Thank you, into_the_pit! I do like the more rocking drunken stuff too, so none of it is "too slow", haha. This guy behind Hellripper really fucking means it on guitar. This is super cool for a solo project. Wow that's cool playing.

As for Desaster, why didn't I listen to them before? Always heard their name. First album (A Touch of Medieval Darkness) is blowing me away.

ARRRGH!!! Thanks dude.

I'll give a shot with those two Industrial BM bands. They miss the female vocalist requirement but are IMHO chunky, well produced and electronic enough, without being too industrial... let me know if they work for you!


T3chn0ph0b1a



...And Oceans

don't mention it!
if you like desaster's debut, make sure you check out their lost in the ages demo too. personally I'd say it's their greatest release, the BM is still strong on this one.
some more "traditional" black/thrash would be terrörhammer from serbia. I can only vouch for their vintage black mass 12" though, but that's really a great one.
maybe also try checking out gospel of the horns from australia. excellent stuff, lke most stuff by their country mates deströyer 666 (phoenix rising is highly recommend although their riffage here is more epic than thrashy. great album nonetheless).
also speaing of "more rocking drunken", definitely gehennah from sweden. their debut is ace, later releases still solid.

Ah yes, that's another category of bands I'm probably overlooking. I've heard both of them before, but I wouldn't say I'm that familiar with them, so I'll give them another go.

Something like this is also a bit closer to what I'm thinking of. Not so much on the synths, and the riffs could be meatier, but they're decent enough, and the production is there.



The vocals don't have to be female though if the other elements are present, since the Burzum track I mentioned is kind of another template, especially the hypnotic synths. That track is a bit on the raw and lo-fi side though, and non-Varg music would go down easier. I've rediscovered in one of the music discussion threads that some of the later Borknagar tracks might also be slightly closer to what I'm looking for.

I love Australia! (AC/DC, INXS, Midnight Odyssey, Portal, Sad Ex, Bestial Warlust, D666, etc) and I will check out Gospel of the Horns. Dudes are crazy down there. Speaking of D666 the song I Am The Wargod still gives me chills for some reason.

Will dig in to your other recs here as well. Desaster kind of hooked me the most, but you gave me plenty of stuff to chew on. Thanks again.

Have you heard about Transilvania? I don't think I've heard a band come closer to old Desaster than this. Dark and vicious black thrash, but incredibly epic and with a great sense for melodies at the same time.

If you want a pure riff-fest from beginning to end then Germany's Nocturnal is highly recommended. They just deliver one fantastic riff after another through all of their albums. Superb band.

Vampire's "With Primeval Force" might also be of interest. This band is more of a death thrash band, but it has a lot of that medieval feeling of old Desaster and kinda sounds like the soundtrack to an old Castlevania game. It's magnificent.

So I listened to those tracks, and I'll look into the full albums later (I'm actually almost positive I've heard them before (definitely at least heard a few individual songs because I instantly knew which bands you were talking about), but it's been awhile and my recollection is murky). I'm thinking that when I say "electronic", that's probably kind of misleading. Those are more like cyber/trancey industrial rock/metal mixed with black metal. I guess that's good for its own sound, but I'm not really looking for that, at least for this request. I just mean that I like the usage of synthesizers for atmosphere and texture, using pads and interesting synthetic sounds to flavor the music, not necessarily to dominate it. This is also in contrast to symphonic black metal, which at times is superficially similar to what I'm looking for, but I'm trying to get away from the fake orchestration, ludicrously over the top theatrics and such.

Uhm, i get what you mean. I've brought up those two bands mostly because of the "chunky downtuned"/"decent-to-high production values" requirements are almost never met by bands using atmospheric "Det Som Engang Var" -like pads, but are more common in EBM influenced bands...
Darkspace sometimes on III employs synths like that and heavy chuggy guitar parts (like in the song Dark 3.12) but are very minimalist and lo-fi, but other than them i can't really think of anything in the BM genre.

