Oslo Scene · 1991–1994
Scenes › Helvete, Oslo
Helvete, Oslo
In short
A record shop in Oslo, a small circle of bands, and the most notorious three years in metal.
The scene
The circle that formed around the Helvete shop between 1991 and 1993 wanted the opposite of Swedish death metal: colder, more amateur, more ideologically extreme, recorded badly on purpose. Musically they succeeded, and the second wave they produced is the definitive form of the genre. The period was also marked by serious crimes — church arsons and a murder — which ended it, and which any account of the scene has to carry rather than aestheticise.
What happened