Second wave, from the outside in. Each step is a genre and the single record this encyclopedia would put on first. Play them in this order and the last one should sound like a next step rather than a wall.
- 1 The way in
Heavy metal 1970
It split off from hard rock and blues rock when Black Sabbath tuned down and wrote riffs on the tritone. Volume, riff and a code of its own - every branch below starts here.
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
Put on
Black Sabbath - the song Black Sabbath. The first thirty seconds are the genre's birth certificate.
Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath (1970) - 2 Then
Black metal 1982
Tremolo picking, blast beats, shrieked vocals and deliberately cold production. More an aesthetic than a technique - atmosphere matters more than clean sound.
Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.
Put on
Darkthrone - A Blaze in the Northern Sky. The production is intentional, not a flaw.
Darkthrone, A Blaze in the Northern Sky (1992) - 3 What you asked about
Second wave 1991
The Norwegian scene that fixed the definitive sound: thin guitars, demo-tape production as an ideal, corpse paint.
Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.
Put on
Immortal - Pure Holocaust. The scene's best album without the troubling baggage.
Immortal, Pure Holocaust (1993) - 4 Where to go next
Mathcore 1993
Metalcore with its wiring torn out: meter changes every few seconds, dissonance and chaos controlled to the millimetre.
Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.
Put on
Converge - Jane Doe. Technically mathcore, emotionally something else entirely.
Converge, Jane Doe (2001)
Assembled from the tree: every genre Second wave descends from, in order. Second wave has no subgenres, so the last step is the genre that rates closest to it by sound.