Tick... tick... ummm... tick...
Okay, in this song there's even some female cleans in the beginning (but then, just how "tr00 black" Ajattara have ever been is up for debate):

Hey, that's pretty good. I've only heard bits and pieces of Pasi's other projects here and there, so I wasn't even thinking about that one. I could nitpick and say I wouldn't mind if the synths were a tad more present in the mix, and if it had some faster tempo stuff, but that's quite solid. I know what I'm looking for isn't very "kvlt" anyway, so that's never been a big deal.

Darkspace's "3.12" is actually pretty interesting as well. I know I've listened to bits and pieces of their work as well, particularly because they sometimes get lumped in as "dark ambient", which I also look for a lot. They're too aggressive and intense for what I look in that genre, but they actually sort of work for this, so that's another artist right under my nose that I've been overlooking. Those ethereal synths at the very end over the clean guitar arpeggiations are almost exactly what I mean keyboard-wise.

Ok! i'll make another little attempt
Forest Silence's only album Philosophy of Winter (one man band made by the keyboard player of Sear Bliss) has subtle, icy synths and and a production way less trebly than other bands in the genre. It's not bombastic, but very ambient influenced (see the section at 5:31 of this track)

Hi, this is my first time posting on this forum so I hope I'm in the right place!

I'm really looking for mostly black metal with bagpipes in them. I'm a big fan of Pagan Black Metal and some folk metal, and folk metal tends to have more bagpipes, but a lot of folk metal is a bit too light for what I'm looking for. The closest I've found so far is a bit of Skyforger but it's still not quite the depth I'm looking for.

I really love some certain movie soundtracks that have used bagpipes, particularly Outlander or Titanic, and I really want some bm or similar that incorporates that dark melodic tone alongside, well you know, black metal.

I've always preferred more melodic bm over the thrashy sounding bm, but at this point I'd love to try anything really heavy with bagpipes.

Cool, I think you might be getting the hang of this now. Definitely also closer to what I'm looking for. I love Sear Bliss, but I've never tried to look into their side projects. I found a 1080p version of that song (only 240p in that YouTube link), which makes it sounds much nicer.

With Ajattara, the amount of synths varies from song to song and even within any given song. Faster tempo is somewhat harder to find; moreover, when they play fast stuff, they don't usually emphasize synths.

There's this non-album track on which they went almost-symphonic, but it's not much faster if it all (trivia moment: it was recorded by the Äpäre lineup, with Koivusaari on lead guitar):

So, I feel like giving Deathspell Omega a try. Any suggestion where I should start?

Paracletus was intentionally written to be have a more accessible sound. The new album is also much easier to tackle than, say, Fas or Synarchy.

This. Maybe Kenose too for a less technical approach.

easy one. try everything with shaxul on vocals = very good traditional BM more or less in the vein of darkthrone. if you really want to try the stuff from SMRC onward, which is basically like a completely different band, their best (or more like, only good) stuff is definitely the two monumental songs from the 2005 splits, diabolus absconditus and mass grave aesthetics.

Kenose and Veritas Diaboli Manet in Aeternum: Chaining the Katechon were my introduction to them, and both blew my teenager mind.
Paracletus is probably their overall best, i'll start with one of those three

Anyone here familiar with Poland's Holy Death? I've been checking their first demo and it's some serious ominous black/doom metal. Quite minimalistic stuff, but it works well for me.

Anyone know of stuff like S.V.E.S.T.'s Urfaust?

imo there's nothing quite like svest. check out the demo by asmodee, the other band the svest guys were in.

Drought is a very good EP by DsO, I didn't see anyone else mention this. My favourite work by them actually

anyone know something like GBK except preferably not nazis?

basically what I want is riffy black metal with driving drums (rather than constant blasting), that's pretty catchy and melodic, but still got some of that rawness to it.

no, nothing. there's svolder who're pretty similar, but I guess you won't tolerate their thematic and aesthetic choices either. other than that, I don't know any similar band, and I've been listening to them for about 20 years now.

Svolder is even more gratuitous with that shit if anything. Oh well, it's fine, I take no guilt streaming Judeobeast Assassination every now and then on youtube.

