Black Metal

Extreme metal characterized by tremolo-picked guitars, blast-beat drumming, and shrieked vocals, often featuring lo-fi production and raw, atmospheric soundscapes with pagan or anti-religious themes. Bands include: Bathory, Darkthrone, Burzum

About Black Metal

Black metal is atmosphere turned into violence. Tremolo-picked guitars smear into a wall of cold noise, blast beats roll on like weather, and the vocals are shrieked rather than growled. The second wave took shape in early-90s Norway around Darkthrone, Mayhem and Emperor, with Bathory's records as the blueprint. It kept the raw, lo-fi production as a statement: this music was never meant to be comfortable.

Since then the genre has sprawled. There's frostbitten raw black metal, sweeping atmospheric and post-black epics, symphonic black metal with keyboards front and centre, and blackened hybrids that bleed into death and doom. The black metal on AI Metal Radio reaches across that whole map, from fuzzed-out bedroom-kvlt recordings to long, cinematic pieces built on slow-building dread.

A good place to start is Tronicon Records, whose Doomgate releases are the most-played black metal on the platform, along with 9Hells and Putrid. Use Shuffle to dig through the catalogue, or save the whole genre as a playlist for the late-night listening this music was made for.

Every upload is reviewed before it's published, and new black metal arrives every week.

Black Metal Tracks

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