Continuing to punish myself with extra writing during Album of the Year season, welcome back to my annual retrospective on black metal albums celebrating their 30th anniversary this year! While not quite as jam-packed as 1994, there were still plenty of all-time greats released in ’95, and this time I will be opting to cover most of the big ones you can probably think of off the top of your head (Darkthrone didn’t make the cut once again, sorry Chris!). Black metal was no stranger to experimentation early on, but this year saw the furthering of unique sounds that carry clear throughlines to some of the most highly-regarded bands of today.
Last year I decided to split this into three parts, and will be doing that once again for the sake of article length. For a genre that already has too many characters dedicated to it by the standards of certain heavy music fans, who really wants to read a single 3,500 word monstrosity about it? Once again Norwegian bands take center stage at five out of nine entries (and the entirety of this first part alone) but a few other European countries will also be featured, including one for the very first time. And in another first for this series I was able to nail down at least the month that each album was released in 1995, rather than having to guess based on any recording info I could scrounge up… so I can affirmatively say it will be a chronological journey this time around! Let’s take a look at the black legends 1995 had to offer.
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Once again this retrospective trek begins with my favorite album on the entire list. Looking beyond the nine albums in this current series I’d rank it not just my #1 album among the entire Norwegian black metal scene of the 1990s, but one of my favorite albums of all time. Ulver captured a special magic on Bergtatt – Et eeventyr i 5 capitler that every lesser band in the dark, forested hollows of atmospheric/pagan/folk black metal has been trying to recreate ever since. Some have come close, or thankfully carved their own beautiful niches within these genres — Wolves in the Throne Room, Panopticon, Agalloch to name a few — but at the end of the day there’s nothing quite like Bergtatt.
Warm, repetitive riffs, an incredible sense of pacing that weaves between acoustic guitar interludes and ferocious blast beats, Garm’s beautifully layered, ethereal cleans and anguished screams which are still some of the best in the entire genre. Not to mention the various other soniscapes at work over the course of the entire album, bringing to life the tale of maiden led astray in the dark woods of Norway. The crack of thunder that has startled me to attention more than a few times throughout my life, Lill Kathrine Stensrud’s flute in the opening of “Capitel II” and her haunting vocals in the folk-only “Capitel IV” — per Encyclopedia Metallum one of a handful of times a musician sharing my last name has lent their talents to a metal album, which is pretty cool (and not the last time she will be featured on this year’s entries!) — Sverd’s piano solo accompanying the field recordings section of “Capitel III,” Haavard’s beautifully melodic soloing on “Capitel I” that has made the track an all-time highlight since first hearing it as a teenager. From the coziness of the opening track to the dual-edged sword of triumphant riffs and bright acoustic guitar that close out the album on “Capitel V,” Bergtatt has served as both the template and arguably the peak of nature-inspired black metal for three decades. An undisputed masterpiece.
I’m not sure how easy they are to get ahold of at this point, but I can’t recommend enough the Trolsk sortmetall 1993-1997 box set CD compilation released by Century Media in 2014 and 2019, or the cassette version released in 2023 by Darkness Shall Rise. Both feature liner notes and interviews with members of the band and worthy musicians such as Ivar Bjørnson, Grutle Kjellson, Carl-Michael Eide, and more regarding this period in Ulver’s storied history (number 217/250 of the die-hard cassette edition is owned by yours truly). Featuring remastered versions of the “Black Metal Trilogie” along with the 1993 Vargnatt demo and a four-track rehearsal from the Nattens madrigal sessions, the sound is improved tremendously without losing any of the black metal edge or the magic that made them all so special in the first place — Nattens madrigal in particular is made less hard on the eardrums without sacrificing any of its trademark rawness. A fitting update to some of the most important music to come out of Norway in the 1990s.
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I’m sure I checked out HEart of the Ages as a youngling black metal listener, but I have absolutely no recollection of what it actually sounded like. Formed from some of the original members of Green Carnation, In the Woods… are an early example of the part of the Norwegian scene that dared to experiment in a genre that was trying to break from established metal norms from the get-go. While rooted in a less riff-heavy, more atmospheric form of black metal than was being played by many of their peers, HEart of the Ages has its fair share of melancholy gothic doom and progressive tendencies tying these and the black metal elements together. The opening six minutes of first track “Yearning the Seeds of a New Dimension” alone are devoid of black metal, instead building up a woodland cathedral of despair through slow riffs, moody keys, and deep clean vocals.
Tracks like the three-part “…In the Woods” put the black metal up front, going from Bathory-esque grooves and triumphant guitar solos backed by throat shredding harsh vocals before settling down into more depressing doom. The 15-minute epic “Wotan’s Return” is HEart of the Ages at its most primally black metal, but even so has extended sections of shimmering keys and eerie ambience (complete with mouth harp and the sound of a babbling brook). Years before Enslaved would follow them along a similar trajectory, this album proved that black metal and progressive music were destined to come together. While not the best among the three “weird” black metal albums I will be covering this year, In the Woods… showcased tremendous foresight in what black metal could become; this very much feels like a blueprint for atmospheric black metal to this day.
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If you’ve already got at least passing familiarity with this album you might be thinking “Huh? This isn’t black metal.” Hear me out! In an inverse of “death metal played in a black metal style” that has been ascribed to A Blaze in the Northern Sky, my hot take is that Blod-draum could be considered “black metal played in a death metal style.” But it’s also a favorite of mine, so I just want an excuse to talk about it. Years before forming the progressive black metal legends Borknagar, Øystein G. Brun played a much more brutal form of extreme metal with Molested. Chaotic and dense from start to finish, Blod-draum is a spiked maze of frenzied guitars, drums that turn from blasts to machine gun double bass to everything in-between on a dime, and some odd (if brief) folk instrumentation that sets the album apart from its peers in either death or black metal at the time. Despite black metal’s long-standing willingness to include folk elements, how many black metal bands at the time had a track that was literally just blast beats, hardanger fiddle, and mouth harp (“Blod-draum”)?
Part of my reasoning for the black metal adjacency of Blod-draum comes from the manner in which riffs are constructed; very chord-heavy, lacking clear groove, and not exactly the palm-muted chunkiness you often get with death metal. Slow down the pace at which the riffs change and back them with some less frenetic drumming, and it’s not hard to envision a more pure black metal version of Molested. This is not a call to change this album in any way as it’s fantastic as-is, but it’s interesting to think about. At the end of the day, this came out at a time when the fissures between the two genres weren’t always so large.
Another aspect I love about Blod-draum is the highly understated melodicism that just barely peeks through the chaotic murk on tracks such as “The Hate from Miasma Storms” and “Forlorn as a Mist of Grief”, and even more openly during “A Strife Won at Wraith”; these moments are Molested at their most blackened, even if it vanishes as quickly as it appeared. Like Bergtatt this album has been remastered, and I highly recommend the version done by Brun himself, first released on CD by Dark Symphonies in 2017. Amongst a thick forest of top-tier black metal around this time, Blod-draum proved that the Norwegian scene was still capable of producing high-quality death metal.
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Alright, part one down! It’s nice to settle back into the groove of writing this series. Although considering the amount of incredible 2025 music I have to revisit for AOTY season, this may be the hardest year to complete thus far. The next installment will feature two bands hailing from a country I have not covered thus far, and perhaps the most underappreciated amongst “out-there” Norwegian black metal. Stay tuned, stay frosty…
— Colin