Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1981

First wave

Emerged 1981 Origin UK / Sweden / Switzerland Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
8
Speed
8
Melody
5

Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.

In short

The bands that supplied the name and the themes, while still playing speed or thrash metal. Venom released the album that christened the genre.

How it sounds

  • Speed or thrash metal structures rather than black metal proper.
  • Chaotic production, with volume and distortion beyond what the tape could hold.
  • Satanic or occult themes, often theatrical.

Hear what that means

  • Incompetence as a template

    Venom - Black Metal

    Sloppy, trebly and recorded fast by a band who could not play well. The accident became a requirement for everyone who followed, and the genre took its name from this track.

    Open on YouTube
  • The first harsh vocal

    Bathory - Bathory

    Rasped rather than sung, over speed metal riffing. Both black and death metal take their vocal approach from records like this one.

    Open on YouTube
  • Musicianship, for contrast

    Mercyful Fate - Melissa

    Twin harmonies, a four-octave vocal and real arrangement, with the same occult content. Proof that the first wave was an imagery movement rather than a sound.

    Open on YouTube

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
160-220 bpm
Song length
3-5 min
Tuning
E standard, played fast and badly on cheap equipment. Nothing here is down-tuned; the extremity is attitude and volume rather than pitch.
Production
Chaotic and frequently incompetent by accident. Venom's records sound the way they do because the band could not play well and the studio time was short, and that accident became a template.
Written about
Satanism, theatrically, Blasphemy, Speed and violence, Occult imagery borrowed from horror

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Speed metal riffing played sloppily, with solos that abandon pitch entirely. The looseness became a stylistic requirement for everyone who followed.
  • Bass Distorted and loud, frequently the only thing holding the tempo together.
  • Drums Fast and barely controlled, with fills that arrive early or late. On the founding records this is not a technique.
  • Vocals Rasped and shouted rather than sung — the first genuinely harsh vocal on the metal branch, and the direct model for black and death metal both.

What it isn't

That the first wave is a genre. It is a set of bands who influenced one another's imagery more than their music: Venom, Bathory, Hellhammer and Mercyful Fate sound almost nothing alike, and what they share is being cited by Norwegian teenagers in 1991. The word came afterwards, applied backwards by the scene that actually made black metal a style.

Told apart from

  • Second wave The first wave is thrash with occult imagery and no shared sound. The second wave, ten years later in Norway, is where black metal becomes a coherent musical style.
  • Thrash metal Musically most of this is thrash or speed metal. What separates it is the imagery and the deliberate refusal of competence.
  • Traditional heavy metal Mercyful Fate are on this list and are technically far more accomplished than the rest of it — traditional metal's musicianship with the occult content that made them influential here.
  • Black 'n' roll Black-and-roll returns to exactly this: the trebly, sloppy, rock-and-roll-derived side of black metal, played deliberately.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Venom played badly and knew it, but they had the whole concept: stage names, cover art, attitude. Bathory — which was Quorthon alone in his father's studio — took the idea further with a far colder sound. Mercyful Fate added theatricality and falsetto vocals, while Hellhammer and Celtic Frost added the weight.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.