Yeah that's unlikely to find.

Hi everyone! This is my first time posting in a help thread so I was just wondering if I could get help with a few queries:

1. What's the best traditional black metal and black/thrash bands you know of that aren't kvlt/satanic/anti-christian? I really want to listen to more bands in this style but these themes have always been a turn off for me.

2. Many of my favorite Black Metal albums tend to be long, expansive, varied and have a "detailed narrative" if that makes sense. On these albums the tracks all tend to be really long, and oftentimes they're more like movements in a symphony instead of tracks in an album- that is, if the whole album just isn't one giant track. Examples include: the Fauna discography, Anarchic by Skagos, The Emanation Of Begotten Chaos From God by Emanation, and The Sparrow EP by Jute Gyte. Examples of this outside Black Metal include Natasha by Pig Destroyer, El Mundo Frio by Corrupted, Dear Insanity by Eye Of Solitude, as well as many other releases. Do you know about any other Black Metal releases like this?

3. What's the weirdest Black Metal album you know of that isn't formally classifiable as "avant-garde" or "experimental"? For example, the Emanation album I mentioned previously is very bizarre but Emanation has not been classified as "avant-garde" or "experimental black metal". The reason I ask this is that bands like this tend to sound weird, but yet different from bands with an "avant-garde" or "experimental" label.

Burzum, Immortal and Ulver.

For the request number one early Enslaved and Borknagar are for you: albums like Frost and Borknagar's self titled are old school, great and about norse mythology.
If you are interested for historical reasons there is also Horde, which was the first christian black metal band: their album is nothing special however.

Ulver was pretty anti-christian on the earlier albums, i don't think they fit

For the request number two there is Midnight Odyssey: his albums really feel like a long track with different movements. Spectral Lore's album III is also like this and it's brilliant!

For the third one i'll have to think a little, but i've just listened to S.V.E.S.T 's only album and i am as thrilled as confused

1. Ulver, Blut Aus Nord first two albums, Enslaved. I don't think the first Ulver album is anti-Christian as someone said, the lyrics are clearly a folkloric tale about a girl lost in the woods that gets eaten by trolls.

2. Sinmara - Aphotic Womb, Gris - À l'âme enflammée, every A Forest of Stars album, Deathpell Omega - Paracletus, Chaos Moon - Eschaton memoire, Skaphe - Skaphe 3, Fyrnask - Forn...

3. Weird black metal: Kringa, Hagzizsa, Skaphe, Situs magus, Malokarpatan, Negative plane, One Tail One Head, Wormlust, Urfaust, Yellow Eyes...

I'm not sure for Ulver: the vargnatt demo and the third album have some openly satanist lyrics and Bergatt while it could be read as a folk tale i feel like it was written to state some kind of supremacy of the forces of old against christians... I think that camjr01 should take a look at the translations an judge if it's for him.
It's a great album in any case!

"The halls of the Mountain King thirsted for Christian blood" is the only line against Christians afaik.

This is going to be super vague but hopefully someone here can point me in the right direction...

For the life of me I can't remember the name of this black metal band-- they were pretty melodic, maybe a touch folky, with keyboards and light symphonic elements. I'm pretty sure they were from Russia, and on the album I'm trying to remember, they used programmed drums. The vocals weren't very good, very raw and screechy, and kind of buried in the mix. My recollection is the album cover was dark blue and probably a depiction of a scene from nature or something. One of the songs had the word 'star' in the title, I think.

I know this is really vague, but if anybody has any idea what band I'm thinking of here, would definitely appreciate some help!

I am probably not even close, but could it be either Melankoli's "Wind" or The Lost Sun's "Spectral Voice from Newborn Star"? Heh.

Nope-- the album I'm thinking of was much less atmospheric and more riff-driven than either of those. Thanks for the suggestions though!

Triumph of Evil is great. A friend gave me that CD many years back. I remember it was compared a bit with old Samael, but it has a different vibe, for sure. The music is very dark sounding and those interludes between the tracks are creepy as hell and really effective at helping to establish a truly ominous mood.