherwise you’d waste not only your shit break at work but probably most of lunch.

There was a time where the idea of “punk” mixing with black metal was somehow as much of a cardinal sin as whatever Cradle of Filth were doing at the time, bleedy vampire dicks with teeth or some shit, and the stigma somewhat carries over to modern times, mostly in the philosophical and political side (“punk ruined black metal” etc) which gets mostly thrown around by those who either bitch about “cancel culture” while taking selfies in their fucking car or own a dozen NSBM records that are, sonically, street punk with harsher vocals and occasional speech sample.

I’m not here to judge your record collection or your lack of critical thinking, at least today.

But black metal and punk have been in bed together for decades and rarely, if ever, used protection with each other. Listen to Venom’s early works or, probably the best example, the first Bathory recordings:

(note the “I Don’t Give A Fuck” has been removed from their official Youtube channel, I’d imagine due to monetization because, yes, everything is a fucking business)

We could move forward and bring up Darkthrone’s shift into punk during the late 00s/early 10s, the whole Casey Chaos and others doing records or the Satyricon Turbonegro cover and a bunch of other shit that blurs the line between black metal and the mainstream of punk, but honestly a lot of that just comes off as performative and/or pandering for an audience, regardless of that being the intent or not. And I can understand why those deeply rooted in the underground could look at such things (with the exception of Darkthrone) with distrust and distaste (or simply stated, “fuck that”) because from the surface it does look like a fucking Hot Topic marketing plan for Q3 rather than artistic expression. Is it? I don’t know, I don’t really care. It’s not what I’m here for today.

Fuck that.

I’m more interested in the nasty side of punk that entered into the second wave through Ildjarn and has become more and more of a prominent sub-genre as the years pass by, especially the last five or so. So today that’s what I wanted to look at and talk about some of the bands, past and present, that have worked in this style that I truly appreciate.

I had first heard of Ildjarn when I was reading an issue of Terrorizer magazine in 1996 when “Forest Poetry” was given a 0. I’d never seen such a harsh review (until I started sending out Imperial demos) or such a low score. I had to hear it.

God, what a wreck of an album. It’s lovely.

Ildjarn itself is worth a deep dive that I’ll eventually get to, but I can reccomend

Shelley

, who have an excellent look into Ildjarn on their Youtube channel. Ildjarn was one of the first black metal bands I listened to that truly pushed sonic limits, not in an experimental way (conventionally speaking, anyway) but I never really put the “punk” label to the project when I was younger, probably because that was such a dirty word. Outside of what I outlined at the start, at least for a time it was fucking heresy to suggest other genres in black metal, a standard that thankfully fucked off decades ago. But, give this a listen and tell me (now) you don’t hear punk and I’m glad to tell you how full of shit you are:

It would be many years before I heard anything else resembling this fusion, until Haat came along, which was basically an Ildjarn worship project at its (sonic) core. But that was around the time that things started to open up a bit, with genre lines blurring here and there and black metal bands openly expressing appreciation for punk music (and eventually vice versa, which caused all kinds of -still occurring- problems, which is an overly wordy essay for another day) and Ildjarn began to become more appreciated, which was timely since the project was fucking dead. But from that grave began spreading a lineage that would endure decades longer than its progenitor.

I was first introduced to Bone Awl in the green room of a venue in San Francisco in 2003 during the “West Coast War Machine” tour Krieg did with Noctuary through meeting a strange lad who made his way back there to talk about esoteric topics, the nature of which I don’t quite remember outside of some very heady concepts that were not the normal introductory discourse at a USBM show in those days. This turned out to be Brandon (He Who Gnashes Teeth) who gave me their first 7 inch, “Night is Indifferent.” It would be a year or so later when he let myself and Blake Judd stay at his compound north of San Francisco during the first Twilight record that I would come to understand Bone Awl a bit more. Hanging in his stark room were two posters, one of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, head in hands, and another an Ildjarn poster of a broken guitar with two strings.

That’s honestly all you need to know when approaching Bone Awl. They were (and continue to be) the benchmark of the melding of punk and black metal, the first child of Ildjarn and probably the nastiest to do it.

The duo would part ways for a time, with Marco Del Rio (He Who Crushes Teeth) being the most publicly active with his Seedstock imprint and work in the excellent black/punk project Raspberry Bulbs:

Sharing a similar heart for stark, stripped down black metal with punk is New York’s Ash Pool, fronted by Dominick Fernow of Hospital Productions and way too many projects to name.

Dominick handed me a copy of Ash Pool’s “First Taste of Power” demo when I was playing in Nachtmystium but it wouldn’t be for about ten years before I really gave Ash Pool a proper chance. I wrote about their split with Thy Serpent for my year end list for No Clean Singing one year and really sounded naive because I was so blown away by their blending of genres. If I’d have listened to the fucking tape years earlier it wouldn’t have shocked me.

Ash Pool’s punk influence isn’t as straight forward as Bone Awl, definitely more subtle, but it’s there. Definitely not a band for everyone, especially lyrically, but I can’t find a single bad release in their catalog. You could also say the same about Akitsa and then you could spend an hour talking about the different projects members of all three bands have taken part in, the various label partnerships and the philosophies behind them but then you’d look up and realize the people you were talking to probably left five minutes into your glassy eyed rant. No wonder my family hates me.

As we move out of the 00s and into the late 2010s you started to notice more and more bands embracing a punk influence, either because that’s what they grew up with before black metal or because they came from the punk scene, the latter being part of the whole “scene tourism” debate I touched on at the go. You started seeing more labels popping up run by old hardcore or punk guys, there was obviously a lot of cross pollination happening. The arrival of the punk scene into black metal is a pretty fascinating thing, worth a later look as, even though it runs concurrent to my topic, it is it’s own thing, fairly different from the lineage of Ildjarn.

Not long ago in my interview with Nyredolk they stated that they feel like more of a punk band due to how they write. Denmark overall has been a hotbed of incredible punk influenced black metal, especially within the Korpsånd Circle, a group of bands based around the Mayhem studio/venue in Copenhagen. Each one of these projects have something special to them and I could/should/sort of did do a whole piece just on them but I think the one to focus on here would be Fanebærer.

A mixture of triumphant pagan black metal and bombastic punk, Fanebærer have set the standard incredibly high for this collective over the course of two full lengths, some eps and a split with the venerable Carved Cross. While they’ve dialed back the punk aspect a bit in later recordings they’ve kept an independent and rebellious spirit, the essential building block of both black metal and punk. It’s been quiet for a few years, hopefully something will surface soon. Honestly, the same could be said about most of the Circle, save Gabestok who continue to produce consistently bizarre and excellent records of street punk/psych infused black metal.

On the outside of the more prolific Circle bands is Grifla da la Secta, whose sole release, “Dyrs Føde” is a mixture of unsettling noise and Ildjarn-esque stomp. This is one of the most criminally overlooked 7 inches of the last ten years and is available for a steal either through Discogs or through Tour De Garde, the label who released that and several other Korpsånd bands as well as my next target, Brånd.

Brånd is the inevitable and pure child of Ildjarn and the UK82 or Kängpunk styles, with a little Bathory thrown in for good measure in the earlier recordings, with a bit of a Warsaw lean on their last recording, 2022’s excellent “Wo draht da Weg?”

This last batch of bands did wonders in reigniting my love for black metal, through the union of two art forms both long derided as “dead” either by critics or idiots (me). When I return to this for the second part (which I hadn’t planned when I began) I’ll shift my focus to the French Croux record label and a few of the other Danish noisemakers I missed this time around. Until then…